was dominated by his wife Blondie, and casually despised by his children. McLuhan’s experience of his own domineering mother may also have had something to do with this particular obsession.
The book still sparkles with wit and insight more than forty years after publication, but it was virtually ignored at the time. Its poor reception increased McLuhan’s frustrations. Occasionally he gave vent to this frustration, among friends, by harping on a conspiracy of Free Masons in high places, including academia, which deliberately thwarted the reception of his ideas. The Masons, of course, were traditional enemies of the Catholic Church, but McLuhan also saw them as the embodiment of what he called “gnosticism”—the belief that earthly phenomena were illusory, veiling the light of the one, true spiritual Reality.
