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Ms. Coulter pauses to reflect on
the whining of those on the blacklist, all of whom she mocks as
prosperous exiles racing happily around Europe with rich friends
and having a good time. In Ms. Coulter's version of this history,
of course, the blacklisted are only the rich and resourceful--a
history that doesn't include the countless people destroyed because
their names had popped up on some list of alleged Communists or
fellow travelers, or sounded like a name on one of those lists.
People like the actor Phillip Loeb, for example, unemployable and
ultimately driven to suicide because he could no longer pay the
bills for the care of a mentally ill son.
-Dorothy
Rabinowitz on Ann Coulter's Treason
___
Our big, easygoing neighbor to the north has its
problems—too cold, a weak dollar, a reputation for paralyzing
dullness—but its people are reasonably free, and they seem,
on the whole, quite nice. Their contributions to popular music (Joni
Mitchell, Neil Young, The Band, the McGarrigle sisters, Leonard
Cohen, Alanis Morissette...) are legion. Their anomalous gift for
comedy (Martin Short, Dan Aykroyd, Mike Myers, and Jim Carrey...)
has made Ontario the Catskills of our time. By sending their soldiers
to serve side by side with ours in Afghanistan, they supported us
in our hour of need—the act of a true friend. By declining
to participate in our Iraq adventure, they let us know that they
sincerely thought we were making a mistake—also the act of
a true friend. In matters of public policy they are often more enlightened
than we are, without being snooty about it. Their health-care system
is a mess, but it’s a fairer, more humane mess than ours is...
They have a comparatively sensible approach to the drug problem:
while our federal government tries strenuously to put marijuana
smokers in jail, even (or especially) when the marijuana has been
smoked for medical purposes in states whose people have voted to
sanction such use, their federal government is about to decriminalize
the possession of small amounts. And now—with a minimum of
fuss, hardly any hysteria, and no rending of garments—they
have made it legal for persons of the same gender to marry each
other.
- Hendrick Herztberg, The
New Yorker
___
We have the worst President ever in the history
of the United States of America. He’s a war criminal, for
crying out loud. He is also responsible for the
most idealistic, hypocritical, empty-headed, and incompetent administration
in the history of this great country. He plans a war but never plans
an occupation. He has to bribe Ethiopia and Eritrea to join the
“Coalition of the Willing” – so he can claim he
has international support. Now his administration is pushing Japan
to remilitarize so he can have Japanese peace-keepers in Iraq, because,
gosh, you know those American voters won’t stand to have a
couple of hundred thousand American troops stationed in Iraq. And
he’s deployed two thirds of the entire military oversees in
Iraq and Afghanistan and now he’s threatening Iran. And wait
a fucking minute, he wants Japan to have a standing army!
-LIBERAL
ARTS MAFIA
___
The idea that it doesn't matter whether we find
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or not is to me one of the most
dangerous notions that's been put out anywhere in my lifetime. Basically,
what it's saying is that the ends justify the means. In this case,
it's hard to argue with the ends. As chaotic as things are, no one
can say Iraq isn't better off without this psychopath. But if Americans
buy into that notion, what they're saying is it's OK to destroy
democracy at home in order to export it overseas.
You cannot have a democracy if you have a government lying to you
about the reasons that you're going to war. If we're signing off
on that tacitly or explicitly, we're living in a very different
country than we ever did before.
-Susan
Tifft
___
What I can't explain is the rage of the counter-revolutionaries
to dismantle every last brick of the social contract. At this advanced
age I simply have to accept the fact that the tension between haves
and have-nots is built into human psychology and society itself
-- it's ever with us. However, I'm just as puzzled as to why, with
right-wing wrecking crews blasting away at social benefits once
considered invulnerable, Democrats are fearful of being branded
"class warriors" in a war the other side started and is
determined to win. I don't get why conceding your opponent's premises
and fighting on his turf isn't the sure-fire prescription for irrelevance
and ultimately obsolescence. But I confess as well that I don't
know how to resolve the social issues that have driven wedges into
your ranks. And I don't know how to reconfigure democratic politics
to fit into an age of soundbites and polling dominated by a media
oligarchy whose corporate journalists are neutered and whose right-wing
publicists have no shame.
- Bill
Moyers
___
Distraught soldiers were saying: ‘I ain’t
prepared for this, I didn't come here to shoot civilians.’
The colonel countered that the Iraqis were using inhabitants to
kill marines, that ‘soldiers were being disguised as civilians,
and that ambulances were perpetrating terrorist attacks.’
I drove away a girl who had had her humerus pierced by a bullet.
Enrico was holding her in his arms. In the rear, the girl’s
father was protecting his young son, wounded in the torso and losing
consciousness. The man spoke in gestures to the doctor at the back
of the lines, pleading: “I don’t understand, I was walking
and holding my children’s hands. Why didn’t you shoot
in the air? Or at least shoot me?”
In Baghdad, McCoy sped up the march. He stopped taking the time
to search houses one-by-one. He wanted to get to Paradise Place
as soon as possible. The Marines were not firing on the thickening
population. The course ended with Saddam’s statue being toppled.
There were more journalists at the scene than Baghdadis. Its five
million inhabitants stayed at home.
- Norman
Madarasz
___
Last November, according to the Post, “a
new Pentagon research office began designing a global computer-surveillance
system to give U.S. counterterrorism officials access to personal
information in government and commercial databases around the world.”
The director of this office, John H. Poindexter, had the weird,
shocking authority to collect every electronic record about every
American citizen – and, it seems, citizens of other nations,
into a national database. Let us not forget: this is the same Admiral
Poindexter who was convicted of crimes in the anti-constitutional
Iran-Contra arms sales of the Reagan administration.
We are watching our civil rights vanish before our eyes, in the
name of an impossible goal of “security.” Surely, Americans
can learn to live with greater risk at home without redefining their
nation into the imperial, and frightening, governor of the world.
Yet at this moment, the accumulated power of the presidency looks
monolithic, while the opposition absents itself from the fray. I
live in hope that it is still possible to make the political process
work for those of us who were in the majority in 2000, and a hair’s
breadth away from it in 2002. America is riven by at least two (opposing)
theories of power and governance: a doctrine of unilateral power,
against a belief in shared sovereignty and multilateral alliances.
These political ideas animate our people domestically as well as
internationally, and neither side, however bitterly opposed to the
other, can claim to love this nation more. No one of us is less
a patriot than any other fellow citizen, though our differences
be sharp and seem nearly insoluble.
- Katherine
Mcnamara
___
The Cuban revolution was born to be different.
Assailed by the incessant hounding from the empire to the north,
it survived as it could and not as it wished. The people, valiant
and generous, sacrificed a great deal to stay on their feet in a
world of rampant servility. But as year after year of trials buffeted
the island, the revolution began to lose the spontaneity and freshness
that marked its beginning. I say this with sadness. Cuba hurts.
My conscience clear, I will repeat what I have previously said
both on and away from the island: I do not believe in, and have
never believed in single-party democracy (including in the United
States, where there is a single party disguised as two). Nor do
I believe that the omnipotence of the state is a valid response
to the omnipotence of the market.
- Eduardo
Galeano
___
What are the conservatives doing
with all the money and power that used to belong to all of us? They
are telling us to be absolutely terrified, and to run around in
circles like chickens with their heads cut off. But they will save
us. They are making us take off our shoes at airports. Can anybody
here think of a more hilarious practical joke than that one?
And they have turned loose a myriad of our high-tech weapons,
each one costing more than a hundred high schools, on a Third World
country, in order to shock and awe human beings like us, like Adam
and Eve, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.
-
Kurt Vonnegut
___
Orwell in 1948 understood that despite the Axis
defeat, the will to fascism had not gone away, that far from having
seen its day it had perhaps not yet even come into its own - the
corruption of spirit, the irresistible human addiction to power
were already long in place, all well-known aspects of the Third
Reich and Stalin's USSR, even the British Labour party - like first
drafts of a terrible future. What could prevent the same thing from
happening to Britain and the United States? Moral superiority? Good
intentions? Clean living?
What has steadily, insidiously improved since then, of course,
making humanist arguments almost irrelevant, is the technology.
We must not be too distracted by the clunkiness of the means of
surveillance current in Winston Smith's era. In "our"
1984, after all, the integrated circuit chip was less than a decade
old, and almost embarrassingly primitive next to the wonders of
computer technology circa 2003, most notably the internet, a development
that promises social control on a scale those quaint old 20th-century
tyrants with their goofy moustaches could only dream about.
- Thomas Pynchon, The
Road to 1984
___
So it was a bit depressing to see Democratic reaction
to two recent GOP-driven news events: the musings of Sen. Rick Santorum
(R-Penn.) on sexual desires both human and, oddly, canine; and the
Republican Party's announcement that it will hold its New York convention
as close to the anniversary of the September 11 attacks as it can
get away with. That Democrats went into high dudgeon over the former
but had almost nothing to say about the latter shows a party trapped
in a cage built of its own timidity and lack of imagination -- a
party that knows well how to address the particular concerns of
its loyal constituencies but has little purchase on how to speak
broadly to more general concerns.
Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee made an announcement
on April 21 that is in every way more offensive and shocking than
any idiocy that tumbled out of Santorum's mouth. For the entire
history of the two-party system in this country, the parties have
had a gentlemen's agreement that the conventions will take place
before Labor Day, with the real, head-to-head campaigning to commence
thereafter. But as we know very well, we are no longer dealing with
gentlemen. So now the Republicans announce that they are going to
meet in New York City about three miles from Ground Zero as near
to the anniversary of the tragedy as possible. And they in essence
acknowledge, discreetly but quite openly, that the purpose is to
squeeze as much political gain out of the attacks, and the national-security
issue, as they can.
- Michael Tomasky from The
American Prospect
___
This is exactly the way the country was run in
the 1980s. Remember that these are almost the same people as in
the Reagan and the senior Bush Administrations. Right through the
1980s they carried out domestic policies that were harmful to the
population and which, as we know from extensive polls, the people
opposed. But they managed to maintain control by frightening the
people. So the Nicaraguan Army was two days' march from Texas and
about to conquer the United States, and the airbase in Granada was
one from which the Russians would bomb us. It was one thing after
another, every year, every one of them ludicrous. The Reagan Administration
actually declared a national Emergency in 1985 because of the threat
to the security of the United States posed by the Government of
Nicaragua.
If somebody were watching this from Mars, they would not know whether
to laugh or to cry.
They are doing exactly the same thing now, and will probably do
something similar for the presidential campaign. There will have
to be a new dragon to slay, because if the Administration lets domestic
issues prevail, it is in deep trouble.
- NOAM CHOMSKY, from an
interview in Z magazine
___
There's a weird illogic about it, because the
less important literary fiction gets to the culture, the harder
those corporations who for whatever reason keep wanting to publish
it, have to market it. So in order to keep it alive, you have to
murder it to save it.
A book is also a product. At least the books that we're talking
about... Even a book that's about living in a culture that relentlessly
turns everything into a product is a product. There are not very
complicated ironies built into that situation. But you know that
happens maybe four or five times a year. There are these legions
of very smart, nice, usually Seven Sisters-educated young publicists
for all the different publishing houses whose entire job is networking
and lunching and hanging out with the book reviewers and opinion
makers again and again ... hoping the cultural and marketing motor
will catch, which one out of 200 times it does.
-David Foster Wallace
___
The war was a disastrous failure of the imagination
and an almost deliberate refusal to envisage the inevitable consequences
of words and acts...made possible above all by the corruption of
language in politics and by some of the major newspapers.
-Karl Kraus (referring to WWI)
___
"There is some kind of anger in the man,
a hostility that sometimes seems barely under control—as if
he were, in street parlance, being ‘dissed.’"
-Richard Reeves
"He has the unreflective person’s immunity from irony,
that great killer of intellectual passion. Ask him to reconcile
his line on Iraq with his line on North Korea and he just gets irritated."-
Michael Kinsley.
"Mr. Bush’s greatest weakness is that too many people,
at home and abroad, smell that he’s not really interested
in repairing the world." - Thomas L.
Friedman.
"A steady hand on the helm in high seas, a knowledge of where
we must go and why, a resolve to achieve safe harbor. More and more
this presidency is feeling like a gift." - Peggy Noonan.
"This is the worst president ever. He is the worst president
in all of American history." -Helen Thomas
-From The Eighth Hundred Days: The Quiz, Paul Slansky
(The New Yorker, April 14, 2003)
___
...I was exhilarated by what some of my best and
most liberal friends deplored as Mr. Moore’s abrasive antics.
Why shouldn’t we have a mad dog barking on our side for a
change? We’re subjected to the drums of war banging incessantly
on CNN—and all the while, people’s pensions are being
looted in broad daylight by a new gang of corporate malefactors
with access to the corridors of power.
Media malaise has set in with a vengeance, and not only just for
me. The endless media coverage of the war has lowered the Nielsen
ratings on the Oscars and the NCAA basketball tournament. It has
reduced attendance at the movies and on Broadway, and made people
less eager to shop and travel. And one can see what McLuhan meant
when he said that televised wars become fictions. Right now, Iraq
looks more and more like a too-long movie with too many subplots.
Even Donald Rumsfeld seemed a little flustered by the media maelstrom,
when he complained that reporters were asking him questions about
events in Iraq that appeared on television long before they were
reported to the Pentagon by the commanders on the ground. The new
phenomenon of "embedded" journalists with their unpredictable
mood swings would have delighted McLuhan as much as the acceleration
of audience expectations, so that a week seems like a month and
a month like a year. Even in McLuhan’s time, 20 years and
more before the end of the last millennium, he observed: "Today
each of us lives several hundred years in a decade."
- Andrew Sarris, The New York Observer, 4/7/03
___
And another reason that I'm happy to live in this
period is that we have been forced to a point where we're going
to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to
grapple with through history, but the demand didn't force them to
do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years
now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can
they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence
and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence.
- Martin Luther King, Jr., from "I've been to the
Mountain Top"
___
The American system is the most ingenious system
of control in world history. With a country so rich in natural resources,
talent, and labor power, the system can afford to distribute just
enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome
minority. It is a country so powerful, so big that it can afford
to give freedom of dissent to the small number who is not pleased.
There is no system of control with more openings, apertures, leeways,
flexibility, rewards for the chosen, winning tickets in lotteries.
There is none that disperses it controls more completely through
the voting system, the work situation, the church, the family, the
school, the mass media—none more successful in mollifying
opposition with reforms, isolating people from one another, creating
patriotic loyalty.
One percent of the nation owns a third of the wealth. The rest
of the wealth is distributed in such a way as to turn those in the
ninety-nine percent against one another: Small property owners against
the propertyless, black against white, native-born against foreign-born,
intellectuals and professionals against the uneducated and unskilled.
These groups have resented one another and warred against one another
with such vehemence and violence as to obscure their common position
as sharers of leftovers in a very wealthy country.
- Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States
___
O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of
our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them --
in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved
firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their
soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their
smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us
to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded,
writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a
hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending
widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless
with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated
land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of
summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with
travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it
-- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight
their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their
steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with
the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love,
of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge
and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble
and contrite hearts. Amen.
- Mark Twain, "The War Prayer"
___
From New World Order to No World Order, Mr. Bush
is making the globe a more dangerous place, one where the United
States will have to fight and fight again. Such is the irony of
his isolationism. And at home in Fortress America, the frightened
politicians increase the size of their bodyguards, the country’s
wealth is drained trying to protect every airport, water reservoir
and highway culvert, phones are tapped and every aspect of life
is suddenly subject to "procedures." We have now reached
the point where it is strictly forbidden to bring a family picnic
to a Major League Baseball game.
Isolationism is just that: being isolated, cut off, marooned, restricted,
narrowed down and regulated. In Fortress America, the watchword
is keep out. Keep ’em all out, keep everything out; build
up the walls and cower behind them. Looking out the window from
the longest limousine in the motorcade may seem like freedom—but
to the pedestrians out on the sidewalks being pushed away and patted
down by security, it may begin to seem a little like life in Baghdad.
- Nicholas von Hoffman @ The New York Observer
___
PATRIOT, n. One to whom the interests of a part
seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and the
tool of conquerors.
PATRIOTISM, n. Combustible rubbish read to the torch of any one
ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary
patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all
due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to
submit that it is the first.
- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
___
One of the most frequent comments I hear everywhere, right
up there with "what’s for dinner" and "I want
to be somebody" is "I don’t have time to read,"
which is essentially telling you, a lifelong writer, that your profession
is below that of communal spritzers and flossing, and frequent social
ass scratching. Everyone has to learn over and over that at best
time is seized and then you flee.
- Jim Harrison
___
I have no respect for writers. They never make money. They’re
like poor people looking in the windows.
- NY Publicist Peggy Seigal, quoted in Toby Young's How to Lose
Friends and Influence People
___
The beauty of the Internet was that Chip could post whole
cloth fabrications without troubling to even check his spelling.
Reliability on the Web was 98% a function of how slick and cool
your site looked. Although Chip personally wasn’t fluent in
Web, he was an American under 40 and Americans under 40 were exquisite
judges of what was slick and cool and what was not.
- Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
___
The main difference between America and Lithuania, as far
as Chip could see, was that in America the wealthy few subdued the
unwealthy many by means of mind-numbing and soul-killing entertainments
and gadgetry and pharmaceuticals, whereas in Lithuania the powerful
few subdued the unpowerful many by threatening violence…
- Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
___
There is nothing...that is not beautiful or that will last.
- Joe Bolton, "Tropical
Paradise"
___
The best thing for being sad...is to learn something. That
is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling
in your anatomies, you may lie awake listening to the disorder in
your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about
you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in
the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to
learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only
thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be
tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.
- T.H. White, The
Once and Future King
___
The difference between Socrates and Jesus is that no one
has ever been put to death in Socrates' name. And that is because
Socrates' ideas were never made into law.
- E.L. Doctorow, The
Book of Daniel
___
The ones for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to
live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the
same time, who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn,
burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders
across the stars.
- Jack Kerouac, On
The Road
___
All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family
is unhappy in its own fashion.
- Leo Tolstoy, Anna
Karenina
___
Buying is much more American than thinking and I'm as American
as they come. In Europe and the Orient people like to trade—buy
and sell, sell and buy—they're basically merchants. Americans
are not so interested in selling—in fact, they'd rather throw
out than sell. What they really like to do is buy—people, money,
countries.
- Andy Warhol, THE
Philosophy of Andy Warhol
___
"You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not
to be a bitch." "Yes." "It's sort of what we
have instead of God."
- Ernest Hemingway, The
Sun Also Rises
___
America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people
are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves....
It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America
is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men
who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more
estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told
by American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
___
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes
it so.
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet
___
I do not like experts. They are our jailers. I despise
experts more than anyone on earth...They solve nothing! They are
servants of whatever system hires them. They perpetuate it. When
we are tortured, we shall be tortured by experts. When we are hanged,
experts will hang us...When the world is destroyed, it will be destroyed
not by its madmen but by the sanity of its experts and the superior
ignorance of its bureaucrats.
- John Le Carre, Russia
House
___
So let's dismiss non-fiction as something any child of eleven
can do and let's dismiss most forms of fiction as writing that requires
no discipline whatever. The novel, in particular, is by definition
a form that defies definition. Moreover, most novelists at work
today are writing as poorly as the people writing non-fiction. What
it's come down to, if a person can successfully string together
nine or ten plain words to fashion a simple sentence, then he or
she may be dubbed 'author' and be permitted to go on author's tours
and speak at Book and Author Luncheons and generally behave like
a writer...
An author is anyone who's written a book. The book can be a diet
book, or a cookbook, or a book about the sex life of the tsetse
fly in Rwanda, or it can be a trashy woman-in-jeopardy mystery,
or a high tech novel about a missing Russian diplomat, or any one
of a thousand poorly written screeds or palimpsests. An author doesn't
need to study literature, he doesn't need to take any courses in
the craft of writing. All he needs to do is impulsively and ambitiously
sit himself down in front of a computer and write as badly as he
knows how to write. In this great land of the literary jackpot,
if he writes badly enough, he may hit it really big, therfore qualifying
AS a boba fide author entitled to go on book tours and television
talk shows...
- Ed McBain, Romance
___
President McKinley Explains That the United States Should
Keep the Philippines by Direct Order of God...
I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight;
and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on
my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than
one night. And one night late it came to me this way—I don't
know how it was but it came; first, that we could not give [the
Philippines] back to Spain—that would be cowardly and dishonorable;
second, that we could not turn them over to France or Germany—our
commercial rivals in the Orient—that would be bad business
and discreditable; third, we could not leave them to themselves—they
were unfit for government, and they would soon have anarchy and
misrule of there worse than Spain's was; and fourth, that there
was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate
the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and
by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow
men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed, and went
to sleep and slept soundly.
- Eduardo Galeano,
Memory of Fire
___
Life is like licking honey from a thorn. [Old Hungarian
saying]
- Alan Furst, Kingdom
of Shadows
___
It's a proven fact that those who have epilepsy also have
a higher incidence of depression, but I wonder if the epilepsy causes
the depression, or if the depression is because of the epilepsy,
which is, when all is said and done, an illness so existential,
so oddly spiritual, you are stuck out in the stratosphere with Sartre
and Kierkegaard, with dead dogs and owls.
- Lauren Slater, Lying
___
“You asking me,” Catlett said, “do I know
how to write down words on a piece of paper? That’s what you
do, man, you put down one word after the other as it comes in your
head. It isn’t like having to learn how to play the piano,
like you have to learn notes. You already learned in school how
to write didn’t you. I hope so. You have the idea and you put
down what you want to say. Then you get somebody to add commas and
shit where they belong, if you aren’t positive yourself. Maybe
fix up the spelling where you have some tricky words. There people
that do that for you. Some, I’ve even seen scripts where I
know words weren’t spelled right and there were hardly any
commas in it. So I don’t think it’s too important. You
come to the last page and you write in 'Fade out' and that’s
the end and you’re done.”
- Elmore Leonard, Get
Shorty
___
Furthermore, those late nights I have driven back to the
pooldar apartments in Berkeley after working, I have seen in the
windows the pale blue glow of at least one television in every home.
And I am told that many family meals are eaten in front of this
screen as well. And perhaps this explains the face of Americans,
the eyes that never appear satisfied, at peace with their work,
or the day God has given them; these people have the eyes of very
small children who are forever looking for their next source of
distraction, entertainment, or a sweet taste in the mouth. And it
is no longer to me a surprise that it is the recent immigrants who
excel in this land, the Orientals, the Greeks, and yes, the Persians.
We know rich opportunity when we see it.
- Andre Dubus III, House
of Sand and Fog
___
Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment
(beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises,
moving zig-zag towards a more decent society.
We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate
in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions
of people, can transform the world.
- Howard Zinn, You Can't
Be Neutral on a Moving Train
___
To contemplate truth, without sorrow, is the greatest gift.
- The Kaballah
___
He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York
was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting
way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance
for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them
with it.
- Don DeLillo, White
Noise
___
I see myself as half narrative...contentless form...I must
compose myself.
- John Barthes, Lost in the Funhouse
___
The only thing that is immune to change is our desire for
meaning.
- Douglas Coupland, Microserfs
___
Frankly, I have no mind for rational solutions to these
immense problems. Nothing I ever hear from Washington, D.C., has
any relationship with the reality I know down here. I’m seeing
delirium, hunger, acute suffering, which are not solved, assuaged
or aired by the stentorian fart breath of the House and Senate.
I’m also wondering if it behooves a writer to try to be right.
Yeats warned about cutting off a horse's legs to get it into a box.
Simon Ortiz, the grand Acomo Pueblo poet, said that there are no
truths, only stories…
A historian might very well consider the validity of the Gadsen
Purchase, wherein we bought my locale for fifty-two cents an acre
from a group of Mexicans that had no right to sell it. The United
Nations would question our right to take all of the Colorado River’s
water, leaving the estuarine area in Mexico as dry as the bones
their people leave up here in the desert. A true disciple of Jesus
would say that we have to do something about these desperate people,
though this is the smallest voice of all. Most politicians have
the same moral imperative as a cancer cell: continue what you’re
up to at all costs. Meanwhile the xenophobes, better known as the
xenoids, merely jump up an down on the border screeching, surely
a full testament to our primate roots. Everyone not already here
must be kept out, and anyone here illegally, if not immediately
expunged, should be made as uncomfortable as possible.
So Ana Claudia crossed with her brother and child into Indian country,
walking up a dry wash for forty miles, but when she reached the
highway she simply dropped dead near the place where recently a
nineteen year old girl also died from thirst with a baby at her
breast. The baby was covered with sun blisters, but lived. So did
Ana Claudia’s. The particular cruelty of a dry wash is that
everywhere there is evidence of water that once passed this way,
with the banks verdant with flora. We don’t know how long it
took Ana Claudia to walk her only forty miles in America, but we
know what her last hours were like. Her body progressed from losing
one quart of water to seven quarts: lethargy, increasing pulse,
nausea, dizziness, blue shading of vision, delirium, swelling of
the tongue, deafness, dimness of vision, shriveling of the skin,
and then death, the fallen body wrenched into a question mark. How
could we not wish that politicians on both sides of the border who
let her die this way would die in the same manner? But then such
people have never missed a single lunch. Ana Claudia Villa Herrera.
What a lovely name.
- Jim Harrison, "Life on the Border" (Men’s Journal,
July 2001)
___
If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect
man's fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite
often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say
that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending.
- Joan Didion, "On
the Morning After the Sixties" (from The White Album)
___
You can never change the Past, but you can see it.
You can never see the Future, but you can change it.
- Charles Laquidara
___
A new question has arisen in man's mind, the question, namely,
whether 'life is worth living,' and correspondingly, the feeling
that one's life 'is a failure,' or is 'a success.' This idea is
based on the concept of life as an enterprise which should show
a profit. The failure is like the bankruptcy of a business in which
the losses are greater than the gains. This concept is nonsensical.
We may be happy or unhappy, achieve some aims, and not achieve others;
yet there is no sensible balance which could show whether life is
worth while living. Maybe from the standpoint of a balance life
is never worth while living. It ends necessarily with death; many
of our hopes are disappointed; it involves suffering and effort;
from the standpoint of this balance, it would seem to make more
sense not to have been born at all, or to die in infancy. On the
other hand, who will tell whether on happy moment of love, or the
joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the
fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life
implies? Life is a unique gift and challenge, not to be measured
in terms of anything else, and no sensible answer can be given to
the question whether it is 'worth while' living, because the question
does not make any sense.
- Erich Fromm, The
Sane Society
___
The "working poor" as they are approvingly termed,
are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect
their own children so that the children of others will be cared
for: they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be
shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will
be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor
is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone
else.
- Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel
and Dimed
___
Sometime in the Eighties, Americans had a new set of "traditional
values" installed. It was part of what may someday be known
as the "Reagan renovation," that finely balanced mix of
cosmetic refinement and moral coarseness which brought $200,000
china to the White House dinner table and mayhem to the beleaguered
peasantry of Central America. All of the new traditions had venerable
sources. In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons: in foreign
policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the
Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying
intolerance of our archenemies and esteemed customers, the Shi’ite
fundamentalists.
A case could be made, of course, for the genuine American provenance
of all these new "traditions." We’ve had our own
robber barons, military adventurers, and certainly more than our
share of enterprising evangelists promoting ignorance and parochialism
as a state of grace. From the vantage point of the continent’s
original inhabitants, or, for example, the captive African laborers
who made America a great agricultural power, our "traditional
values" have always been bigotry, greed and belligerence, buttressed
by wanton appeals to a God of love.
- Barbara Ehrenreich, The
Worst Years of Our Lives
___
Nothing is more real than nothing.
- Samuel Beckett
___
Patty Keene was stupid on purpose, which was the case with
most women in Midland City. The women all had big minds because
they were big animals, but they did not use them much for this reason:
unusual ideas could make enemies, and the women, if they were going
to achieve any sort of comfort and safety, needed all the friends
they could get.
So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be
agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds
had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then
they thought that, too.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast
of Champions
___
"The sky is blue because you wanta know why the sky
is blue."
- Jack Kerouac, The
Dharma Bums
___
The shack had been built by an old man to die in, years
ago. It was well built.
- Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
___
His own lonely impunity is rank: it smells to heaven. If
it is allowed to persist then we shall shamefully vindicate the
ancient philosopher Anacharsis, who maintained that laws were like
cobwebs: strong enough to detain only the weak, and too weak to
hold the strong. In the name of innumerable victims, known and unknown,
it is time for justice to take a hand.
- Christopher Hitchens,
The Trial of Henry Kissinger
___
Four more years of an unwinnable war and undeclared and
murderous war, which was to spread before it burned out, and was
to end on the same terms and conditions as had been on the table
in the fall of 1968. That was what it took to promote Henry Kissinger.
To promote him from being a mediocre and opportunist academic to
becoming an international potentate. The signature qualities were
there from the inaugural moment: the sycophancy and the duplicity:
the power worship and the absence of scruple: the empty trading
of old non-friends for new non-friends. And the distinctive effects
also were present: the uncounted and expendable corpses: the official
and unofficial lying about the cost: the heavy and pompous pseudo-indignation
when unwelcome questions were asked. K's global career started as
it meant to go on. It debauched the American republic and American
democracy, and it levied a hideous toll of casualties on weaker
and more vulnerable societies.
- Christopher Hitchens,
The Trial of Henry Kissinger
___
In a dark night of the soul, it's always 3 o'clock in the
morning, over and over again.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The
Crack Up
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