COMMONPLACE BOOK: Current Readings

“As for the people I am accusing, I do not know them, I have never seen them, and I bear them neither ill will nor hatred. To me they are mere entities, agents of harm to society.”
(Emile Zola)

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“You no longer rely on your citizens to make wars; you now rely on private companies.”
(Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater, in an interview on C-SPAN)

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“What to think of a man who would rather believe a member of the Gestapo because he is German than to believe a woman of the Résistance because she is French? “
(“Kiki” posting on the blog Global Clashes)

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“I wonder if I might offer you some constructive criticism. Among the problems, I think, has been your clarity of precisely why you were fighting me and how you intended to wage that fight. Like when you say: "As the rhythm designed to bounce / What counts is that the rhymes / Designed to fill your mind / Now that you've realized the pride's arrived / We got to pump the stuff to make us tough / from the heart / It's a start, a work of art." Pardon my frankness but what the hell are you talking about there? It rhymes, but what are people supposed to do with that information? If you're trying to fight someone, especially someone like me, you need clear action items. Maybe "Carjack The Power's limousine after an important board meeting" or "Expose The Power's malfeasance in a national publication" or maybe "Propose a better alternative to The Power and let the people decide." Those are just off the top of my head! Look, take this advice or don't, but before dismissing it just remember The Power must know what he's doing, right? Thus the name. Think about it.”

(A Letter from "The Power" to Public Enemy, one of John Moe’s “Pop Songs Correspondences at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency)

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“Propaganda... undermines trust in the source of information, which means that even the truth, when it comes, may not be believed.”

(Magnus Linklater, UK Times )

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“Image wins out over reality more and more in the battle for attention and belief. Virtually every public event now arrives filtered through a lens, laptop computer, or recording device, and hence nearly all our daily news has been “produced” and woven into some kind of narrative. Old-fashioned, relatively unmediated reality at times appears obsolete. In this environment, [Frank] Rich’s New York Times columns attempt to redress the balance as he rips holes in the scenery of the image manipulators to reveal stagehands frantically hauling on ropes, and drags unwelcome truths onstage.”

(Christopher Lambert on Frank Rich’s shift from theatre critic to political observer in Harvard magazine)

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“It’s [media manipulation] a cultural pattern now: empirical reality doesn’t penetrate as well as it should... If we can’t agree on what the facts are, then we have no hope. We need to distinguish between facts and showmanship, facts and propaganda. If you can’t agree on the fact that the house is burning down, you can’t put out the fire.”

(Frank Rich)

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"What are creation's needs for full functioning? Wholly surrendered and dedicated lives; time as needed for the work; totality of self."

(Tillie Olsen)

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“The fallout from Don Imus’s racist and misogynistic remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team has led to one of those periodic and quintessentially American paroxysms of disapproval, contrition and repentance. But the response of the mainstream media—and CBS radio and MSNBC, in particular—is as hypocritical as it is revealing. [Late Wednesday, MSNBC announced that it will no longer broadcast the Imus radio show]. Using stereotypes—about blacks, Jews, women, and gays and lesbians—has been a part of Imus’s act for decades.”

(Marcus Mabry, Newsweek Online)

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“Incredible how the top dog always announces with such an air of discovery that the underdog is childish, stupid, emotional, irresponsible, uninterested in serious matters, incapable of learning — but for god’s sake don’t teach him anything! — and both cowardly and ferocious […] The oppressed is also treacherous, incapable of fighting fair, full of dark magics, prone to do nasty things like fighting back when attacked, and contented with his place in life unless stirred up by outside agitators.”
(James Tiptree Jr., aka Alice Sheldon)

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“Americans don’t want to play chicken with the troops.”
(Barack Obama, April 6, 2007)

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“Some of us are still Pleistocene bipeds, no matter that we like James Joyce and Heidegger.”
(Jim Harrison)

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“Kurt Vonnegut was a hero to baby boomers, though he was raised in an earlier time. The president he mourned was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, not John F. Kennedy. His war was World War II, not Vietnam. Vonnegut was less a peer... than a wise, eccentric and cranky uncle, scorning the world's madness but rarely failing to get some laughs or challenge some minds.”
(Hillel Italie)

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“One story line that Virginia Tech is emphatically not about is a unique American culture of violence. To tell it that way demeans other massacres by deranged gunmen over the past thirty years in Australia, Scotland, South Korea, Germany. Simply put, such mass shootings have occurred wherever in the world mentally ill and enraged loners had easy access to guns. This is neither a pro- nor antigun statement, just a fact.”
(Bruce Shapiro, The Nation )

“In this world there is room for everyone, and the good earth is rich Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men – machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural.”
(Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator)

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“As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
(Eugene Debs)

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"If you are a younger journalist … how are you to know that there's another way to do it? A whole different tradition? That success is not becoming a talking head celebrity, saying what everyone else says?"
(Molly Ivins)

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“Being Canadian must be like living next door to the Simpsons.”
(Molly Ivins)