Commonplace Book

"In short, I conceive that great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by the false estimates they have made of the value of things, and by their giving too much for their whistles.” (Benjamin Franklin, "The Parable of the Whistle")

To fall into despair is just a high-class way of turning into a dope. I choose to laugh, and laugh at myself no less than at others."
(Saul Bellow)

“If I, Rigoberta Menchú served only as the testament of a failed revolution, a moment in history when the highest collective ideals of liberation theology crashed headlong into the most vicious distillate of cold war anticommunism, it would be a good book, still worth reading. But what made liberation theology, along with Latin America's New Left more broadly, so potent a threat in a place as inhumane as Guatemala in the 1970s was not just its concern with social justice but its insistence on individual human dignity.”
(Greg Grandin in The Nation)

"I find film in its modern form to be quite bullying. It spoon-feeds us, which has the effect of watering down our collective cultural imagination. It is as if we are freshly hatched birds looking up with our mouths open waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms. The 'Watchmen' film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I for one am sick of worms. Can't we get something else? Perhaps some takeout? Even Chinese worms would be a nice change."
(Alan Moore)

“I think most illustrators are far too hard on themselves. They expect to sit down with one piece of paper and draw exactly what they have in their mind the very first time around. In my opinion this is nearly impossible. Drawing is a process that takes a long time. I like to make an analogy between a good batter in baseball and a good illustrator. A great batting average for the major leagues is “.300.” This batting average means that they get 3 hits out of ten, or get a hit 30 percent of the time. I think that this is a reasonable expectation for an artist to have as well. If I can get 3 decent drawings out of ten attempts – I feel fairly good about myself.”
(William Beachy)

“Love is to our hearts what winds are to the sea. They grow into tempests, true; they are sometimes even the cause of shipwrecks. But the winds render the sea navigable, their constant agitation of its surface is the cause of its preservation, and if they are often dangerous, it is for the pilot to know how to navigate in safety.” (Ninon de l'Enclos, Letters to the Marquis de Sévigné , VIII)

“I happen to be an anti-Stalinist and an anti-Nazi, so I don’t think that the state should be granted the right to determine historical truth.” (Noam Chomsky)

Tina Fey: [ holds up picture of Hugh Hefner and seven girlfriends ] Tonight, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner will celebrate his 75th birthday. At Hefner's side will be his seven girlfriends - Stephanie, Tiffany, Regina, Cathy, Kimberly, Buffy and, of course, Tina. Because wherever two or more whores are gathered, there's always a Tina. Now, when I first saw these women, I thought the same thing we all did - what has happened to affirmative action in this country? Hefner's dating seven blonde, white women - not a blonde pubic hair among them, might I add. Not a pubic hair among them. Come on, though - seven blondes? There's not a hot Asian woman you can throw in there? A light-skinned black woman? A deaf brunette? Something? Where's the diversity? When are we going to have a Hefner harem that looks like America? Am I really to believe that these women, each of them, offers you something unique?
Let's go over them, if you will. [ points to first girlfriend ] This one is 19, okay. Two months ago she was working at Dairy Queen, now she goes clubbing every night with Bill Maher and Don Adams. Is she better off? It's hard to say!
This one.. [ points to second girlfriend ] ..this one isn't even trying. I'm actually very disappointed in this one. What is that, a man's shirt? You are the weakest link - goodbye!
[ onto the third girlfriend ] This one doesn't even have a name anymore.. she's just "Girl". She's basically just there because she knows CPR.
[ fourth girlfriend ] This one is always next to him, always holding his hand. [ in Chinese accent ] She a numba one girlfriend! At 28, Tina is the oldest and has a two-year-old son. That must be a wonderful way to grow up, playing Fetch the Ashtray with James Caan in the Grotto, while your mom's upstairs praying for the Viagara to wear off so she can get you to the orthodontist on time. Fantastic.
These two.. [ points to next two girlfriends ] ..these two right herem these two are like this.. [ crosses fingers ] Sometimes they're like this.. [ squeezes fingers ]
[ final girlfriend ] And this one, clearly, this one is willing to do something the others will not do. Whatever the filthiest thing you can think of - it's a little worse than that, and she'll let you photograph her doing it. Gotta be the reason she's there.
But you know what? You can't condemn these woman, because at least they work together, they support each other, and how many woman can say that, right? And these women aren't doing it for the money. They're doing it because they were molested by a family friend. I salute you, Hefner ladies. You are making it work! Back to you Jimmy!
(Tina Fey)

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life; the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.” (Bertrand Russell)


“The word “prophet” is a very bad translation of an obscure Hebrew word, navi. Nobody knows what it means. But today they’d be called dissident intellectuals. They were giving geopolitical analysis, arguing that the acts of the rulers were going to destroy society. And they condemned the acts of evil kings. They called for justice and mercy to orphans and widows and so on. I don’t want to say it was all beautiful. Dissident intellectuals aren’t all beautiful. You read Sakharov, who is sometimes appalling. Or Solzhenitsyn. And the nivi’im were treated the way dissident intellectuals always are. They weren’t praised. They weren’t honored. They were imprisoned like Jeremiah. They were driven into the desert. They were hated. Now at the time, there were intellectuals, “prophets,” who were very well treated. They were the flatterers of the court. Centuries later, they were called ‘false prophets.’ People who criticize power in the Jewish community are regarded the way Ahab treated Elijah: You’re a traitor. You’ve got to serve power. You can’t argue that the policies that Israel is following are going to lead to its destruction, which I thought then and still do.” (Noam Chomsky)

Commonplace Book of Quotations, August 2010

"I find film in its modern form to be quite bullying. It spoon-feeds us, which has the effect of watering down our collective cultural imagination. It is as if we are freshly hatched birds looking up with our mouths open waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms. The 'Watchmen' film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I for one am sick of worms. Can't we get something else? Perhaps some takeout? Even Chinese worms would be a nice change."
(Alan Moore)

“If you are superman, let me be forever animal.”
(artist and occultist Austin Spare in a 1936 letter to Adolf Hitler, responding to Hitler’s request that Spare paint Hitler’s portrait)

“A GREETING FROM THE NINETEENTH TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.
I bring you the stately nation named Christendom, returning, bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate raids in Kiao-Chou, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and towel, but hide the looking-glass.”
(Mark Twain, New Years, 1900)

“As a (semi-) reformed fanboy myself, you’d think I’d be celebrating... yet I find this rise to dominance both confusing and ironic, no more so than when fanboys shout down opposition to something they collectively adore. .. Not only is this wrongheaded, it’s the exact opposite of the fanboy ethos.... You loved what you loved, in part, because it spoke directly to you, and in part because most other people didn’t feel the same way... [and] if there is one thing the Internet is good for, it’s bringing together like-minded people, then convincing them that their opinion is the only valid one in existence. Psychologists call this “group polarization,” a tendency for people who agree to gather and prod each other toward further extremism. This has long been evident on political blogs, but it’s true in cultural criticism as well...Once the outcast underdogs, fanboys have become the new bullies.”
(Adam Sternberg in New York



“Charlemagne [columnist for The Economist, not the Holy Roman Emperor] doesn't always work for me, but he did this week, boy howdy. (I've never used that phrase before; I'm trying it out.) His column focuses on explaining something that Americans probably don't fully grasp, which is that Europe's tendency towards limiting the work week and lowering the retirement age came not out of laziness or me-me-meism, but from a general belief that these were the goals of a civilized society when they had escaped the basics of food/shelter problems for a large enough group. Throw a hand to the unfortunate, and try to get to a place where most people didn't have to work crazy hours. Take longer vacations. Chill the fuck out. It's a solid piece of wistful writing, even when it smacks of a little bit of blind optimism.”
(Tucker Stone)

“The reason that Europeans struggle to accept the need to work more, and get less from the state is that it seems to signal an abrupt reversal of the decades-long advance towards an ever-more civilised society: in short, the end of progress..... By progressively shrinking the number of hours worked a week, or years worked over a lifetime, society seemed to be rolling towards some sort of ideal, with vin rosé and deckchairs on the beach for all. This fits France’s sense of secular, revolutionary History, carrying the country forward, however fitfully, like an “endless cortege proceeding towards the light”, in the words of Jules Ferry, a 19th-century educationalist. Even President Nicolas Sarkozy, usually averse to abstract nouns, has spoken of “the politics of civilisation” and asked economists to measure output in terms of happiness, not just growth.
Put simply, if Europe stands for something, it is decent treatment for all. To this way of thinking, to guarantee a comfortable retirement is akin to banning child labour or giving women the vote: not optional perks, but badges of a civilised society. Such social preferences are what Europe is for, and what makes it different from America. Europe may no longer be a global power, or have much military muscle. Its churches may be empty, its spiritual fibre weak. It may not boast much cutting-edge innovation or economic growth. But it knows how to look after its sick and elderly, take a long lunch break and abandon the office in August. The cold realisation that time is up, and that such progress is over, prompts anger, denial and shock.”
(“Charlemagne” in The Economist)

“The difference between actors and comedians is that actors are symmetrical, physically, and comedians are lopsided.”
(Martin Brown)

“The human form, with its endless racial and genetic variations, is only one template for beauty which suffers from the changing tastes of passing eras - our views on horses and orchids have remained relatively static.” (Jay Stebly on the article “The Phenomenology of Ugly)

Commonplace Book of Quotations for July

“... It was the fixation of businessmen that the WPA did nothing but lean on shovels. I had an uncle who was particularly irritated at shovel-leaning. When he pooh-poohed my contention that shovel-leaning was necesary, I bet him five dollars, which I didn’t have, that he couldn’t shovel sand for fifteen timed minutes without stopping. He said a man should give a good day’s work and grabbed a shovel. At the end of three minutes his face was red, at six he was staggering and before eight minutes were up his wife stopped him to save him from apoplexy. And he never mentioned shovel-leaning again.“ (John Steinbeck, “Primer on the ‘30s", anthologized in America and Americans )

“Colleges must counter the experience of conventional high school education in the United States, where learning is little more than a standardized test-driven chore with utilitarian benefits. In college, students should discover that most of the important writings and discoveries they will study were not generated for their benefit, but rather came into being in order to illuminate and improve life.”
(Leon Botstein)

“Revolutions are always impolite because the upper classes have never taught manners to the people.” (Leon Trotsky)

“... The supposed rise of the “mama grizzlies” of the right, has obscured where things really are with women in politics. One in six members of Congress is female; out of a total of 535 seats, Republican women hold only 21, or 4 percent. It’s hardly an onslaught.” ( Julia Baird)

“The motor of accumulation has been sputtering for nearly four decades, and its coughs can be heard again now that the roar of combusting paper wealth is dying down. This doesn’t mean capitalism or even growth is at an end. Economists of all kinds have pinned their hopes on the transformation of laboring and saving Chinese into hardy consumers. In any case, the US consumer—a ravening appetite in a paper house—appears to be finished as the world’s buyer of last resort. It would add a nice dialectical twist to the future history of our period if it could be said that, around the time the post-Maoist Chinese took up shopping, the post-bubble Americans turned to studying Marx.” (n+1, uncredited)

“Professional historians were in danger of killing off history, he [Hugh Trevor-Roper] wrote, just as philosophers were killing off philosophy, through a misplaced zeal for ‘unimportant truth’. He therefore committed himself to promoting history as a public discourse aimed at helping ordinary readers to understand the world in which they live... By bringing history “down to earth”, Gibbon and the other Enlightenment historians had contributed more to the discombobulation of know-nothing theologians than any number of philosophers would ever be able to do... if skeptical secularism is to get a new lease of life, perhaps it needs a little more history and a little less philosophy, more explanation and less indignation.” ( Jonathan Rée)

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.” (Unknown comment on Wonkette)



Whereas in the late 17th and early 18th century, an orange rock guy wearing a beard and a pirate costume is de rigueur for the Caribbean. Why? ‘Cause comic books, that’s why.

" 'Everything I'm doing now in terms of talking about climate, talking about immigration, talking about Gitmo is completely opposite of where the Tea Party movement's at,' [Lindsey] Graham said. . . . On four occasions, Graham met with Tea Party groups. The first, in his Senate office, was 'very, very contentious,' he recalled. During a later meeting, in Charleston, Graham said he challenged them: ' 'What do you want to do? You take back your country -- and do what with it?'. . . . Everybody went from being kind of hostile to just dead silent.'”
(The New York Times Magazine)

“Most media outlets have someone parked in Ballroom 20 and someone parked in Hall H, writing about the big developments in both rooms, and that makes it seem like the only stuff going on at the Con is the big set of announcements from the major studios and networks. There's a whole other world of weird, hyper-personal geekery that flows around the edges of the stuff that gets written about... So much of Comic-Con is about making you forget what you really love to replace it with a temporary high that clinging to the things that truly mean something to you becomes that much more important.”
(Todd VanDerWurff)

"The opposite of war isn't peace, its creation."
(A character in Rent)

Orthodoxy, OCD and the F@#ing Wire, Baby

“As the Bacchae knew, we always tear our Gods to bits, and eat the bits we like.”
-- Adam Gopnik, “What Did Jesus Do?” in The New Yorker

***

“The same energy of character which renders a man a daring villain would have rendered him useful in society, had that society been well organized.”
-- Mary Wollstonecraft-Godwin Shelley

***

“Each day brings fresh proof to my feeling that orthodoxy of any kind is simply another word for "learning disability." It's in the nature of orthodoxy that one is discouraged to process new information objectively: the world MUST be as previously learned. Hence new data, rejected, leaves the poor person, be it a driver, a doctor, or a politician, severely handicapped. “
(Steve Brodner)

***
“Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it requires the widest spread of intelligence, and we forgot to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign. Education has spread, but intelligence is perpetually retarded by the fertility of the simple. A cynic remarked that ‘you mustn’t enthrone ignorance just because there is so much of it.’ However, ignorance is not long enthroned, for it lends itself to manipulation by the forces that mold public opinion. It may be true, as Lincoln supposed, that ‘you can’t fool all the people all the time’, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.”
-- Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History

***

Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

***


***
As a Jewish child I was regularly instructed, both subtly and openly, that Jews, the people of Maimonides, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk and Meyer Lansky, were on the whole smarter, cleverer, more brilliant, more astute than other people. And, duly, I would look around the Passover table, say, at the members of my family, and remark on the presence of a number of highly intelligent, quick-witted, shrewd, well-educated people filled to bursting with information, explanations and opinions on a diverse range of topics. In my tractable and vainglorious eagerness to confirm the People of Einstein theory, my gaze would skip right over — God love them — any counterexamples present at that year’s Seder.
.... The shock comes not because we have never encountered any stupid Jews before — Jews are stupid in roughly the same proportion as all the world’s people — but simply because from an early age we have been trained, implicitly and explicitly, to ignore them. A stupid Jew is like a hole in the pocket of your pants, there every time you put them on, always forgotten until the instant your quarters run clattering across the floor.... If, in the words of the 1948 Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, the Jewish people have a natural right “to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign state,” then the inescapable codicil of this natural inheritance is that the Jewish people, “like all other nations,” are every bit as capable of barbarism and stupidity.”
-- Michael Chabon on the Israeli blockade of Palestine

***
“... Nobody—literally nobody—knows how to make the pencil on my desk (as the economist Leonard Read once pointed out), let alone the computer on which I am writing. The knowledge of how to design, mine, fell, extract, synthesize, combine, manufacture and market these things is fragmented among thousands, sometimes millions of heads. Once human progress started, it was no longer limited by the size of human brains. Intelligence became collective and cumulative.”
-- Matt Ridley

***

“Professor James Leckman of Yale University did tests on the cerebrospinal fluid of OCD sufferers and found gobs and gobs of Oxytocin, the chemical responsible for love, jealousy and parental attachment. As it turns out, OCD-sufferers produce as much of this stuff as new parents and raver kids on ecstasy. This led Leckman to think there may be a very big connection between parenthood and OCD, believing that once upon a time in our evolution, obsessive attention to detailed cleaning and hygiene rituals marked the difference between infants that survived childhood diseases and ones who didn't. Compulsive rituals don't seem so weird when they involve constantly circling the camp site to make sure there are no wolves coming to eat the children.... Apparently succeeding in the human species isn't a matter of being crazy or not crazy, but having just the right amount of craziness.”
-- Robert Evans and Philip Moon, Cracked.com

Commonplace Book: Hypocrisy and the Culture War, Rabbits, "Original Intent" and the Constitution, and Ye Ancient Dogge of Malta

“Of all wars, only culture wars offer the hope of sheer, unadulterated hilarity. Sex and hypocrisy were staples of farce long before America became a nation, and they never go out of style.”
(Frank Rich)

***

"We Maltese — we bichon maltais, the Roman Ladies' Dog, the old spaniel gentle, the Maltese lion dog, or Maltese terrier – are suffered to know ourselves to be the aristocrats of the canine world."
(from the novel # The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of his friend Marilyn Monroeby Andrew O'Hagan)

***

“[T]he constitutional doctrine of original intent has always struck most historians of the founding era as rather bizarre. ... The doctrine of original intent rests on a set of implicit assumptions about the framers as a breed apart, momentarily allowed access to a set of timeless and transcendent truths ...



... [T]he doctrine requires you to believe that the "miracle at Philadelphia" was a uniquely omniscient occasion when 55 mere mortals were permitted a glimpse of the eternal verities and then embalmed their insights in the document. Any professional historian proposing such an interpretation today would be laughed off the stage.”
(Joseph J. Ellis, “Immaculate Misconception and the Supreme Court”, The Washington Post)


***

"Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did beyond amendment....
Let us follow no such examples, nor weakly believe that one generation is not as capable of taking care of itself, and of ordering its own affairs . . . Each generation is as independent of the one preceding, as that was of all which had gone before."
(T. Jefferson, in a letter to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816)

***

“Rabbits are clever about manipulating humans and can seem stubborn about learning how to live in our homes. It helps to see things through rabbit eyes: a wire is root that needs trimming, a piece of furniture is a tree, a household is a rabbit warren with strict hierarchy and rules.

Behavior
Rubbing chin on things, such as houseplants, priceless armoires, Italian leather shoes.

What it means
A great misconception: It does NOT mean marking territory. It is a rabbit custom, like saying grace before a meal. In short, "One day I will eat you."

What you should do
Give your bunny more sticks and branches, keep your stuff off the floor, and kiss the antiques goodbye.”

(from Rabbit Language , or: "Are you going to eat that?" by Carolyn Crampton)

Commonplace Book, April: Sensitive Redheads, Richard Pryor, What Wonder Woman Represents and Too Much Twee in Literature

“He had seen society in its three great phases—Obedience, Struggle and Revolt... and he hesitated in his choice. Obedience was dull, Revolt impossible, Struggle hazardous.”
(Balzac, Pere Goriot)

“He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.”
(William Drummond, some old Scotsman)

“Something nice this way comes. It begins with the awful—whether it’s as enormous as the Holocaust or the World Trade Center or as intimate as family dysfunction or the death of a loved one—and then finds comfort. None of this Anna on the tracks, Emma in the dumps, or depressing Father Zosima’s corpse smells stuff; that’s sooo 19th century. ...
Instead, let’s just book passage on a gentle, healing voyage. Sound trite? It is, but it’s apparently the literature of our time as exemplified by Jonathan Safran Foer, Myla Goldberg, Nicole Krauss, and Dave Eggers, along with everything McSweeney’s, the magazine founded by Eggers.”
(Melvin Jules Bukiet , ”Wonder Bread” in The American Scholar)


“In American popular culture, the private detective is a unique heroic figure: champion of last resort for the vulnerable client, a knight-errant for hire, bringing rough or poetic justice to cases unserved by more official powers that be. [Robert Parker] wrote dialogue that at once informed, amused and gave a sense of character; and he conjured characters a reader wanted to spend more time with—especially Spenser, a fixed point in a footloose world, take him or leave him. A pragmatist whose ethics were situational. A tough and decent type who did what needed to be done in the service of a moral cause, affirming the worth of the individual regardless of race, sexual orientation, social status, age or occupation. He made timeless points that need to be remade every generation, in a society ever able to find ways to betray the public and private trust.”
(Obituary by Tom Nolan in the Wall Street Journal)




“As Juke [on a 1974 Lily Tomlin special], Richard Pryor gave one of his relatively few great performances in a project that he had not written or directed. He made use of the poignancy that marks all of his great comedic and dramatic performances, and of the vulnerability—the pathos cradling his sharp wit—that had seduced people into loving him in the first place.... The concert films are excellent examples of what the Village Voice critic Carrie Rickey once described as Pryor’s ability to “scare us into laughing at his demons—our demons—exorcising them through mass hyperventilation.”... Taken together, the concert films show the full panorama of Pryor’s moods: brilliant, boring, insecure, demanding, misogynist, racist, playful, and utterly empathetic.... Pryor embodied the voice of injured humanity. A satirist of his own experience, he revealed what could be considered family secrets—secrets about his past, and about blacks in general, and about his relationship to the black and white worlds he did and did not belong to.”
(Hilton Als profile of Richard Pryor in The New Yorker



“So Wonder Woman counts among one of the very few superhero genre characters that are legitimately a gift to young women. She is not a character to be marketed to young men. Marston assured the company the boys would read as well, but she's custom designed for young women. For god's sake, she's a princess who talks to animals. Her entire supporting cast, with the exception of one blockheaded love interest, was women. She is a character made with little girls in mind.
The bondage urban legend always struck me as a mean-spirited attempt to rob us of that. To strip her of all innocent and generous beginnings in favor of something uber-sexualized. To say that we weren't worth our own superhero princess, she had to be secretly aimed at young men. That she was really meant for boys. It's a way to steal Wonder Woman, and claim she wasn't ever stolen.
To be honest, that's why I've always felt they had trouble with her. She is a female-oriented character that they keep marketing to a widely male audience.” (Ragnell on her blog Written World”



“I think that's a big part of it — she COULD tear someone's head off, she COULD destroy a country if she chose. But she would consider that a failure as a warrior for peace. The death of an enemy is not victory to her. I love that stuff. I think it's a far better blueprint for the future than most of the action hero stuff out there right now.
But there are a million reasons. I love that she's the DC universe's premiere badass. I love that she was giving messages of the power of womanhood in the 40's, you know, decades before Buffy or Xena or Lara Croft. And there's a part of me that loves the pegasi and the princess-ness of it all, and all the trappings of Paradise Island. She's just brilliantly conceived. And I like her with a dry sense of humor, while we're at it. The sisterhood aspect of the Amazons is tremendously compelling to me. Who wouldn't love to have that many sisters who loved you AND carried bladed weapons?”
(Gail Simone, current writer on Wonder Wonan, in an interview at After Ellen)


“If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who deal likewise with their fellow men.”
(Saint Francis)

“The largest single survey to date of serial killers found: 36 percent admitted to committing animal cruelty as children; 46 percent admitted to committing animal cruelty as adolescents; 36 percent admitted to committing animal cruelty as adults.”
(Human Society of the United States)

“When John Paul II appointed Cardinal Ratzinger head of the department that watches over theological orthodoxy (the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, or CDF), it was in full confidence that he would curb the proliferating dissidents, not least the liberation theologians of South America who argued that sin could often mean not wrongdoing by individual moral agents, but the injustice of social and political structures leading to poverty and oppression. He soon earned himself the sobriquet "the Pope's Rottweiler". Theologians guilty of unorthodoxy were summoned to his inquisitorial office: some were deprived of their teaching licences, and others were excommunicated.
... Benedict... continues to think of the abuse as a spiritual lapse, rather than a psychological, social and criminal problem. Priestly pedophile abuse, in his view, is a failure of priesthood, a failure of holiness, asceticism and piety. ... The cause of the crisis, he said, had been secularism, and the temptations secularism has posed to the holiness of priests. The innocent majority of priests in Ireland... are infuriated by Benedict's implied exculpation of the Vatican and the papacy.”
(John Cornwell in The New Statesman)


“Scientists suspect that small inherited predispositions are either enhanced or suppressed by experience, and computer models show that tiny discrepancies at the start can become enormous over time, through feedback loopings of positive reinforcement. Evidence is also emerging that certain physical setpoints affect temperament globally. Notable among such setpoints is the relative rate at which one’s nervous system processes sensory information.
“There are low information processors who don’t attend much to their environment and bulldoze through life,” said David Sloan Wilson of the State University of New York at Binghamton. “Then there are the sensitive ones who are always taking things in, which can be good because information is valuable, but it can also be overwhelming.”
Studies of highly sensitive people show their delicacy is “domain general,” Dr. Wilson said. Not only are they “exceptionally moved by symphonies” and find graphic depictions of violence “too hard to bear,” but they are also sensitive to drugs like caffeine, and their skin is easily irritated by the wrong soap, sunscreen and fabric. Highly sensitive pigs squeal a lot; highly sensitive people feel a lot. Sure, it’s painful at times. But just switch on some Bach and I’ll squeal my thanks for thin skin.”
(Natalie Angierin The New York Times)



“Most TV comics trade in brand-name jokes or jokes that play off physical stereotypes. They don’t question their culture so much as pander to its insatiable hunger for distraction. But [Bill] Hicks’ mischievous flights of fantasy bring the audience back to reality with a thump. Hicks is a kind of ventriloquist of his contradictory nature, letting voices and sound effects act out both his angst and his appetites.... He started writing and performing his jokes as an alienated thirteen-year-old in Houston in 1975, and, by his own count, for the last five years he has been performing about two hundred and sixty-five days a year, sometimes doing as many as three two-hour gigs a night. Few contemporary comics or actors have such an opportunity to get their education in public.”
(Profile of the late Bill Hicks by John Lahr in The New Yorker)

Commonplace Book: The Music of O'Carolan, What Art Students Really Need, Bullies, the Perils of "Self Esteem" and Reckless Women

"This next one's called 'Fanny Power'. Fanny was the daughter of O'Carolan's patron and he wrote this piece for her wedding. I wanted you to hear it because I didn't want you to think there was only one perfect melody in the world."
.... Sarah was surprised to see that his eyes were moist. "She must have been very beautiful."
He looked at her. "Who?" And his voice was suddenly wary.
"Why, Fanny." Sarah sighed. "Three is magic in the old man's music, if it can move us to tears for the beauty of a woman two centuries dead."
"Ah, yes, Fanny." There was a distant look in Red's eyes and she sensed the sadness in his voice. "I suppose she was. Beautiful, that is. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, you know; and O'Carolan was blind."
(In the Country of the Blind by Michael Flynn)



“We live in a country where a black who wants to help poor people buy insurance is regularly referred to as a Nazi, so I guess anything is possible.”
(Comment on Wonkette)



“For a student, creativity should be the last lesson. If it’s there, let it be, but for the moment learn—look—absorb—study.... A discipline achieved early on should be as automatic as breathing or talking. And the discipline of drawing is the finest. A savage two or three years is imperative. No creativity. Drawing forces you to look and an artist needs to do that more than anything short of thinking... Then give yourself a break and waste a year in total anarchy. ... Is it not possible for art schools to re-establish themselves as protectors of values? ... Purity of intention should be a guiding maxim. The moment we decide to enter an art school, we should feel that we have taken our Hippocratic oath to see it through. We are doctors of the spirit—and if an operation is necessary, then it must be performed. “ (Ralph Steadman, Comics Journal interview)



“The Chicago pol in the Oval has had to learn one of the great American truths: You’ve got to slap the bully in the face.”
(Maureen Dowd)

“Sex diarist Belle de Jour has claimed that nothing in her background had any bearing on her decision to become a prostitute. On her website her father's recent public admission that he'd slept with dozens of prostitutes during her adolescence was denied any importance. The facts were not disputed. She just doesn't want anyone thinking they impaired her ability to freely choose sexual slavery, à la Susan Street, while still calling the shots. This belief has made women reckless. Belle's assertion in one of her memoirs that she became a prostitute because she "couldn't remember the reasons not to" suggest that she has forgotten, or more likely repressed, the physical and psychological risks. Paradoxically, this generation of women is more vulnerable than any of its forbears. Women's refusal to acknowledge any weakness has made them easy prey.”
(Charlotte Raven, “How the New Feminism Went Wrong”)

“... Although it is ironic that for a guy [David Frum] who was wrong on pretty much everything and still kept his job, the one time the guy gets fired, it is because he is right.”
(Comment by “Manchu Candidate” on David Frum’s resignation from the American Enterprise Institute, at Wonkette)



“One has only to go into a prison, or at least a prison of the kind in which I used to work, to see the most revoltingly high self-esteem among a group of people (the young thugs) who had brought nothing but misery to those around them, largely because they conceived of themselves as so important that they could do no wrong. “
(Theodore Dalrymple)

Commonplace Book of Readings, July 2009

“There are some people with a vested interest in the world as it is, because that’s the world they have power over.” -- Alan Moore
***
“People who read Empire of the Sun have often said to me, ‘What a strange life, how unusual,’ and I say to them, actually, the life I led in Shanghai before and during the Second World War was not strange; it wasn’t unusual. The majority of the people on this planet today and for most of this century and previous centuries have always lived lives much closer to the way I lived than to, say, the comfortable suburbs of Western Europe and North America. It is here where I live today that is very strange by the world’s standards. Civil war, famine, flood, drought, poverty, disease are the norms of human experience.” -- J.G. Ballard in a BBC interview.
***
“Conservatives are only funny when they don’t mean to be. How many fucking times do we have to say this?”
-- Comment by “Aquannissiwamissoo” on Wonkette
***

“This reflection on another girl’s morality is interesting, because however much our heroine revels in her naughtiness—and she does revel—she is at pains to tell us that she is not promiscuous like the other girls. Even in this genre, which is almost explicitly about how we shouldn’t judge the naked girl on the stage, we find the same judgment, the same innate, catty, female dividing of the world into sluts and non-sluts, that takes place in the rest of the world.” – Katie Roiphe on stripper’s memoirs in Double-X
***
“Popular artists, then faced with the corporate control of the popular media, have a choice: like Harvey Pekar, they can say exactly what they think about the times in which we live and thus remain at the margins of culture, at best only a cult figure, or, like Letterman, they can swallow their reservations and move to the spot-lit center of the culture, while remaining at the margins of the discourse about what is really going on.”
-- James Hynes, In These Times
***
“I had, by then, abandoned all pretence of work… I could not write or even, by that time, read. Words made no sense to me. I made no sense to me so how could I make sense to anyone else? If journalism is about anything, it is about making sense of the world in which we live. Words, sense, the very reason that kept me moored and anchored to the world had abandoned me. I was lost and that loss was catastrophic. Who are you when you are no longer who you are? What do you do with a self that is no longer your self? If you don’t know who you are, how do you go on living? If you cannot live as yourself, who and what is it that you are living for?” -- Sally Brampton, Shoot the Damn Dog
***
“You bid me rouse myself. Go, bid a man paralytic in both arms rub them briskly together, and that will cure him. Alas! That I cannot move my arms is my complaint.” – Coleridge, in a letter on writer’s block, 1804.
***
“Just how bad will August be, because of the Republicans and various anti-reform special interest groups? Imagine the Brooks Brothers Riot, but happening every day, across the country, for the entire month. Just health insurance employees being dispatched in plainclothes to town halls, so as to shout nonsense at congressmen and senators trying to inform their constituents about health care reform. CALLING IT NOW: Most obnoxious month in American history! Maybe.” – Wonkette, week of August 1st, 2009
***
“The experience of the poor… comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks.” – Barbara Ehrenreich
***
“It’s the sinking sensation that the American game is rigged — that, as the president typically put it a month after his inauguration, the system is in hock to “the interests of powerful lobbyists or the wealthiest few” who have “run Washington far too long.” …. What disturbs Americans of all ideological persuasions is the fear that almost everything, not just government, is fixed or manipulated by some powerful hidden hand, from commercial transactions as trivial as the sales of prime concert tickets to cultural forces as pervasive as the news media. It’s a cynicism confirmed almost daily by events.” -- Frank Rich, The New York Times
***
“A growing body of research shows that people with red hair need larger doses of anesthesia and often are resistant to local pain blockers like Novocaine…. Researchers believe redheads are more sensitive to pain because of a mutation in a gene that affects hair color. In people with brown, black and blond hair, the gene, for the melanocortin-1 receptor, produces melanin. But a mutation in the MC1R gene results in the production of a substance called pheomelanin that results in red hair and fair skin. The MC1R gene belongs to a family of receptors that include pain receptors in the brain, and as a result, a mutation in the gene appears to influence the body’s sensitivity to pain. A 2004 study showed that redheads require, on average, about 20 percent more general anesthesia than people with dark hair or blond coloring. And in 2005, researchers found that redheads are more resistant to the effects of local anesthesia, such as the numbing drugs used by dentists. In the latest study, the researchers tested for the MC1R gene variant, finding it in 65 of 67 redheads and in 20 of 77 people with brown or black hair.” – Tara Parker Pope, The New York Times
***
In the political jargon of those days, the word ‘intellectual’ was an insult. It indicated someone who did not understand life and was cut off from the people…. The invasion of Bohemia by the Russian army, whose occupation of the country had affected everything, had been for her a signal of a new life, out of the ordinary. She saw that people who ranked above her (and everyone ranked above her) were being deprived, on the slightest allegation, of their powers, their positions, their jobs, and their bread, and that excited her; she started to denounce people herself.
"So why is she still a gatekeeper? Why wasn't she promoted?"
The mechanic smiled. "She can't count to ten. They can't find another job for her. All they can do is let her go on denouncing people. For her, that's a promotion!" ….
The mechanic leaned over the engine again and said: "In Wenceslaus Square, in Prague, a guy is throwing up. Another guy comes up to him, pulls a long face, shakes his head, and says: 'I know just what you mean.'”
-- Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

What Song the Superman Sang: Commonplace Book of Quotations for February 2009

"Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
- Alan Moore

“I always offend someone by asserting that the reason the death of a pet is worse than the death of a human is that you have mixed feelings about all people.”
-- Dick Cavett

"I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies, and -- to return to my first instance -- toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable… At any rate, Spring is here, even in London N.1, and they can’t stop you enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time I have stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can’t. So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or holiday camp, Spring is still Spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it."
-- Orwell

“This town [Washington,DC] talks to itself and whips itself into a frenzy with its own theories that are completely at odds with what the rest of America is thinking.”
– David Axelrod


-- image by Sleestak, for his blog Lady, That's My Skull


“Faith is at best morally neutral, and at worst a vile mental distortion. Our habits are to respect people of faith, but I think we’ve been forced to question those habits. The powers of sweet reason look a lot more attractive post-9/11 than the beckonings of faith, and I no longer put them on equal scales.”
-- Ian McEwan, profile in The New Yorker


“The search for an impartial and neutral tool to mitigate the disruptive effect of factionalism was an important feature of political life in Italian city republics. As Waley (1991) maintains, the political scene in medieval Italy was characterized by factionalism fueled by intense competition for political office. The citizens were driven by an ardent desire to obtain the "honors and benefits" of office (Manin 1995). To overcome factional strife, most Italian communes adopted the institution of podesta, a foreigner endowed with judicial and administrative powers. The podesta was usually hired for a year and played the role of military leader, judge, and administrator. An important attribute of the podesta was that he had to be a foreigner so that he could be neutral to the internal "discords and conspiracies"
-- via Steve Clemons, The Washington Note

“The aim of literature is the creation of a small object covered with fur which breaks your heart.”
-- Donald Barthelme

"I’m confused now, because I thought Lindsey Graham was DC’s official angry chimp."
-- comment by Sassette on the "dead chimp cartoon" controversy at Wonkette


"In Final Crisis 7, Superman finally kills Darkseid [by singing a song into the newly constructed Miracle Machine. Morrison doesn't let the reader know exactly what song Superman sings, but instead leaves it up to the reader to fill in this particular gap."
-- Meme explained in Dr. K's 100-Page Super Spectacular Blog, with links to other examples. (For the record, it is the opinion of this writer that this song would only lengthen Darkseid's reign.)

Commonplace Book: Quotations, January 2009

In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
– Albert Camus

***
Jimmy Olsen=me. And we all have signal watches
-- unidentified comic fan, watching the inauguration

***
Friendships, like marriages, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable.
— John D. MacDonald

***
It may dash your hopes for that nice warm feeling called Schadenfreude, but the Masters of the Universe are smarter than the people they left behind at the investment banks. Their hedge funds have blown up here and there, but unlike the investment banks, they are still very much in business. They have hurriedly pulled themselves into defensive positions inside their shells, like turtles. Their Armageddon, if any, will not come for two more days, which is to say, Tuesday, Sept. 30. Most hedge funds open up a crack on Sept. 30, Dec. 31, March 31 and June 30 to give investors the chance to “redeem” their investments, meaning take their money out.
-- Tom Wolfe

***
Bill Clinton is brooding in his hotel suite at Brown Palace Hotel, like the outcast Grendel lurking on the outskirts of the town where young Beowulf lived.
-- Maureem Dowd

***
“In this issue, Hellboy bashes in a Hillbilly Devil’s face with a consecrated shovel. Goddamn I love comic books.”
-- Chris Sims



***
"The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work."
- Emile Zola

***
“One could argue that the key Al Qaeda training for 9/11 occurred not in the Taliban’s Afghanistan but in Jeb Bush’s Florida. And in terms of terrorist planning, 9/11 would have been better avoided with an occupation of Hamburg, where most of the essential plotting for the attack occurred.”
-- Bartle Breese Bull, NY Times

***

“There go the people. I must follow them. I am their leader.”
-- Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, 1848

***
Depression and schizophrenia are diseases that distort reality, and cause great suffering in the process. Depression is a great liar. You are not a failure. You are not worthless. You are not unloved. You have been happy in the past, though you can’t remember it, and you will be happy in the future, though you cannot remember it.

-- Dick Cavett

***
“I think we’ve remained fixed on 1968 because it feels like where we missed our turn and went down the wrong road… And on some level, I think we blamed everything that went bad after that on those two deaths. Just before he was assassinated, Bobby Kennedy was asked when he thought the country would be ready to elect a black president. He said, “Forty years. 2008.” RFK was right on the nose. Barack Obama is not Martin Luther King, and he’s not Bobby Kennedy, but you’d have to be emotionally tone-deaf to miss the fact that he reminds boomers of both of those fallen leaders. That had to be part of the reason that this election created such elation in the population. It felt as if we were going back to that missed turn, and starting down the right road at last.

-- Bill Flanagan, CBS Sunday Morning

Robert Francis Kennedy, 1925-1968

Some unfinished thoughts, for an unfinished life that ended when I was almost 13. My father was making breakfast when the news came over the radio.
I don't know much, and the more I learn the dumber I get (or at least, the more cognizant of my own ignorance), but one of the things I do know is that humanity is always in a race between creation and destruction. When Sirhan Sirhan, or whoever, resolved that Robert Kennedy must die, it was for nonsensical reasons, a pact with chaos. I'm not Manichean enough to declare this a war between good and evil, nor Freudian enough to call it Thanatos and Eros, or speculate on the existence of a "death wish" or "life force".
I've been around long enough to recognize ambiguity, to understand that no one is a villain in their own eyes, not even Hitler or Stalin. Indeed, their murderousness might be due in part to seeing themselves as repositories of virtue, or, in Stalin or Pol Pot's case, simply not caring. T, H. White called it "the awful dream of Genghis Khan".
One step forward, two steps back, some build and others work twice as hard to destroy. It's a tragedy that we build these hopeful sandcastles, that can be so quickly knocked down by bullies. The answer, I suppose, would be to build a society or culture that's not so easily torn down.
But that requires certainty, something Hamlet lacks, but Anne Coulter posseses in great measure, until as Yeats says, "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity."
One of my bedside books is a collection from Robert Kennedy's journals, commonplace book, and speeches put together by his son Max: Make Gentle the Life of This World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy. There's a lot of Camus, and the Greeks that Robert Kennedy discovered after the death of his second brother:
"I feel rather like Augustine did before becoming a Christian when he said, 'I tried to find the source of evil and I got nowhere'" Camus says. I think of that scene in Angel when Angel believes he is about to confront "the source of evil", the Devil himself-- and instead, the magic elevator drops him off back on the street, surrounded by humanity. Humanity doesn't change its ways as easily as a dragon, and the reformer would have to cure the patient without killing him.
Some people expect this struggle to be linear, to do a job and be done with it, slay the dragon, win the Cold War, declare an "end to history" like Francis Fukyama said after the collapse of the Soviet system. But our struggles against destruction are circular, like changing diapers or washing dishes, and we have to get up and do it again. A priest who fed the hungry a la Mother Theresa to an interviewer that the worst part about his job was that it was boring.
We lost our way when the pivotal figures in the social justice movement were so violently taken out, as when the Gracchi brothers in republican Rome were killed in the street for advancing reform. The fear today is that Obama will be killed as well, and society will collapse back into irony, indifference and opportunism as it did in 1968. Maybe our model ought to be someone like Tony Benn, the British reformer who keeps chipping away at the boulders.
"Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from becoming a world where children are tortured," Camus goes on. "But we can reduce the number of tortured children."

Commonplace Book: CURRENT READING

"I think the pace of life is pretty fast-- and art and food and clothing and cars are all disposable and I think it manifests a type of fear of beauty and of emotional intimacy."
--K.D. Lang

***
“"McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles* from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they (the missiles) get to the ground? He doesn't know.”
 Sen. Jay Rockefeller

[* They didn’t have laser-guided missiles when McCain was dropping bombs; leave it to a registered Democrat to obscure a valid moral point by screwing up a detail for the opposition to focus on. Shades of Dan Rather’s last case! ]
***

“What an outrage! [Obama’s comment that Pennsylvanians are “bitter”. ] Next thing you know, Obama is going to tell us that poor inner city blacks are black, poor and live in inner cities - or that outsourcing jobs to India is leading to the outsourcing of jobs to India.”
-- comment on Wonkette by Johnny Zhivago’s Cat
***
The Belgrade home of Radivoje Lajic has been hit by meteorites five times since last November.
"I am obviously being targeted by extraterrestrials. I don't know what I have done to annoy them but there is no other explanation that makes sense. The chance of being hit by a meteorite is so small that getting hit five times has to be deliberate." The first meteorite fell on his house in November last year and since then a further four have smashed into his home. ..."I did not know what the strange-looking stones were at first but I have since had them all confirmed as meteorites by experts at Belgrade University.

***

The United Nations also conducted a worldwide survey:
"Would you please give your opinion about solutions to the
food shortage in the rest of the world?"
The survey was a huge failure:
In Latin America, they didn't know what “please” meant ...
In China, they didn't know what “opinion” meant ...
In the Middle East, they didn't know what “solution” meant ...
In Europe, they didn't know what “shortage” meant ...
In Africa, they didn't know what “food” meant ...
In the United States, they didn't know what the "rest of the world" meant...
-- posted by “Darehead” to Wonkette comments
***

“McCain's emergency appeal to boys who are more afraid of losing than anything else in the world speaks to every clown who ever got in a fist fight at a slow-pitch softball game. The United States has already lost a lot more than a war it never should have started in the first place. Thanks to America's growing police state, we have lost our civil liberties. Thanks to America's practices of torture, illegal detention and extraordinary rendition, America has lost whatever good name it had in the world. Thanks to America's two-term fascist moron president, America has become an international punch-line. Thanks to the low, low prices of politicians, the American government has become a subsidiary of heartless, bloodless corporate scum. And thanks to that, the American military has become Hessians in service of that scum. Under the phony cover of "globalization" America's economic backbone has been filleted and shipped in sharp shards for use in impaling peasant populi around the world. This country is broke, its infrastructure is busted and its health in the exact same condition as the ethics of the insurance and pharmaceutical racketeers who value profiteering more than life. Why exactly should I give a shit WHEN we officially lose a war that was a lost cause the second it became a viable option?
-- Barry Crimmens
***
“There are many, many Christians who practice Buddhism and they become better and better Christians all the time.”

--Thich Nhat Hahn
***

“In 1961, a young African-American man, after hearing President John F. Kennedy's challenge to, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,’ gave up his student deferment, left college in Virginia and voluntarily joined the Marines. In 1963, this man, having completed his two years of service in the Marines, volunteered again to become a Navy corpsman. (They provide medical assistance to the Marines as well as to Navy personnel.)
The man did so well in corpsman school that he was the valedictorian and became a cardiopulmonary technician. Not surprisingly, he was assigned to the Navy's premier medical facility, Bethesda Naval Hospital, as a member of the commander in chief's medical team, and helped care for President Lyndon B. Johnson after his 1966 surgery. For his service on the team, which he left in 1967, the White House awarded him three letters of commendation. What is even more remarkable is that this man entered the Marines and Navy not many years after the two branches began to become integrated.
While this young man was serving six years on active duty, Vice President Dick Cheney, who was born the same year as the Marine/sailor, received five deferments, four for being an undergraduate and graduate student and one for being a prospective father. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, both five years younger than the African-American youth, used their student deferments to stay in college until 1968. Both then avoided going on active duty through family connections...
After leaving the service of his country, the young African-American finished his final year of college, entered the seminary, was ordained as a minister, and eventually became pastor of a large church in one of America's biggest cities. This man is Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the retiring pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, who has been in the news for comments he made over the last three decades.”
-- Lawrence Korb
***

"A brass unicorn has been catapulted across a London street and impaled an eminent surgeon! Words fail me, gentlemen."
-- from The Abominable Dr. Phibes, starring Vincent Price

Readings: "In the Hyborean Age, We Call That Thursday"

“[Witches] sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird’s nest or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report.”
(Malleus Malleficarum, 1547)
***
“We don’t think of ourselves as a culture in the West. We think that we somehow exist outside of time and culture. We’re the real world moving inexorably forward: Get with it or lose the train. When the truth is, we’re the anomaly. ... We think that this that this economic system or our exists out of culture, out of time, and is the inexorable wave of history when, by definition, it is simply the product of a certain set of human beings, our lineage.”
(Wade Davis)
***

***
'China will tighten its controls over foreign singers and other performers after Icelandic singer Bjork shouted "Tibet! Tibet!" at a Shanghai concert last weekend... Bjork chanted the name of the Chinese-ruled Himalayan region after performing her song "Declare Independence," which she has used in the past to promote independence movements in other places such as Kosovo.
The performance "not only broke Chinese laws and regulations and hurt the feelings of Chinese people, but also went against the professional code of an artist," the ministry said in a statement quoted by the official Xinhua news agency.'
(Reuters)
***
“The awful truth, of course, is that we’re all living in a huge conspiracy, and things are so ridiculous that we barely even think about it anymore. We entered into the Iraq war under false pretenses. Our government routinely spies on its citizens both inside and outside its borders, and runs secret courts with special rules. We torture and kill civilians in other countries because we can.
“I was surprised when I met some of Seattle’s Truth groups [Believers in alternative 9-11 conspiracies] because I was confronted by smart, sincere people with lots of information about the sad state of civil liberties and corporate control in the United States, people eager to inform other people about what’s happening to our rights and using money out of their own pockets to do it. People fighting, in other words, the single biggest sin in America: laziness. ... They could do a lot better by dropping the arguments about the melting point of steel and whether or not planes actually did hit buildings. What they already have in their hands is priceless: In just a couple of years they’ve created, from nothing, a truly democratic, highly visible grassroots framework for a new kind of peace and civil rights organization that could use that concept of “civil informationing” to bring about change.
(Paul Constant in The Stranger)

“The more I read about Socrates, the less I wonder that they poisoned him.”
(Lord Macaulay)

“It will come as a surprise to many people that there are rules in politics. Most of those rules are unwritten and are based on common understandings, acceptable practices, and the best interest of the political party a candidate seeks to lead. One of those rules is this: Do not provide ammunition to the opposition party that can be used to destroy your party's nominee. This is a hyper-truth where the presidential contest is concerned.
“By saying that only she and John McCain are qualified to lead the country, particularly in times of crisis, Hillary Clinton has broken that rule, severely damaged the Democratic candidate who may well be the party's nominee, and, perhaps most ominously, revealed the unlimited lengths to which she will go to achieve power. She has essentially said that the Democratic party deserves to lose unless it nominates her.
(Gary Hart)
***
“I'm not really a horror reader. I don't really love roller coasters and things that make me queasy, and I particularly dislike gore. ... But—you knew there was a "but" coming—I've always had a weakness for ghost stories. I'm not sure why; something about the attenuated cry of the long dead, something about the loss, and the possibility of justice, or at least the emergence of truth, strikes a chord in me. There's something ineluctably human about ghosts.”
(Michelle West)
***
“In Buckley’s world, gifts of intellect and power were to be used as bludgeons against the less gifted and powerless. For all his cunning charm, Buckley’s was a cynical view of the human condition, its practicality based on the commonest greed and fear. Alas, few truly rigorous minds ever had the chance to take on Buckley in public, though he was ultimately oblivious to argument. Still I wonder if he ever regretted that his intellectual defense of selfishness became the mindless thuggery of the current conservative movement?”
(blog comment by Ric Williams)
***
“Germany, Japan, and the USSR were modern industrial nation-states that posed direct, tangible, and sustainable military threats to the survival of the United States. The Islamofascist enemy is a specious conjuring of the neoconservatives that does not exist. The Islamist threat personified and led by Osama bin Laden is a direct, tangible, and enduring national-security threat to the United States, but it does not now amount to a world war, and it will not unless the neoconservatives continue to hold sway. We are fighting a war with the Islamists that is ours to lose, and at the moment we are successfully losing it because President Bush and 17 of the 19 individuals in the current crop of presidential candidates buy Podhoretz's lethal lie that the Islamists are "the latest mutation of the totalitarian threat to our civilization" and are, "like the Nazis and the Communists before them … dedicated to the destruction of the freedoms we cherish and for which Americans stand." Actually, America's war with the bin Laden-led Islamists is fueled by the impact of U.S. and Western interventionist foreign policies in the Islamic world, not, as Podhoretz claims, by "our virtues as a free and prosperous country." To the extent that America combines reduced interventionism with military action against genuine threats, we will defeat the Islamists. The increased interventionism of Podhoretz and his coterie will lead to endless war abroad and eventually between Muslim Americans and their countrymen at home – and America's defeat.”
(Michael Scheurer)
***
“So fuck the Street, Ben Bernanke; just this once, just for, like, a quarter or something. You don't have to play rough; I'm not asking you to nationalize any industries or institute land reform or anything, just give them a little scare. They chose this path, you know. They chose to worship Ayn Rand and wear those Paul Smith shirts and pay zero money down on their Hamptons summer homes and obnoxiously, whenever confronted by someone like myself at a bar, claim that the Market Solves Everything. Let the market solve this one for them.”
( posted by “Moe” on Jezebel.com)
***
Honesty feels heady right now. For seven years, we have lived with the arid, us-against-them formulas of Bush’s menial mind, with the result that the nuanced exploration of America’s hardest subject is almost giddying. Can it be that a human being, like Wright, or like Obama’s grandmother, is actually inhabited by ambiguities? Can an inquiring mind actually explore the half-shades of truth?
Yes. It. Can. The unimaginable South African transition that Nelson Mandela made possible is a reminder that leadership matters. Words matter. The clamoring now in the United States for a presidency that uplifts rather than demeans is a reflection of the intellectual desert of the Bush years.
Hillary Clinton said in January that: “You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.” Wrong. America’s had its fill of the prosaic.
The unthinkable can come to pass. When I was a teenager, my relatives advised me to enjoy the swimming pools of Johannesburg because “next year they will be red with blood.”
But the inevitable bloodbath never came. Mandela walked out of prison and sought reconciliation, not revenge. Later Mandela would say: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”
(Roger Cohen, “Beyond America’s Original Sin”)
***
“...Conan has sex with a ghost, chops up a couple dozen mummies, and then stabs a wizard who is riding a giant red eagle and summoning Lovecraftian horrors. Back in the Hyborean age, that was pretty much just called “Thursday.””
(Chris’ Invincible Super Blog)

Commonplace Book: Quotations

“The more extraordinary the story the more ordinary the drunk.”
(old AA saying)
***
“One of my favorite concepts in anthropology is that of the polite fiction. It's something nobody believes, but we all pretend to because it makes life so much easier. My favorite example was of a Pygmy couple. Pygmy divorce involves quite literally breaking up the home: the couple tears apart their house (it's easy - the houses are made of leaves) and once it's down, the union is dissolved. One anthropologist was watching a long-married couple have a fight. It escalated until the wife threatened to leave, and the husband yelled something along the lines of ‘Fine!’ and there was nothing the wife could do but start tearing down the house. She began tearing the roof off, clearly miserable. The husband looked wretched too, but at this point neither could back down without losing face and by now the whole village was watching.
Finally, the husband called out the Pygmy equivalent of ‘You're right, honey! The roof is dirty! It'll look much better once we get those leaves washed!’ The two of them started carrying leaves down to the river, soon with the help of the whole village, and then washed and rebuilt the whole roof. When the anthropologist later discreetly asked how often one washes the roof, everyone looked at him like he was a complete doofus.”
(Ali Davis, True Porn Clerk Stories)
***
“This is an important sophisticated argument. It doesn't help to point at the amputees and say how terrible it is."
(British Tory Peter Viggers, speaking against a ban on land mines)
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“In contrast to Winston Churchill — another son with a famous father, who managed to free himself psychologically and politically from the shadow of his parent, learning from his elder’s mistakes without being governed by the need to rebel programmatically — the younger Mr. Bush, according to Mr. Weisberg, “played out his family drama in a way that had devastating consequences for his family, his country and the world.”
-- NYT review of The Bush Tragedy by Jacob Weisberg
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Will Elder, The Shadow, Mad Magazine, 1950s
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“The point of Obama's candidacy is that the damaged state of American democracy is not the fault of George W. Bush and his minions, the corporate-controlled media, the insurance industry, the oil industry, lobbyists, terrorists, illegal immigrants or Satan. The point is that this mess is our fault. We let in the serpents and liars, we exchanged shining ideals for a handful of nails and some two-by-fours, and we did it by resorting to the simplest, deepest-seated and readiest method we possess as human beings for trying to make sense of the world: through our fear.”
(Michael Chabon)
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“The Clintons... and yes, I think it's fair to refer to the plural... have ridden their centrist, sellout, fundie-crooked-accomodationist pony right into the ground. They've controlled the Democratic agenda and enabled the most egregious GOP crap. They are emblematic of a Congress that's done little to repudiate George Bush. ... The Clintons are admitted hawks, they're prudes, and they're absolutely quaint on issues like continuing the embargo on Cuba. Someone needs to surgically remove the Cold War out of their ass. They take advantage of liberals hoping that they are more "cool" in their private lives than they are in their public ones. Who cares? I don't want to "have a beer" with them; I'd rather they show their social justice colors in their public policy.”
(Susie Bright)
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Miss Sylvia, daughter of Tim and Staci

Loving a Girl with a Broken Nose

Nelson Algren was Chicago's great broken-hearted lover, and even he gave up and moved to New Jersey in the end. My buddy Wayne and I have Algren watching over our shoulders the way Turgenev looked over Tolstoy (well he didn't, but the alliteration sounded good), so in his honor here's some quotations collected by The Local Tourist:

"Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring." Nelson Algren, Newsweek, August 13, 1984

"Loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose." Nelson Algren

"Chicago is not the most corrupt American city. It's the most theatrically corrupt." Studs Terkel, 1978

"Satan (impatiently) to Newcomer: The trouble with you Chicago people is, that you think you are the best people down here; whereas you are merely the most numerous." Mark Twain "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar," 1897

"Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos." Ben Hecht

"In most places in the country, voting is looked upon as a right and a duty, but in Chicago it's a sport." Dick Gregory, 1972

"He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way." David Mamet

"Chicago is the product of modern capitalism, and, like other great commercial centers, is unfit for human habitation." Eugene Debs, 1908

"It's a 106 miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes; it's dark and we're wearing sun glasses. Hit it!" The Blues Brothers

"The Chicago Tribune has come out against syphilis. Bet you 8 to 5 syphilis will win." Anonymous, 1940