Not to mention everything elseNot to mention everything else
“The truth about human nature is very bad news for socialism.” – William Barrett, The Truants
Winter is a-cumin’ inWinter is a-cumin’ in
“If there be no great philosophic idea, if, for the time being, mankind, instead of going through a period of growth, is going through a corresponding process of decay and decomposition from some old, fulfilled, obsolete idea, then what is the good of educating? Decay and decomposition will take their own way. It is impossible to educate for this end, impossible to teach the world how to die away from its achieved, nullified form. The autumn must take place in every individual soul, as well as in all the people, all must die, individually and socially. But education is a process of striving to a new, unanimous being, a whole organic form. But when winter has set in, when the frosts are strangling the leaves off the trees and the birds are silent knots of darkness, how can there be a unanimous movement towards a whole summer of fluorescence? There can be none of this, only submission to the death of this nature, in the winter that has come upon mankind, and a cherishing of the unknown that is unknown for many a day yet, buds that may not open till a far off season comes, when the season of death has passed away.” – D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love
Making sense of itMaking sense of it
“Symbolic expression, however forceful, leaves a space between communicator and recipient, a space for contesting, fighting back with one’s own words and images, organizing to oppose whatever action the abhorred speech may incite. Though speech may, and often does, support the structure of domination, whether by lending aid and comfort to the powerful or frightening and discouraging their targets, in leaving room for opposition it falls short of enforcing submission. For this reason the unrestrained clash of ideas, emotions, visions provides a relatively safe model – one workable even in a society marked by serious imbalances of power – of how to handle social conflict, with its attendant fear, anger, and urges to repress, through argument, persuasion, and negotiation (or at worst grim forbearance) rather than coercion. In the annals of human history, even this modest exercise in freedom is a revolutionary development; for the radical democrat it prefigures the extension of freedom to other areas of social life.” – Ellen Willis (quoted by George Scialabba in “The Trouble with Principle”)
The simple thingsThe simple things
“What we want is . . . bread for the people, rest for the people, immunity from robbery and scorn for the people, hope for them, enjoyment, equal respect and consideration, life and aspiration, instead of drudgery and despair.” – George Bernard Shaw
The truth you are allowed to tellThe truth you are allowed to tell
“Telling the truth is not just not telling lies about your enemies; it is talking straight to your friends. It means the avoidance of bad faith. What makes this so hard is the politics of solidarity, which applies quite equally on Right and Left. What solidarity politics means is that you have to stay on the same side as this or that group and that therefore you must not say anything which might embarrass that group or which could possibly be of use to its enemies. Crucially, it means observing certain necessary silences and not being right too soon.” – E. G. Johnson, Heroes and Villains
The long way downThe long way down
“America has no real alternative to continuing imperial decline: the big questions are simply how fast and how peacefully. The problem is that the arms industries will fund any and every Presidential candidate and, whoever wins, those industries will demand to be fed. It is unclear, though, whether Americans at large are willing to accept the sacrifices this may entail. As the American debt grows, the choice will become stark: paying off the debt—or, mare realistically, never paying more than the interest on the debt—will require either large tax increases, or a deep recession, or a huge inflation. The American public will vote for inflation as the least painful solution: somewhere out there in the years to come there is a giant inflation of almost Weimar proportions waiting to happen. But the banks will hate that, as will virtually all the other business interests (including the arms manufacturers) who are full voting members of the American democracy.” – E. G. Johnson, Heroes and Villains
Making America Great AgainMaking America Great Again
“Safe, simple, effective, and relatively cheap ways to increase intelligence and longevity in the American population include mounting the equivalent of the antismoking educational campaign against the high levels of fat, sugar, and salt in our national diet; encouraging physical activity, for example by forcing ourselves, through gasoline taxes and urban rezoning, to walk more, if only to get to public transportation; implementing national health insurance, or at least universal free health care for children under five; and subsidizing public radio and television. Reducing economic insecurity and environmental degradation also offers virtually unlimited opportunities for enhancing our beleaguered selves.” – George Scialabba, “Our Posthuman Future”
Not just another wordNot just another word
“What is free speech supposed to be free from? Political and legal restrictions, presumably. But commercial fraud, libel, perjury, declaiming in a stranger’s living room, and shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater are all uncontroversially restricted forms of speech, whose boundaries are nevertheless sometimes contested. Those contests are resolved—and hence the boundaries of ‘free’ speech are determined—legally and politically: not once and for all, through metaphysical discovery, but contingently and revisably, through democratic deliberation.” – George Scialabba, “There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech”
There doesn’t seem to be a shadowThere doesn’t seem to be a shadow
“The summer would be celebrated by people of every nation in the city. People marauding after work, discontented. Thugs surfing on the sides of cars, flagging. Going into the garbage cans and throwing bottles in the street. Immigrants working, forever working, watching people go by who have days off, time off, while they don’t. Trying to stay cool. Families with five young children going to Dunkin Donuts for a night out together in the air conditioning. The littered floors, the strange lone males reading the newspaper. Cabdrivers and dysfunctional individuals sitting in the window of the all-night Tropical. Messed-up guys with Puerto Rican flag hats talking to waitresses, high-fiving them, saying when do you get off? Spanish girls with Indian blood, slave blood, mopping floors at three a.m. Caribbeans saying we were brought here as slaves from India. We got together with the blacks and threw the British out. Now we listen to dub step. Let me tell you where it’s hot like fire burning. Where the party’s at. Where you can get robbed, stuck, shook, bucked and maybe fucked down on one hundred and ninth going towards Far Rockaway. Where no one’s gonna feel bad for you if you have problems. The Wenzhounese will sit outside in folding chairs in their pajamas on Cromellin Street, talking on the steps, fanning themselves in the gleaming night. The women will be pregnant and still they will be taking out the garbage, collecting bags of recycling, saving little fistfuls of money, little investments that, like children, will turn into something later. But for now, we’ll all have to deal with the heat first—all of us no matter where we’re from.” – Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life
Either way, it just goes onEither way, it just goes on
“He saw the sand going on and on across the continent. The broken palm trees and mud buildings and corrugated steel lean-tos and dead trucks and the domes and spires of the mosques. He could hear the loudspeakers wired by a man who weighed twenty pounds less and looked twenty years older and who was the same age as he was, a goat herder with missing fingers. He heard the static and the ram’s horn and the voices as they spoke together, wearing robes the same color as the landscape, kneeling together, rising together, chanting together. He could see them as if he were watching them through binoculars and the Arabian dusk was coming down. He saw the dim blue sky and smelled the sunbaked human waste and saw the dark forms of his many friends, their gear, their white eyes and very occasional smiles. He tasted the smell of burning tires, hashish, gun oil, animals, coal fire, chicken and rice and Tabasco sauce. The weight of the gear. The tearing down of the body. All the things you complained about. And the thing that was greater—the war itself. It was the one thing. You went outside the wire, and each time, either you died or you did not.” – Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life
Score’s thirty-love, loveScore’s thirty-love, love
“You can love the game, but the game loves no one.” – Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life
State of graceState of grace
“Don’t talk about it, be about it.” – Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life
It’s over hereIt’s over here
“There’s always been a story that wasn’t written, and it almost always should have been.” – Seymour M. Hersh, Chain of Command
Hitting the gymHitting the gym
“An editor is a mouse training to be a rat.” – Shirley Povich, Editor, Washington Post
It already passedIt already passed
“There are times when most cards you are dealt come up aces, when forces you cannot control—or even influence—combine to push you forward. Such a moment does not often last long.” – Michael Scheuer, Imperial Hubris
We have met the enemy and it is usWe have met the enemy and it is us
“Terror is the most dreaded weapon in the modern age and the Western media is mercilessly using it against their own people. It can add fear and helplessness to the psyche of the people of Europe and the United States. It means what the enemies of the United States cannot do, its media is doing that.” – Osama bin Laden (quoted by Michael Scheuer in Imperial Hubris)
What it’s aboutWhat it’s about
“I’ll tell you what war is about. You have got to kill people, and when you have killed enough of them they stop fighting.” – General Curtis LeMay (quoted by Michael Scheuer in Imperial Hubris)
Paranoia strikes deepParanoia strikes deep
“A small Christian subculture in the United States strongly believes in the notion of cosmic war. Believers are splintered into a number of small groups, the largest of which is the Christian Identity movement. According to Christian Identity ideology, the British are descended from ‘Aryan’ northern Israelite tribes who migrated to the British Isles in the wake of the Babylonian conquest of ancient Israel. These Aryans are the true Jews of the Bible. This self-serving myth about the genetic superiority of the British people appeared in England in the nineteenth century and quickly died out there, but not before migrating to the United States. The transplanted version took on anti-Semitic overtones, holding that contemporary Jews, who are assumed to be the descendants of the biblical Jews, are masquerading in that role and may well be the children of Eve and Satan. There are many variations on the core beliefs of the movement, which has now settled in Idaho and also has communities in the southern Midwest. Most adherents believe that mainstream Protestant churches in the United States are unwilling to confront the fraud perpetrated by the Jews, or have secretly been taken over by them. The Catholic Church is also believed to be part of this conspiracy. Identity sympathizers believe that the late nineteenth-century Czarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purports to disclose the Jewish plan for world domination, is genuine. In pursuit of their goals, the Jews have teamed up, in one or another variation of this story, with the United Nations, the federal government and the Federal Reserve Bank, the Democratic party, Freemasons, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos to thwart the quest of Aryan Christians for liberty and independence. The world is not as it seems: Aryan Christians are the true Jews; the Jews are scheming imposters; ordinary churches are in league with Satan. These convictions are intertwined with an obsession with firearms. In the perilous world inhabited by these Aryans, they will need their weapons to prevent the government from completely subjugating them and enthroning the Jews. Gun control legislation is therefore part of a larger, barely visible conspiracy to enslave white Americans.” – Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror
And the walls came downAnd the walls came down
“The scriptural emphasis on warfare has armed successive generations with powerful mental images of an embattled world. The community of the faithful is perpetually in crisis or at its edge. When a religious group believes that its identity is fundamentally threatened, it may turn to stories of apocalypse that describe the end of earthly history. In Christian apocalypses, Jesus is not the pacifist messiah of the Gospels, but a man of war. . . . In Christian and Jewish apocalyptic literature—exactly as in the Muslim literature, which is based largely on the earlier-born faiths—the reversal of fortune is a stock theme. The righteous advance from suffering under the murderous rule of a terrible beast to a restored community of believers who enjoy eternal life in the presence of God. The transforming event is the destruction of the beast, followed by the annihilation of Satan and death at the hands of a heavenly figure sent by God. . . . In times of severe social dislocation, political change, and economic upheaval, individuals overwhelmed by radical pessimism may turn to apocalyptic millenarianism. They see the signs that their tradition has identified as portents of the end of time. The tribulation they experience is interpreted as the era of cataclysms that precedes the eruption of a new order and God’s reassertion of his beneficent rule. When these individuals merge into groups and find a charismatic leader, or he finds them, they can be stirred to dramatic action intended to force the end of time and the kingdom of God.” – Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror
Yer gonna help us out, see?Yer gonna help us out, see?
“CIA officers prevailed upon an Austrian woman, Martha Schneider, a onetime resident of River Edge, New Jersey, to help them with safe houses. Schneider signed leases on apartments in Vienna and Salzberg that the CIA used in its activities from early 1969 through 1973. The agency apparently left her with broken leases and unpaid rent, for which landlords held her responsible. Schneider rejected a CIA offer of three thousand dollars to settle her claims, gained support from New Jersey legislators, and in September 1976 finally collected fifteen thousand dollars in cash from an associate general counsel of the CIA.” – John Prados, “First Freeze of the Cold War”
Another dismal political realityAnother dismal political reality
“Religious violence is typically different from any other kind of warfare—for the simple reason that for a true believer, there is no compromise about the sacred. Or, to put it in a more monotheistic key: one God, one truth. Tolerance is not an intrinsic part of any of the monotheistic religions. For some believers, the outcome of a conflict cannot be ambiguous. When the issues are sacred demands, there can be no bargaining. The believer cannot compromise on the will of God. Killing becomes an end in itself, rather than one instrument arrayed among nonlethal instruments in a bargaining process. Such believers want a lot of people dead and may not care whether a lot of people are watching, as long as God sees what has been done in His name.” – Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror
But the rich have gotten richer, that’s a startBut the rich have gotten richer, that’s a start
“Despite some success, the industrialized world has done relatively little to alleviate poverty, not just in the Arab and Muslim world, but globally. Indifference is not the full reason. In absolute terms, significant sums are given over to poverty reduction by contributors to multilateral development banks and by bilateral donors. The ineffectuality of aid programs is an equally important explanation for the persistence of poverty. Recipient countries do not have the financial, legal, and social institutions that would allow them to transform financial assistance into lasting economic gains, and donors do not know how to create these institutions. The governments receiving the aid resist the necessary structural reforms because their hold on power is often too fragile to subject their publics to the supposedly short-term pain of reform. The potential recriminations are not worth the uncertain long-term benefits.” – Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror
File under ‘R’File under ‘R’
“Reorganization is the classic technique to avoid problems that are too complex or deeply rooted to solve.” – Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror
Decline and fallDecline and fall
“History, scholars say, is written in three stages: heroic, with the narratives of great individuals and their feats; revisionist, which turns those accounts on their head; and tragic, where we see how events conspired to bring about an end beyond the reckoning of most actors of the time.” – Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror
NewsmakersNewsmakers
“There is a schizophrenia about the power of the press. At times, we still think of it as an objective bystander, narrating events—and many of its leading practitioners portray it this way. In American democracy, however, the press is part of the policy process. As Washington reporters from top newspapers and the networks know well, their personal ability to move the wheels of government equals that of almost anyone in the stone and concrete piles that line Pennsylvania and Independence Avenues. The physicist Werner Heisenberg famously noted that observation changes matter at the subatomic level; it does so every bit as much at the political level.” – Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror
Not all it’s cracked up to beNot all it’s cracked up to be
“There are few more durable illusions in American life than the omnipotent presidency. For fear of appearing weak, incumbents rarely draw attention to the minimal powers accorded them by the Constitution and established practices of American government. Their critics in Congress and the public avoid mentioning this inconvenient fact because letting the executive off the hook never serves their purposes. Yet anyone who has worked in the White House knows that the office has remarkably little real power, not only when it comes to dealing with Congress and the judiciary but also in running the vast, unwieldy contraption that is the executive branch. A President relies on the loyalty of his appointees in the agencies to overcome the inertia and ingrained predilections of civil servants and the uniform military.” – Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror
Making sense of it allMaking sense of it all
“The political and the non-political, freedom and restriction, fairness and unfairness, ideas and their consequences: these distinctions are all indispensable but contingent. They are working distinctions. We can’t do without them, on pain of intellectual and social incoherence. But what content we give them is determined by our fundamental goals and values, our deepest sense of how things are and who we are. It’s no use saying that there’s no disputing about such questions. Either we discuss them publicly or they’re settled, for public purposes, without discussion.” – George Scialabba, “Debating P.C.”
Making art safeMaking art safe
“Contemporary society, and in particular contemporary criticism, has tamed the arts, gradually deprived them of their prophetic and subversive possibilities. There’s no place in modern life for the mystical or the unpredictable; the arts have been institutionalized and are now managed by a cultural bureaucracy of scholars, critics, patrons, businessmen, and publicists. . . . The techniques of modern management are various: the blockbuster phenomenon and the star system, with their accompanying publicity machines; the centralization of public patronage; the recruitment of artists into universities.” – George Scialabba, “The Arts Without Mystery”
It’s a free countryIt’s a free country
“A four-letter word beginning with ‘f’ has tragically corrupted the minds of countless innocent Americans. I mean ‘free,’ in the expressions ‘free market’ and ‘free enterprise.’ It is a glorious word, of course, but its association with these morally neutral abstractions generally serves to obscure their often harsh and irrational consequences.” – George Scialabba, “The Market System”
All you need isAll you need is
“Literature has always been about love; the modern novel has been about love as a problem. More precisely, about love as one instance of the fundamental modern problem: autonomy, individuality, selfhood. Enacting one’s identity, living up to one’s inherited role, offered premoderns plenty of scope for literary heroism; but devising one’s identity, choosing one’s role, is a peculiarly modern difficulty. It has been the burden above all of modern women, the response to which has included several waves of feminism and a line of great novels: Wuthering Heights, Daniel Deronda, The Portrait of a Lady, The House of Mirth, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Women in Love, To the Lighthouse, The Golden Notebook, Wide Sargasso Sea, and others by Meredith, Gissing, Forster, Cather, and more. These novels show women — and men — struggling for self-knowledge, self-reliance, or self-definition against the weight of traditional expectations and dependencies. The terrain of this struggle is love-and-marriage, which is where — at least in the world in which those novels take place — most people have their deepest experiences and meet their most significant fates.” – George Scialabba, “The End of the Novel of Love”