Quotations: Politics and Society

I was under the impression that that was the purpose of the Democratic Party. That is, get someone unelectable elected once in a while to take the heat off whatever bunch of criminals has been running the country previously, allow them to wallow in adverse media coverage for four years, and then settle down to enjoy another three terms of government by vested interest.

The level of US political discussion, while never high save perhaps for the happy exception of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, is sliding precipitously towards the stunningly inane. At least the Brits have some nasty wits to redeem their Houses, while the House and Senate in YankeeLand seem filled with semi-literate goons fulminating about "Hoemoeseckshul Preevert Artists" while children are starving in the streets.

In fact, all the causes of the French Revolution were present among us too. Only we were not in France, and there was no revolution. We live in a country where causes are always seen but never effects.

By substituting dogma and abstraction for coherent narrative and historical fact, the judge [Bork] can imagine the wreck of American civilization, that once noble work of Christian conscience, having been caused by a small band of traitorous intellectuals who, on or about the same day that the Beatles first showed up in America, bludgeoned the security guards surrounding the nation's top disc jockeys, gained access to the control booths, destroyed the Perry Como records, and broacdast "All You Need Is Love" to thirty million teenagers, all of them ripe with sexual yearning, who heard the song on their portable radios and so began to dance, naked and tumescent and unashamed, on the grave of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Soon afterward barbarians sacked the universities,; atrocious liberals seized the movie studios; feminists captured the churches; nihilists took over the national parks; culture died.

[The point of view that any event preceding one's birth is irrelevant and unworthy of occupying brain cells] is a recurring lab experiment every spring here at Kent State U: "Why do people, like, have to drag all that up every frigging year? It has no meaning anymore!" In letters to the campus rag from trendy-clothed, business and fashion majors (or majorettes) with "Friends" haircuts who can actually write with Valley Girl accents.

Satire is humor sent on a moral errand, but the book-buying public is more familiar with publicity tours. As forms of literary address, we nearly always have preferred the sermon and the sales pitch, and we seldom have had much use or liking for the voices of dissent....American society turned out to be profoundly conformist, suspicious of any idea that couldn't be yoked to the wheel of progress, deeply reverent in the presence of wealth. Wit was predictably disastrous, and the ambitious clerk or college man soon learned that in the troubled sea of worldly affairs one sinks by levity and rises by gravity.

Everyone who is vain, dull, peevish, and sexually frustrated dreams of legislating his impotence.