“The extraordinarily wide dissemination of the perversions forces us to suppose that the disposition to perversion is itself of no great rarity but must form a part of what passes as the normal constitution.” — Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (ed. Gay)
“Foreign policy is not a game of Risk. Great nations achieve lasting influence and security not by bloody gambits but through economic growth, scientific innovation, military deterrence, and the power of ideas.” – Steve Coll, “Remote Control”
“The expectation that cats can be made to change their nature, like wayward teens in a Scared Straight course, is a new development in feline-human relations. Humans bred dogs to be loyal and companionate; cats domesticated themselves. Biologists call them ‘commensal domesticates,’ meaning that they can live with humans, and yet, unlike most other domesticated species, they can revert at any time to feral status. What you glean from the general feline vibe is evolutionary truth: cats can take us or leave us.” — Ariel Levy, “Living-Room Leopards”
“When I set myself the task of bringing to light what human beings keep hidden within them, not by the compelling power of hypnosis, but by observing what they say and what they show, I thought the task was a harder one than it really is. He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.” – Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (‘Dora’)” (ed. Gay)
“The point of playing games is to confront and accept our inadequacies, a comforting boilerplate that makes it easier to rationalize the cruelty of the way we are slotted into value-based roles in the world. You’re not as good as this person so you get less than them. You’re better so you get more. When playing against other people, this makes direct sense, but when play is computerized, this emotional mandate becomes masochism, a perverse mewling for the rack to be tightened to the point where it becomes intolerable, and once released, one lubricates one’s emotions with the shame of not having been able to tolerate more. When Milton’s Satan wonders if Adam and Eve’s happiness is ‘Proof of their obedience and their faith,’ he is critiquing the logic of game satisfaction and our expectation that accepting punishment should signify a player’s faith and obedience to the rules. But what differentiates players from slaves? Induced by the seductions and security of the game, the player accepts that their present conditions can be improved in some way by their own actions, and if there are inadequacies in their present, they must come from their own personal flaws. Slaves recognize that they are trapped in conditions that have little to do with their personal virtue, that under such conditions, play is a deeper form of servitude, a relieving pantomime that, rather than challenging authority structures, makes them more bearable. Games torture players by regularly affirming their inadequacy, yet their structural values are reassuring, sparing us the anxiety of having to create new values out of nothing at all. The fear of failure is always comforting in that it at least dispels that ambiguity over what the distinction between good and bad should be in the first place. Being met with the resistance of punishment reminds the player there is some godlike meaning we are capable of discovering, it depends only on the player doing well enough to prove worthy of it. Before we can go in search of it, we have to accept there is something inadequate in us, which in turn depends on belief in some ideal state to which we could compare ourselves. Is this what I’m supposed to be doing? Yes, this is what you’re supposed to be doing. Don’t screw it up. I’ll try.” — Michael Thomsen, “Reign in Drool” (emphasis in original)
“My wife had opened a bottle of liqueur, on which the word ‘Ananas’ appeared and which was a gift from our friend Otto: for he has a habit of making presents on every possible occasion. It has to be hoped, I thought to myself, that some day he would find a wife to cure him of the habit. This liqueur gave off such a strong smell of fusel oil that I refused to touch it. My wife suggested our giving the bottle to the servants, but I—with even greater prudence—vetoed the suggestion, adding in a philanthropic spirit that there was no need for them to be poisoned either.” – Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (emphasis in original; ed. Gay)
“The Internet began as an unlikely collaboration between the military and academia. This fact alone explains much of its contradictory character. The military wanted to link their giant mainframe computers together to share data in order to build better bombs and rockets. They also needed a robust system, open-ended and flexible enough to be extended indefinitely but sufficiently rugged to withstand nuclear attack. The generals turned to the geeks just as they had during the Second World War. Isolated in their cozy ivory towers, the scientists wanted to share data and multitask easily. The system they created elegantly embodied their liberal ideals as well as the military’s strict requirements. It would be transparent from end to end. It was also anonymous and egalitarian, in that all data would be treated equally regardless of either source or destination. Scientists built these values into the Net’s core protocols, or agreed methods of doing things. Programs can certainly be devised to weigh, block, or trace data, but they are all additions to the protocols, not replacements. The fact is that freedom for good or evil is built into the very foundation of the Internet. Any attempt by anyone on any level to limit it in any way is an application built on top of that. And what one application can do, another can undo.” – Jay Nelson, “Can the Internet Be Tamed?” (emphasis in original)
“No people are more often wrong than those who will not allow themselves to be wrong.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“We hardly find any persons of good sense, save those who agree with us.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“If there be men whose folly has never appeared, it is because it has never been closely looked for.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“A quickness in believing evil without having sufficiently examined it, is the effect of pride and laziness. We wish to find the guilty, and we do not wish to trouble ourselves in examining the crime.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“Sovereign ability consists in knowing the value of things.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“The entire West has lost those instincts out of which institutions grow, out of which the future grows: perhaps nothing goes so much against the grain of its ‘modern spirit’ as this. One lives for today, one lives very fast—one lives very irresponsibly: it is precisely this which one calls ‘freedom’. That which makes institutions institutions is despised, hated, rejected: whenever the word ‘authority’ is so much as heard one believes oneself in danger of a new slavery.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (trans. Hollingdale; emphases in original)
“What’s been passed down from the postmodern heyday is sarcasm, cynicism, a manic ennui, suspicion of all authority, suspicion of all constraints on conduct, and a terrible penchant for ironic diagnosis of unpleasantness instead of an ambition not just to diagnose and ridicule but to redeem. You’ve got to understand that this stuff has permeated the culture. It’s become our language; we’re so in it we don’t even see that it’s one perspective, one among many possible ways of seeing. Postmodern irony’s become our environment.” — David Foster Wallace (interview with Larry McCaffery in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2)
There was only one cashier on
duty and she wasn’t
there. The manager was pissed
off and pushed the restocking
cart into one of the customers,
careful to avoid eye contact.
The automatic change dispenser
didn’t dispense any change.
The cashier arrived and told
the manager, You put it on
backwards. She unlocked her
register, rang up the customer’s
purchases, made change from
her own purse—Have a good day.
“History does not abide by traditional narrative explanations. It isn’t that narrative explanation doesn’t have its place—it is a great instrument—but uncritically examined, its assumptions about the world are, well, unlikely. Within a specific human realm, when we are busy giving meaning to human events selecting, choosing, arranging a story at a dinner party—we may be so taken with the result that we forget that another arrangement could have yielded something quite different. I am not suggesting what some have seen as an inevitable consequence of this particular mode that everything is relative; it’s much more that there are modes of explanation equally satisfactory within their own prescribed realms of discourse.” — William H. Gass (interviewed by Arthur M. Saltzman in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 1991, Vol. 11.3)
Eight dollars is the cost of admission to Greenwood Beach.
Seven dollars and a quarter is the federal minimum wage
for hourly workers under certain circumstances. The state’s
minimum is eight and a quarter. These are the wages
beneath which it is considered no worker could be justly paid,
unless that worker is a tipped employee dependent upon
the largesse of drinkers and diners sated with food
and beverage. Or unless the worker is an intern—
interns can be had for free—or a migrant farm worker,
shuffled from field to field, sleeping in a shack, drinking
tepid water from a rusty bucket—or an illegal immigrant
shoehorned two dozen to an apartment, never let out except
to be taken to the job, working sixteen hours a day
for room and board, exhausted sleep filled with American dreams.
“There comes a point of morbid mellowing and over-tenderness in the history of society at which it takes the side even of him who harms it, the criminal, and does so honestly and wholeheartedly. Punishment: that seems to it somehow unfair—certainly the idea of ‘being punished’ and ‘having to punish’ is unpleasant to it, makes it afraid. ‘Is it not enough to render him harmless? why punish him as well? To administer punishment is itself dreadful’—with this question herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its utmost conclusion.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (trans. Hollingdale; emphasis in original)
There’s a party in the alleyway every night.
It’s August, it’s hot, what’re you going to do?
Sit in your stuffy apartment, puny wall-unit
wheezing a lie of cool, refreshing air?
Watch some fast-food brain shit on the box?
Drink thin beer from cheap cans, scream at the wife
who screams at the boy while the baby
screams at everyone? Fuck that. Get your ass
downstairs and out back to the alleyway. Bring your
30-pack of cheap beer and share it around.
Bring the wife and the boy and the baby,
the neighbors are grilling burgers and dogs
and the cars are idling, their doors open
and their sound systems thumping loud.
You didn’t ask—no one has asked
but this is why I’m afraid of black people:
I’m afraid of black people
because television shows, movies,
newspapers, magazines, and popular songs
have taught me that black people
hate me and want to hurt me
because I’m white and because being white
makes me guilty both of injustices
being committed now and injustices
that hang from our nation’s history
like a stinking dead albatross around
a maddened, decrepit mariner’s neck.
And I’m afraid because
I cannot understand
what it means to be an American
and be black.
“Nothing is so infectious as example, and we never do great good or evil without producing the like.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“Does this present not belong to the mob? The mob, however, does not know what is great or small, what is straight and honest: it is innocently crooked, it always lies.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (trans. Hollingdale)
Five dollars’ admission.
All the neighbors (who can pay) are there.
Canvas folding chairs (bring your own)
line the curbside along green parkways.
Dogs crap in those parkways.
The new kids on the block
are in attendance. They are middle-aged
and are me and my wife.
We are shy but determined,
frightened of people but resolved
to make our new beginnings here.
We set our canvas chairs
on the parkway behind some of our neighbors.
Introductions are made. We are all middle-aged
(the younger ones and their children
are down the street, closer to
the inflatable fun castle and the quoits).
There is a line of buffet tables and a
griller grilling meats (burgers, dogs) on a charcoal grill.
Canned and bottled beverages (non-alcoholic)
in an ice-and-water-filled tub.
A P.A. system, a host, a raffle (my wife
wins a bottle of wine), pre-recorded music
(late 60s to early 70s, the pinnacle
of post-war American culchuh).
The music is too loud. Conversation
is difficult. Later there’s a singer
backed by two electrified guitarists.
Early on, I stepped in dog shit.
Three times went down the street
to try and scrape it off my shoe.
Even a little bit of that stuff stinks,
and there was no hiding that this
new kid needed to learn
at least one new thing.
“Books and reading, I believe, have to be understood and taught as a distinctive, embodied meditative tradition; as a rhetorically constructed deliberative verbal ordering of the world; and as a social practice through which the liberal ideal of a mutual human accountability was formulated and partially enacted. Reading as an embodied rhetorical verbal interchange and as a deliberative tradition has to be cultivated apart from the passive cognitive reception of administered entertainments and the sensationalist, discontinuous, permanent immediacy of consumer culture. The presence created by reading within book culture’s tradition of literacy must be distinguished from the immediacy created by reading that is controlled by the contemporary cyber-logic of the electronic image. The presence of reading must be distinguished formally from the immediacy of the electronic image. Print literacy as an embodied rhetorical form of cognitive and deliberative agency has to be enacted apart from a consumerist reception of information, opinion, sensation, and stimulation.” — Peter Dimock, “The Presence of Reading, Part II”
“If in fact the core of our supposedly rational society is a great vacuum, if its present arrangement precludes any contestation to the Thanatos-fueled expansion of capital, then the seizure of power by the working class becomes a necessity for the continuing survival of the species. If the myths we have ceased to believe in are being replaced by those more absurd still and equally fated to unbelief, perhaps the challenge becomes crafting better myths; more convincing myths, myths grounded in the material reality of daily life, of daily work and life in common; myths which smash the artificial divisions between us, myths which know that the past cannot be recaptured but that the future remains unwritten. Or, to invoke a word blasphemous to the relativistic mythology of our time, do we have the courage to offer the truth? Facing the imminent threat of ecological ruin and unprecedented human suffering which capitalist states are powerless to reverse, the stakes of the proletariat’s historical mission become even higher than its 19th century prophets could imagine.” — Jarrod Shanahan, “I Want to Believe”
“The appeal of conspiracy theories is simple. Whether its Lizard People, Ancient Aliens, Freemasons, Occupy’s ‘1%,’ or the poor maligned Rothschilds, the conspiratorial mind clings to the comforting notion of a world controlled by a rational agent capable of exerting its will to guide human events. Somebody is driving this thing … anybody. To the conspiratorial mind we are not alone with ourselves, left to our own devices, which can be the most terrifying prospect of all. The conspiracy fills the seeming vacuum at the center of society, the paralyzing abyss beneath our flimsy facades of order, with a reassuring rational kernel. Beneath the purported chaos of a modern world seemingly driven inexorably toward its own destruction, a secret logic hums away, unseen, yet steering with the circumspection of a protective father. In this way the conspiracy theory is a secularized monotheism which replaces our dearly departed God with an equally shadowy intelligence serving the same omniscient function. Sometimes it even lives in outer space and knows what we’re thinking.” — Jarrod Shanahan, “I Want to Believe” (ellipsis in original)
“The irony of the increasing rationalization of society toward some mythic equilibrium is the intensification of paroxysm, of violent crisis, of catastrophe on a heightening scale which it has ensured. The crises inherent in the capitalist cycle now grip the entire planet, leaving destitution in the wake of periodic booms, leaving entire regions to starve, evacuating capital from entire cities and letting them rot while the local ruling class throws up their hands. In the major developed countries, the transition from hulking welfare state apparatuses to militarized police forces maintaining order indicates the increasingly reactionary tendency of states, faced with simply containing the results of a disordered market by brute force, rather than even pretending to curb the causes of destitution and hopelessness among the poor.” — Jarrod Shanahan, “I Want to Believe”
“Since the late 18th century, and in plain sight, the entire world has been quite violently molded into one expansive international market and playground for the European bourgeoisie. Nation states have increasingly come to exist solely for the benefit of the markets which function through them, developing vast apparatuses of population management, security technologies, and militarized police forces, which serve the needs of production here and repression there.” — Jarrod Shanahan, “I Want to Believe”
“Most people’s lives are a direct reflection of the expectations of their peer group. Whoever you spend time with, that’s who you become.” – Anthony Robbins, “Get the Edge”
“Research shows, and any observant person can see, that gender variation falls on a continuum from very masculine to very feminine, and that most of us fall somewhere in between. Such labels would be rendered obsolete if we were to accept all manner of tree-climbing and truck-playing behavior in girls and doll-playing and dress-up behavior in boys as healthy explorations of self. It is the same with sex: Alfred Kinsey’s research revealed a continuum of sexual preference, from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual, with most people falling somewhere along it. Society’s intolerance of ambiguity forces us to define ourselves as straight or gay, masculine or feminine; nature abhors such dichotomies. Acceptance of this fact of human complexity, with all its wonder and fascination, would obviate the need to narrowly determine gender.” – Michael C. Quadland, “Boys and Girls”