Category: A few great lines …

Second terms in the White House open the way for second thoughts.
“Grand Strategy in the Second Term“, Foreign Affairs, January/February 2005.
Gaddis is a history professor at Yale.

…culture can be understood as the order of life in which human beings construct meaning through practices of symbolic representation. If this sounds a rather dry generalization, it nevertheless allows us to make some useful distinctions. Very broadly, if we are talking about the economic we are concerned with practices by which humans produce, exchange and consume material goods; if we are discussing the political we mean practices by which power is concentrated, distributed and deployed in societies; and if we are talking culture, we mean the ways in which people make their lives, individually and collectively, meaningful by communication with each other.
– John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999 (p. 18)

America is now offering lessons in what little wisdom it takes to govern the world. Confounded in Iraq, isolated from its traditional allies, shamed over Abu Ghraib, soaked in corporate corruption and the backwash of environmental harm, sustaining an uninherited budget deficit while preparing more tax rewards for the rich, as dismissive of the unhealthy as the foreign, as terrified of the unfolding truth as of mailed anthrax, it is a society made menacing by a notion of God's great plan. America is tolerance-challenged, integrity-poor, frightened to death, and yet, beneath its patriotic hosannahs, a country in delirium before the recognition that it might have spent the last three years not only squandering the sympathy of the world but hot-housing hatreds more ferocious than those it had wished to banish for ever from the clear blue skies.
–“The God Squad” in the London Review of Books, Vol. 26 No. 18 dated 23 September 2004

The Country North of Belleville
Bush land scrub land –  
     Cashel Township and Wollaston
Elzevir McClure and Dungannon
green lands of Weslemkoon Lake
where a man might have some
     opinion of what beauty
is and none deny him
          for miles —   

Yet this is the country of defeat
where Sisyphus rolls a big stone
year after year up the ancient hills
picknicking glaciers have left strewn
with centuries' rubble
          backbreaking days
          in the sun and rain
when realization seeps slow in the mind
without grandeur or self deception in
         noble struggle
of being a fool —

A country of quiescence and still distance
a lean land
     not like the fat south
with inches of black soil on
     earth's round belly —
And where the farms are
     it's as if a man stuck
both thumbs in the in the stony earth and pulled
         it apart
          to make room
enough between the trees
for a wife
     and maybe some cows and
     room for some
of the more easily kept illusions —
And where the farms have gone back
to forest
     are only soft outlines
     shadowy differences —

Old fences drift vaguely among the trees
     a pile of moss-covered stones
gathered for some ghost purpose
has lost meaning under the meaningless sky
     — they are like cities under water
and the undulating green waves of time
     are laid on them —

This is the country of our defeat
     and yet
during the fall plowing a man
might stop and stand in a brown valley of the furrows
     and shade his eyes to watch for the same
     red patch mixed with gold
     that appears on the same
     spot in the hills
     year after year
     and grow old
plowing and plowing a ten-acre field until
the convolutions run parallel with his own brain —

And this is a country where the young
          leave quickly
unwilling to know what their fathers know
or think the words their mothers do not say —

Herschel Monteagle and Faraday
lakeland rockland and hill country
a little adjacent to where the world is
a little north of where the cities are an
sometime
we may go back there
          to the country of our defeat
Wollaston Elzevir and Dungannon
and Weslemkoon lake land
where the high townships of Cashel
          McClure and Marmora once were —
But it's been a long time since
and we must enquire the way
          of strangers —

 

(1965)

It is hardly possible to overstate the value … of placing human beings in contact with other persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar … Such communication has always been … one of the primary sources of progress.
-Quoted in Republic.com, by Cass Sunstein, p. 191

Notes from Republic.com, (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001)
Sunstein writes: “For countless people, the Internet is producing a substantial decrease in unanticipated, unchosen interactions with others.” (p. 23) He does not source this or prove this observation. I would tend not to believe this assertion.
“…the most general constitutional ideal of all: that of deliberative democracy. … a decline in common experiences and a system of individualized filtering might compromise that ideal. As a a corrective, we might build on the understandings that lie behind the notion that a free society creates a set of public forums, providing speakers' access to a diverse people, and ensuring in the process that each of us hears a wide range of speakers, spanning many topics and opinions.” (p. 26) Hence the the value of a mass media.
Sunstein may not have realized it but he provides a reason governments ought to subsidize or assist in the development of Internet infrastructure to insure that all citizens have it. He says speakers must have the right of access if they are to exercise free speech.
“There is no question that taxpayers are required to support the expressive activity that … must be permitted on the streets and the parks. Indeed, the costs that taxpayers devote to maintaining open streets and parks, from cleaning to maintenance, can be quite high. Thus the public forum represents one area of law in which the right to free speech demands a public subsidy to speakers.” (p. 28)
“If we care only about consumer sovereignty, the only question is whether consumers are getting what they want. The distinction matters for policy… If the government takes steps to increase the level of substantive debate on television or in public culture, it might well be undermining consumer sovereignty at the same time that it is promoting democratic self-government.” (p. 46)
Sunstein quotes U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis:
“… the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty …” (p. 47)
“Freedom consists not simply in preference satisfaction but also in the chance to have preferences and beleives formed under decent conditions — in the ability to have preferences formed after exposure to a sufficient amount of information, and also to an appropriately wide and diverse range of options. There can be no assurance of freedom in a system committed to the “Daily Me”. ” (p 50)
“These shared experiences provide a kind of social glue, facilitating efforts to solve shared problems, encouraging people to view one another as fellow citizens, and sometimes helping to ensure responsiveness to genuine problems and needs, even helping to identify them as such.” (p 103)
“Unrestricted consumer choices are important, sometimes very important. But they do not exhaust the idea of freedom, and they should not be equated with it.” ( p 106)
“…freedom imposes certain preconditions, ensuring not just respect for choices and the satisfaction of preferences, whatever they happen to be, but also the free formation of desires and beliefs . … We are entitled to say that the deprivation of opportunities is a deprivation of freedom — even if people have adapted to it and do not want anything more.” (p. 108)

“There aren’t any teachers until there are learners, and there aren’t any learners until something is disturbed in the student’s world.”
“Remembering Neil Postman, accessed at 0941 EDT on Mar 25 04.

Among the privileges enjoyed by rich, fat, superpower America is the power to invent public reality. Politicians and the mass media do much of the inventing for us by telling us stories which purport to unfold a relatively simple reality. As our tribal storytellers, they shape our knowledge and ignorance of the world, not only producing ideas and emotions which influence the way we lead our lives, but also leaving us dangerously unaware of the difference between stories and reality. Walter Cronkite used to sign off his nightly CBS television news show by saying “And that's the way it is . . .” I once heard Senator Eugene McCarthy say he always wanted to reply, “No, Walter, that's not the way it is at all.”

– “The Awful Truth”, The New York Review of Books Nov. 6, 2003

Pop music is nostalgic in its bones – it is part of Morrissey's gift always to have known this – and fans who adhere to its magic are in love with something that was passing as soon as it was made. True fans live in exile: that is their nature, their glory and their tragedy. People who love Elvis actually love a time when it was possible to be defined by your love of Elvis; people who continue to admire The Undertones want to believe they recognise an essence that defies the present. That is the meaning of nostalgia, and pop music carries it better than books. John Peel, the Radio One DJ, said recently that he can't hear The Undertones' song 'Teenage Kicks' without bursting into tears. Every fan knows instantly what he means, for every fan must live an awkward life, forever strung between former loves and current preoccupations, dreading the moment when he goes to Curry's and buys a karaoke machine.
Cartwheels over Broken Glass”, Reviews of two books on Morrissey, London Review of Books, March 3, 2004
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