“If you fail to feel the pain of others, you do not deserve the name of man.” – Saadi Shirazi, translated words of Bani Adam inscribed at entrance to UN headquarters.
Category: Politics
Baptism Through Drowning
Ah, the Purgists are back, though in truth, they never really leave us. It’s not even a sane argument but the dark brooding of a psychopath’s wet dream, a psychotic belief that Utopia must come at the cost of inflicting a massive amount of human suffering, degradation, and punishment. Sin, after all, must be purged, and what is more sinful than modern civilization? Of course, the suffering must be born by others, the masses, never by themselves, safe behind their ivory towers. Too many people in charge of too many things think like this. If we could purge this parasitic form of thinking from the souls of men, how much better off would we have been as a species? How many wars and injustices would have been averted, how fewer drops of innocent blood would have been spared?
Gravity’s Rainbow
“If there is something comforting–religious, if you want–about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.”
What Troubles Thee, Sir?
“Not things, but opinions about things, trouble men.”
War, What is it Good for?
War is not politics by other means. It is not the outcome of failed policy but a policy of failure itself. What is the objective? Victory? A Pyrrhic one at best. A cleansing of bloodlust? There are not enough scapegoats to sate man’s thirst. Peace? A madness and a delusion. To the victor go the spoils, clutching a worthless and dead carcass. This, alas, is your reward. No god, no country, no honor, no salvation, no freedom. War, yes. The Devil, probably.
In Cold Blood
Perhaps the strongest argument ever made against capital punishment came from a murderer.
“Those prairiebillys, they’ll vote to hang fast as pigs eat slop. Look at their eyes. I’ll be damned if I’m the only killer in the courtroom.”
Anti-Oedipus
Foucault’s preface: “Last, but not least, the major enemy, the strategic adversary is fascism. And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini – which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively – but also the fascism in us all, in our heads, and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”
“… something essential is taking place, something of extreme seriousness: the tracking down of all varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives.”
Notes on Sirk
“Perhaps no more monstrous children, outside horror films, were ever seen in Hollywood than those who interfere grotesquely with their parents’ lives in “All That Heaven Allows” and “There’s Always Tomorrow.” Sirk’s lesson has a long throw—politics motivated by a demagogic plea “for the children” is a code for reactionary moralism.” – Richard Brody
Much of American history has been dominated by the overt. reactionary moralism of the middle class. Book banning, anti-pornography, abortion restrictions, etc. – all sold as necessary draconian measures to protect the virtue of children. But the only virtue of childhood is getting to be young. The rest is whistling past the graveyard.
Sartre
“There is nothing more consistent than a racist humanism since the European has only been able to become a man through creating slaves and monsters.”
Los Olvidados
The task is simple. In order to create a geography of hunger, we must throw away the ordinary map. Clear markers are gone. Lines of demarcation have been obliterated. Surveys are useless and contradictory. Boundaries become topography; topography creates new and surprising boundaries. We are forced to trace the characters on an entirely new trajectory and plane. This is where their lived reality occurs. This is the authentic space in which they (we) are forced to inhabit.
The Hack 