"Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead."
- Arundhati Roy
An Immoral Story
by Tim O'Brien
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing things men have always done. If a war story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.
Art Instructs:
Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Allegories of the Good and Bad Government, commissioned six and a half centuries ago, in 1338, to remind the city fathers of Sienna of their duties, is still to be seen today. "Good Government" is dominated by a throned figure representing the commune, flanked by "the Virtues".
"Bad Government" is ruled by "Fear", whose scroll reads: "Because he looks for his own good in the world, he places justice beneath tyranny. So nobody walks this road without Fear: Robbery thrives inside and outside the city gates."
"It is utterly ridiculous to see any connection between the high capitalism of today — as it is now being imported into Russia and as it exists in America — with democracy or with freedom in any sense of these words. Yet this capitalism is an unavoidable result of our economic development. The question is: how are freedom and democracy in the long run at all possible under the domination of highly developed capitalism? Freedom and democracy are only possible where the resolute will of a nation not to allow itself to be ruled like sheep is permanently alive."
— Max Weber, quoted in From Max Weber (ed. H. H. Gerth & C. Wright Mills)
Do you suspect you have a Geranium in the Cranium?
When you're trying to convert the heathens do you lose your train of thought RIGHT at the moment when you most need it? The facts just trail off into the fog? happens to me, I'll obviously never be a soapbox speaker, but this blog may be a little corner of Hyde Park for me, or as Studs Terkel said yesterday on C-SPAN ... there it goes again.
How does he do it?
Scott Horton put it this way, approximately... "we may have collectively lost our short term memory, but we still have our long term memory..." and... "Now put on your thinking caps..."
Dave Lippman: "short term memory loss isn't as bad as historical amnesia..."
Josh Marshall About Bush: "Of course, that's not what happened.
We were there.
We remember.
It wasn't a century ago. We got the resolution passed. Saddam called our bluff and allowed the inspectors in. President Bush pressed ahead with the invasion.
His lies are so blatant that I must constantly check myself so as not to assume that he is simply delusional or has blocked out whole chains of events from the past."
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/007956.php
At least my memory blocks don't wipe out civilizations.
"Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses."
— H. L. Mencken
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