QUOTES
"There
are moments in history when loving your country means deploring the individuals
who represent and purport to lead it."
Experience
tells us that once American blood is shed, it makes no difference if the mission
is shameful or preposterous--the ranks of the war party will be swollen by tens
of millions of battlefield patriots incapable of the distinction between "supporting
our troops" and supporting political hoodlums who purchase credibility with soldiers'
blood.
Yet
all our experience, every page of our history, tells us that capitalists without
cops devolve into bullies and thieves, even monsters. . Capitalism is a calculated
bargain with the devil. We invite moral vertigo--and contempt--when we mistake
this compromise with our darkness for the source of our light.
Terrorism
is the gross moral astigmatism of outlaws who worship abstractions and despise
life. If we overreact and massacre civilians, if we ignore the distinction between
the innocent and the guilty just as the suicide squads ignored it, we become terrorists
ourselves--and forfeit the right to our outrage.
It's
my personal conviction that cruelty follows a lie, loves a lie, makes its nest
in a lie. And I've never been able to divine any purpose in our individual human
lives, unless it's to reduce the sum of human cruelty during the time when we're
alive. That's reason enough to press for the truth, to expose falsehood, even
to deplore ambiguity if it's thick enough for cruelty to hide behind it. ... I
think that liberation from truth is the same as liberation from responsibility---an
open invitation to all the ugliest things that adhere to human nature.
"Right-wing
propagandists like Limbaugh and Coulter are essentially entertainers, entertainers
who stimulate prejudice, selfishness and meanness the way a comedian works for
laughs or a tragedian plays for tears. Theirs is a new art form, exclusive to
America and bewilderingly successful. In place of traditional conservative ideology,
they offer their audience partisan belligerence and a complete package of mail-order
hatreds, designed for the conceptually and ethically impaired."
Swollen
corporations rule more or less unchallenged. When a big one falls as Enron fell,
it's like a missing tooth in the blinding corporate smile that mesmerizes America.
For a moment anyone who cares to look can see all the infection and corruption
in the hungry mouth that threatens to swallow us whole. Expect a brief glimpse,
before the Big Smile is repaired by the best oral surgeons money can buy. But
what we see, and the way we respond to what we see, is more critical to America's
survival than the fate of a million Islamic terrorists."
"Capital
punishment hasn't yielded a stimulating debate. Its opponents have articulted
a dozen legal, philosophical, sociological and theological arguments, each more
compelling and unanswerable than the one before. It's supporters simply howl for
revenge -- for raw meat -- like forest predators baying on a hilltop."
