(3089/898) Miscellany: politics, science, art

1934) There's an old saying that every geek thinks that the circus couldn't run without him. In the political circus recently, the geeks have started writing books in which they describe exactly how they bit the heads off the live chicken and how this makes them indispensable. Inadvertently, they also make it clear we'd all be better if that circus never came to town.

Donald E. Westlake
"Tough Guys Don't Shut Up" in
New York Times Book Review (8/23/1996)
[review of Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms
by Ed Rollins with Tom DeFrank]

1935) [T]he general public - in modern countries, the electorate - doesn't spend much time thinking about politics, so that the nation's hopes, traditions, and myths tend to live on. Capital cities, by contrast, are humid cultures for the intensive, tropical growth of political forces, schemes, bureaucracies, parasites, and interests - and for greed and institutional corruption.

Kevin Phillips
Arrogant Capital (1994)

1936) We may say with truth and meaning that governments are more or less republican, as they have more or less of the element of popular election and control in their composition; and believing, as I do, that the mass of the citizens is the safest depository of their own rights, and especially, that the evils flowing from the duperies of the people are less injurious than those from the egoism of their agents, I am a friend to that composition of government which has in it the most of this ingredient. And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

Thomas Jefferson
letter to John Taylor (5/28/1816)
Memoirs, Correspondence, and Private Papers
of Thomas Jefferson, v.4
Thomas Jefferson Randolph, ed., (1829) [WQ]
quoted (in part) by Kevin Phillips in
Arrogant Capital (1994)

1937) When irrational terror takes to itself the fiat of moral goodness somebody has to die. [...] No man lives who has not got a panic button, and when it is pressed by the clean white hand of moral duty, a certain murderous train is set in motion.

Arthur Miller
"It Could Happen Here - And Did"
New York Times (4/30/1967)
The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (1996)
quoted (in part) by Victor Navasky in
Naming Names (1980), and in
"The Demons of Salem, With Us Still" in
New York Times Arts and Leisure Section (9/8/1996)

1938) [S]ome of [us] have completely lost sight of the fact that we are responsible for our choices. We are not automatic mechanisms. Regardless of the stimulus, except for low level reflexes, we always have a choice of response.

Ron Robertson
posted on the Court TV
Elements of Crime discussion board (7/13/1996)

1939) Americans visit one another's homes and join civic associations less than in any era on record. Alone at the end of the cul-de-sac, we watch murder, mayhem and assorted social pathologies on television. Bereft of community, we have become suspicious of immigrants, of shared social responsibility - and even of human potential itself. Racist arguments like [co-author of The Bell Curve] Charles Murray's conform to this mindset" they offer "scientific" evidence that the poor are inferior and therefore a hopeless case. The press is culpable too, transmitting the idea with barely a skeptical question.

Brent Staples
"Zeal of A Convert" in
New York Times Books Review (8/4/1996)
[review of Up From Conservatism (1996)
by Michael Lind, and citing ideas from the essay
- later book - "Bowling Alone" (1994)
by Robert Putnam]

1940) If [the] natural sciences lead to anything, they are apt to make the belief that there is such a thing as the "meaning" of the universe die out at its very roots.

Max Weber
"Science As A Vocation"
quoted by Richard Wolin in
"Liberalism As A Vocation" in
The New Republic (9/2/1996)
[review of Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy
by John Patrick Diggins]

1941) We have also sound houses, where we practice and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmonies which you have not, of quarter sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; together with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep; likewise divers trembling and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which set to the ear to do further the hearing greatly. We have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and as if it were tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have also means to convey sounds in tubes and pipes, in strange lines and distances [...]

Francis Bacon
New Atlantis (1627)
quoted by Paul D. Miller
(aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid) in
"Algorithms, Erasures {and the Art of} Memory",
an excerpt from "Flow My Blood the DJ Said", in
liner notes, Songs of a Dead Dreamer (cd, 1996)
by DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid

1942) I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.

D.H. Lawrence
letter (4/15/1908)
Letters of D.H. Lawrence (1979),
edited by James T. Boulton [CQ]