Articles: Best of the Web
Collected below, a shortlist of some of the most provocative, revealing, often exasperating articles from over the past few years, all of which sound as vital today as the day on which they were published. Starting with the best, a real tour-de-force that proved the most refreshing thing I read, and re-read, that miserable Spring 2002.
Tony Kushner, Vassar College Commencement Address 2002
“…You should have gotten the British Tony Kushner, or maybe Condoleezza Rice, who is I believe actually mentioned in the Book of Revelations – I know Stanford University is mentioned, I know her boss is mentioned, I know John Ashcroft features prominently, and not pleasantly, with batwings and horns, really, you can look it up. This is a time of crisis and in a time of crisis we all have to focus on getting real, and you, what do you do? You get a playwright to deliver the 2002 commencement speech.”
Finding Justice With Arundhati Roy (Alternet Interview 10/24)
“…Then the only people who are actually engaging the forces of empire are the resistance movement in Iraq or the people in Palestine. And because they are not pristine and secular and feminist and democratic and perfect, all of us curl up in moral distaste. We have to find a way of becoming the resistance or we have to find a way of supporting whatever resistance there is.”
Arundhati Roy, Peace & The New Corporate Liberation Theology (The 2004 Sydney Peace Prize Lecture , University of Sydney,11/24)
“Today, it is not merely justice itself, but the idea of justice that is under attack. The assault on vulnerable, fragile sections of society is at once so complete, so cruel and so clever – all encompassing and yet specifically targeted, blatantly brutal and yet unbelievably insidious – that its sheer audacity has eroded our definition of justice. It has forced us to lower our sights, and curtail our expectations. Even among the well-intentioned, the expansive, magnificent concept of justice is gradually being substituted with the reduced, far more fragile discourse of ‘human rights’.”
Bill Moyers, There is No Tomorrow (D&D, January 2005)
“One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington … Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad, but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.”
A Shattered Nation Longs to Care About Stupid Bullshit Again (The Onion, Oct 3 2001)
“In the aftermath of this horrible tragedy, people find themselves cruelly preoccupied with the happiness and well-being of their loved ones, unconcerned with such stupid bullshit as the new Anne Heche biography or Michael Jackson’s dramatic comeback bid,” said Dr. Meredith Laufenberg, a psychologist and family therapist at UCLA Medical Center. “Who knows how long it will be before things are back to normal?”
Frontline Interview With Naomi Klein (November 9 2004)“It’s really complicated, because in many ways, I would say that people rightly feel that corporations are more interested in their opinions than their politicians are. So once again, you see corporations sort of fulfilling a role that probably should be fulfilled elsewhere. Generally I think people don’t feel terrifically listened to at work; they don’t feel terrifically listened to by their politicians. Yet these brands are constantly canvassing their most minute shades of opinion. But I don’t think that’s actual democracy or participation, because the stance of the consumer is not the same as the stance of a citizen. The customer is always right: “It’s my money. You have to listen to me.” I think if we’re confusing that with democracy or actual citizen engagement, it’s because we’ve actually lost touch with what democracy and community really does mean, because it’s a much more complex give-and-take process of human beings interacting with each other and not “This is my opinion; take it; act on it,” which is the consumer’s stance vis-à-vis these companies.”
Rebecca Solnit, Acts of Hope: Challenging Empire on the World Stage
“American history is dialectical. What is best about it is called forth by what is worst. The abolitionists and the underground railroad, the feminist movement and the civil rights movement, the environmental and human rights movements were all called into being by threats and atrocities. There’s plenty of what’s worst afoot nowadays. But we need a progressive activism that is not one of reaction but of initiation, one in which people of good will everywhere set the agenda. We need to extend the passion the war brought forth into preventing the next one, and toward addressing all the forms of violence besides bombs. We need a movement that doesn’t just respond to the evils of the present but calls forth the possibilities of the future. We need a revolution of hope.”
Slavoj Zizek, A Plea for Leninist Intolerance “Fidelity to the democratic consensus means the acceptance of the present liberalparliamentary consensus, which precludes any serious questioning of how this liberal-democratic order is complicit in the phenomena it officially condemns and, of course, any serious attempt to imagine a society whose sociopolitical order would be different. In short, it means say and write whatever you want on the condition that what you do does not effectively question or disturb the predominant political consensus. So everything is allowed, solicited even, as a critical topic: the prospects of a global ecological catastrophy, violations of human rights, sexism, homophobia, antifeminism, growing violence not only in faraway countries but also in our megalopolises, the gap between the First and the Third World, between the rich and the poor, the shattering impact of the digitalization of our daily lives, and so on. There is nothing easier today than to get international, state, or corporate funds for multidisciplinary research into how to fight the new forms of ethnic, religious, or sexist violence. The problem is that all this occurs against the background of a fundamental Denkverbot, a prohibition against thinking. Today’s liberal-democratic hegemony is sustained by a kind of unwritten Denkverbot similar to the infamous Berufsverbot in Germany of the late sixties; the moment one shows a minimal sign of engaging in political projects that aim to seriously challenge the existing order, the answer is immediately: “Benevolent as it is, this will necessarily end in a new gulag!” And it is exactly the same thing that the demand for scientific objectivity means; the moment one seriously questions the existing liberal consensus, one is accused of abandoning scientific objectivity for the outdated ideological positions. This is the point that one cannot and should not concede: today, actual freedom of thought must mean the freedom to question the predominant liberal-democratic postideological consensus-or it means nothing.”
1 Comment
July 21, 2009 at 2:13 am
Ah, the oh so pretentious ultra-liberal hippie yippie weathermen nonsensical babble, how I have missed it so. Quite disturbing I must say.
“Not to be a republican at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head.”
Francois Guisot (1787-1874)
or if you prefer
“Not to be a socialist at twenty is proof of
want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head.” French Premier Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929)
I actually thought it had been Winston Churchill who had waxed poetic on this subject yet I was mistaken.