Greg > Recent Status Updates

…the smell of modern evil is said to resemble burnt plastic and rotten oranges…only different…so many smells you can’t quite classify because you never quite smelled them before and you have to approximate.

Kim dislikes England on first contact. The porters are deferring to the signal presented by his clothes and luggage. They don’t see him. He infers correctly that the whole place operates on hierarchical categories that determine how everybody treats everybody else, categories carefully designed to make sure no one ever sees anyone else.

The Johnson family is a cooperative structure. There isn’t any boss man. People know what they are supposed to do and they do it. We’re all actors and we change roles. Today’s millionaire might be tomorrow’s busboy. There’s none of that ruling-class old school tie…‘Hey boy, manicure my toenails and look sharp about it…I’m sweating my bloody balls off…saddle my horse nigger…’

It was dead easy. The townspeople were antivaccinationists…“polluting the Blood of Christ,” they called it. Around the turn of the century there were a number of these antivaccination cults, a self-limiting phenomenon since all the cultists contracted smallpox sooner or later.

He knew that once an article goes into mass production, the last thing a manufacturer wants to hear about is a better and simpler article that is basically different. And they are not interested in a more efficient, simpler or better product. They are interested in making money.

An administration that is impatient with democratic politics at home is not, on the face of it, the most likely promoter of democracy abroad…In response to the needs of the megastate, democracy is made safe for the world by being radically transformed at home.

Ever since World War I, when Woodrow Wilson justified America’s entrance into the war under the slogan of “making the world safe for democracy,” it has been commonplace for American presidents and political leaders to claim democracy both as an objective or end that justifies the use of state power and as a subject or agent whose will—because it is a democratic will—legitimates that end.

The dream of public bureaucracies is a uniform, mass society; the dream of private bureaucracies is a mass market of consumers with roughly the same tastes.

Marginal populations are not extraneous to state power but essential. This is because their status of pariah, as defined by the actions and rhetoric of public officials and politicians and disseminated by the media, represents the legitimation of an extension of state power. Marginality is the symbol of political helplessness...

By politicalness I mean our capacity for developing into beings who know and value what it means to participate in and be responsible for the care and improvement of our common and collective life. To be political is not identical with being a part of government or...a political party...they are opposed to the authentically political.

Think of how the theoretical object called ‘Shakespearian studies,’ how it has accumulated, and how much eighteenth- and nineteenth century scholarship is still read. Interpretative modes, we might say, are the guardians of plurality and difference, even sometimes to the point of preciosity. Their patron saint is Hegel. The idea is to keep things in the world, including memories of monstrous historical acts.

Memory, we might say, is the guardian of difference. The individual acquires and accumulates his or her different selves, and memory allows for re-collection. Difference within the self and between selves is not merely received; we may not choose our genders or our skin color, but we do choose in some measure how we are going to interpret the...differences we receive or acquire in the course of our lives.

Dr. F. writes nostalgically: ‘Your lines seemed to me to be a greeting from a distant world.’ Yes, Father, those who were now busy building Germany’s future all still clung to Germany’s glorious past.

On the other hand, the birthrate of the ethnic German population fell considerably. They must have taken a good look at each other and decided the best thing they could do was to let themselves die out.

‘When the Bolsheviks plan to annihilate people, they send at least two thousand Red Army troops into every little village where the people are to be exterminated. But to send us only ten thousand police troops for the whole GG, and then order us to finish off fifteen million people…that just can’t be done.’ It’s sentences like that one which brought about your death. And I go on living with them.

Mother wiped away the news about mass murder like a drop of wine from that French mahogany table, and in doing so gave the postwar German people a good example to follow.

What a reassuring feeling it gives me to picture the SS entering the cell just as he is writing his next-to-last sentence. Now just guess, Father, who suddenly appears on the scene? Right. Good old, dear old ‘God’—the words you crooks were always prepared to spit out at a moment’s notice, God packaged in saliva. ‘God bless you & keep you.’

…justifications of your behavior are not totally with an element of self-interest: the gentlemen of your retinue who managed to survive past 1945 could hardly be expected to admit now that they had been associated with a murderer—you, the murderer who begged the tribunal for mercy on the grounds that he had been a ‘head of state.’

…it could not have escaped your notice that Krüger was just as much of a weasely little Nazi as you were. His eyes, too, were filled with that passion for murder that comes from cowardice.

...[the more ‘German’ justice is, the more inhuman, no matter how you slice it]…

Mustafa Kamal notes the books he read. They are a catholic selection, starting with Alphonse Daudet’s Sappho – Moeurs Parisiennes (whose plot did not impress him), and going on to a Turkish treatise entitled Can one deny the existence of God? This prompted the comment, ‘Religious thinker have done their best to twist science and philosophy to back up their law.’

How she loved to tell the story about the public prosecutor, the same one who initiated a suit against her because of her fishy fur-trading deals. As soon as you became Minister of Justice (she would gleefully recount for me later), this man came creeping obsequiously to your new office to pay his respects and to let you know that, of course, the files regarding Frau Brigitte Frank would be closed at once.

Und wenn er net saufat wia a Loch, dann hätt er koa so rote Nasn! Und sei Schmerbauch, der ko doch a nur vom Fressn kemma! Also nacha ham ma scho oa Todsünd: Unbotmäßigkeit im Essen und Trinken. Aba mer darfatn do herinn lauter Haring fressn und zaundürre gröste Kartoffeln. Der soll mir bloß no amal kemma, der!

Ask any band that's toured with us in the last ten years or so. I think I freak a lot of them out when they get offstage showering them with praise and encouragement. I mean it, too. It's such an honor to be a witness to someone else's art. Letting them know that all of the heart and soul they've put into their work is bright and visible is the least I can do.

Feeling ownership of music you didn't make through the simple act of investing yourself into it will always be more real to me than whatever goes on at the New York Stock Exchange.

God, how I dreamed about one day standing up for myself, unafraid of not fitting in.

…the burning of Jews, Moors, and sodomites produces a certain sense of comfort in those who are not Jews, Moors, or sodomites: “This won’t happen to me.” To turn this mechanism back on the Inquisitors themselves gives me a feeling of taking over the office of fate. I am become the bad karma of the Inquisition. I am allowing myself also the satisfaction that derives from a measure of hypocrisy…

Here everything is true and nothing is permitted except to the permitters.

I doubt if any important arrests will be made. In a country like that, people of wealth are virtually untouchable.

Walk through life with the swagger of a cat who knows the world is theirs to command. Let your dignity shine, your confidence radiate, and your belief in your own authority become the kind of quiet revolution that no fascist can ever extinguish.