The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fanta...sies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
True Civilization does not lie in gas, nor in steam, nor in turn-tables. It lies in the reduction of the traces of original sin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The improved American highway system ... isolated the American-in-transit. On his speedway ... he had no contact with the towns wh...ich he by-passed. If he stopped for food or gas, he was served no local fare or local fuel, but had one of Howard Johnson's nationally branded ice cream flavors, and so many gallons of Exxon. This vast ocean of superhighways was nearly as free of culture as the sea traversed by the Mayflower Pilgrims.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Here lies interred in the eternity of the past, from whence there is no resurrection for the days--whatever there may be for the d...ust--the thirty-third year of an ill-spent life, which, after a lingering disease of many months sank into a lethargy, and expired, January 22d, 1821, A.D. leaving a successor inconsolable for the very loss which occasioned its existence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars; then may we ho...pe to comprehend the infinitudes of man's soul under formulas of Profit and Loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Billboards, billboards, drink this, eat that, use all manner of things, everyone, the best, the cheapest, the purest and most sati...sfying of all their available counterparts. Red lights flicker on every horizon, airplanes beware; cars flash by, more lights. Workers repair the gas main. Signs, signs, lights, lights, streets, streets.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The learned professors have been at considerable pains in their attempts to make a distinction between tools and implements on the... one hand, and machinery on the other. Nor have they arrived much of anywhere. The one is continually shading into the other. Here is an ordinary shovel used by a day labourer in a ditch; here is the same shovel with a somewhat thicker handle, containing a pneumatic attachment which is said to improve its digging power; here is a very much larger shovel with curved ends and steel teeth, hitched to an arm that is hitched to a steam engine, which can gobble up a cartload of dirt at one mouthful. Where does the tool stop and the machine begin? A grindstone is widely held to be a primitive tool; a turret lathe is widely held to be a machine. Both spin around. What is the essential difference? The employment of nonhuman power, steam, oil, gas, has been defined as the difference. Well and good. Then everything worked by human hands and legs is a tool only, and bicycles, typewriters, adding machines, sewing machines, foot lathes, clocks, hand-pumps--are not machines. Which is absurd. And what is one to do with treadmills for grinding corn, whose motive power is said by some to be the donkey, and by some the carrot in front of his nose?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A new father quickly learns that his child invariably comes to the bathroom at precisely the times when he's in there, as if he ne...eded company. The only way for this father to be certain of bathroom privacy is to shave at the gas station.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »