Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As... members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The widespread fear among today's parents that their manageable children will turn overnight into dope fiends, school dropouts, or... voracious sexual voluptuaries reflects a certain anger and animosity towards the young, a fear and loathing that helps turn the myth into a self-fulfilling prophecy. After all, there were "bad" children and uncontrolled teenagers in the past; nevertheless, parents expected their own children to be good, to grow up well. . . . The fact that today's parents are amazed if their children do not turn into black sheep makes it clear that a less than optimistic, indeed a deeply distrustful and negative, attitude towards children exists today.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people--including me--would be rotting in prison cells from ...Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a progression of understanding vis-à-vis pro football that varies drastically with the factor of distance--physical, emo...tional, intellectual and every other way ... Which is exactly the way it should be, in the eyes of the amazingly small number of people who own and control the game, because it is this finely managed distance factor that accounts for the high-profit mystique that blew the sacred institution of baseball off its "national pastime" pedestal in less than fifteen years.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable ...to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time--and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile--and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not nece...ssarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely. We owe that to ourselves and our crippled self-image as something better than a nation of panicked sheep.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The trouble with Nixon is that he's a serious politics junkie. He's totally hooked ... and like any other junkie, he's a bummer to... have around: especially as President.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That was always the difference between Muhammad Ali and the rest of us. He came, he saw, and if he didn't entirely conquer--he cam...e as close as anybody we are likely to see in the lifetime of this doomed generation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Gonzo journalism ... is a style of "reporting" based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any ki...nd of journalism--and the best journalists have always known this.... True gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an artist/photographer and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he's writing it--or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The fundamental impulse of the movement is neither masturbatory nor concretely lesbian--although it of course offers warm houseroo...m to both these possibilities; it is an impulse to maidenhood--to that condition in which a woman might pretend to a false fear or loathing of the penis in order to escape from any responsibility for the pleasure and well-being of the man who possesses it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »