In the small town each citizen had done something in his own way to build the community. The town booster had a vision of the futu...re which he tried to fulfill. The suburb dweller by contrast started with the future--with a shopping center for twice the population, with a school building already built, with churches constructed, with parks and playgrounds and swimming pools. These were as essential to building a suburb as the prematurely grand hotel had been to building a city in the wilderness. In large developments where the developer had a plan, and even in the smaller developments, there was a new kind of paternalism: not the quasi-feudal paternalism of the company town, nor the paternalism of the utopian ideologue. This new kind of paternalism was fostered by the American talent for organization, by the rising twentieth century American standard of living, and by the American genius for mass production. It was the paternalism of the market place. The suburban developer, unlike the small-town booster, seldom intended to live in the community he was building. For him community was a commodity, a product to be sold at a profit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In our world of big names, curiously, our true heroes tend to be anonymous. In this life of illusion and quasi-illusion, the perso...n of solid virtues who can be admired for something more substantial than his well-knownness often proves to be the unsung hero: the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at lonely, underpaid, unglamorous, unpublicized jobs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is hardly surprising that children should enthusiastically start their education at an early age with the Absolute Knowledge of... computer science; while they are unable to read, for reading demands making judgments at every line.... Conversation is almost dead, and soon so too will be those who knew how to speak.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Stripped of incidental ornaments, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are seen as the same dream dreamed twice over, the second time a...s nightmare; though, to be sure, the terror of the second dream is already at work in the first, whose euphoria persists strangely into the second. In both books, there is a pretended, a quasi-ritual death to the community and its moral codes; though in Tom Sawyer that death is a "lark" undertaken in childish pique, while in Huckleberry Finn it is a last desperate evasion, an act of self-defense. In both, there is a consequent spying on the community from cover to watch the effects of that death, the aftermath of regret: the childish dream of the suicide, who longs to be present at his own discovery, come true. In the one case, however, the spying is a prelude to a triumphant return, a revelation, in the other, to a further flight and concealment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If for Americans, at least, the Great War could sometimes be imagined as a brief, quasi-athletic lark, the Second War permitted no... such melioration by the spirit of adolescent optimism. In North Africa alone, the 1st Infantry Division spent more time in mortal contact with the enemy than all the time it spent--forming up, marching, drawing equipment, lining up at the mess hall, training, bitching--in all of the First World War. And on December 7, 1941, the American navy lost in one day more men killed--2008, to be exact--than in all the days of the earlier war. The Second World War, total and global as it was, killed worldwide, more civilian men, women, and children than soldiers, sailors, and airmen. And compared with the idiocies of Verdun, Gallipoli, or Tannenberg, it was indescribably cruel and insane. It was not until the Second World War had enacted all its madness that one could realize how near Victorian social and ethical norms the First World War really was.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Folk art" signifies the poetical, musical, and pictorial activities of those strata of the population which are uneducated and no...t urbanized or industrialized. It is of the essence of this art that those who keep it in being are not only passively receptive, but normally are creative participants in the artistic activities, and yet do not stand out as individuals or claim any personal authorship of the productions. "Popular art" on the other hand is to be understood as artistic or quasi-artistic production for the demand of a half-educated public, generally urban and inclined to mass-behavior. In folk art, producers and consumers are hardly distinguished, and the boundary between them is always fluid; in the case of popular art, we find on the contrary an artistically uncreative, completely passive public, and professional production of artistic goods strictly in response to the demand for them. It is indeed a striking fact that folk art, especially folk-poetry, emerges from the ranks of those who enjoy it, whereas popular songs--the street ballads and popular "hits"Mderive from professionals belonging to and spir itually dependent upon the upper classes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a man who exists as one of the most popular objects of leadership, legislation, and quasi-literature in the history of al...l men.... This man, that object of attention, attack, and vast activity, cannot make himself be heard, let alone to understood. He has never been listened to.... That man is Black and alive in white America where the media of communication do not allow the delivery of his own voice, his own desires, his own rage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American woman's concept of marriage is a clearly etched picture of something uninflated on the floor. A sleeping-bag without ...air, a beanbag without beans, a padded bra without pads. To work on it, you start pumping--what the magazines call "breathing life into your marriage." Do enough of this and the marriage becomes a kind of Banquo's ghost, a quasi-living entity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Few can be induced to labor exclusively for posterity; and none will do it enthusiastically. Posterity has done nothing for us; an...d theorize on it as we may, practically we shall do very little for it, unless we are made to think we are at the same time doing something for ourselves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
D--n me, stranger, ef you can't stay as long as you please, and I'll give you plenty to eat and drink. Play away, stranger, you ki...n sleep on the dry spot tonight!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »