Edward Curtin “They call my people the White Lower Middle Class these days. It is an ugly, ice-cold phrase, the result, I suppose, of the missionary zeal of those sociologists who still think you can place human beings on charts. It most certainly does not sound like a description of people on the edge of …
John Steppling “it’s the proper morning to fly into Hell.” Arthur Miller (The Crucible) “One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that life is death’s prisoner.” Emil Cioran (On the Heights of Despair) Increasingly, I think, the American public operates in a mild dissociative state. I wrote about it here. …
The word was the ember and the forest was my life.
― Jimmy Santiago Baca, “Coming into Language,” March 3, 2014
We’re at the Flip ‘n Chicken sharing food, swapping stories about El Paso, and philosophizing about what it means to be an educator in the Early Childhood program at Oregon Coast Community College.
His looks are a cross between Lee Trevino (golfer from El Paso) and my buddy the muralist from El Paso, Mario Colin.
“You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.”
— Michael Crawford, writer
One might think a profile of a former Oceanlake school, Taft elementary youth and a teen who dropped out of Taft High School (Lincoln City, Oregon) who now, 21 years later, works hard as a carpenter might not be the stuff of legends.
In fact, speaking with 37-year-old Justin Marical is like a breath of fresh air along with bursts of déjà vu.
In class society, everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.
— Mao, On Practice, 1937
That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence.
— Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood, March 6, 2007
Words, and spin, and the Mad Men and Mad Women of this perverse consumerism and cultural wasteland tied to Predatory Capitalism, Celebrity Culture and Americans who have perpetual ennui because of their perpetual dumb-downing, perpetual swallow of exceptionism as a core value of the American Project To Take Over the World.
Mohsen Abdelmoumen: You wrote Worker Cooperatives and Revolution where you talk about workers’ cooperatives. In this fascinating book, we note your optimism about the coming of a new era where the human is at the center. You give the example of the cooperative New Era Windows, in Chicago.
The divide and conquer tactics practiced by minority ruling powers are simply age-old class divisions forced on their majority subjects, but they have become more dangerous as imperial capitalism has entered a most critical period threatening more destruction than ever before. At a time when real global democracy is both more possible and necessary than ever, humanity is split into more sub-divisions than ever, with economic stratification disguised by group identity labels, most totally and a-scientifically as separate races.
Drawing a Picture on the Shreds of American Greenbacks
It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; . . . the individual who has not staked his or her life may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he or she has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.
— Georg Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (New York, 1967), p. 233
