This is a subject with which I have an intimate degree of familiarity, so I do not hesitate to post this explosive photo here. I can has immodium?
Category Archives: Literary
Paging Gérard de Nerval!
As we at the ol’ raincoaster blog understand it, Spring is late in coming to parts of the world, and in such times our thoughts go always to those more primitive, dependent species: cephalopods, crustaceans, and government contractors.
Alas, we do not know, for it is not recorded, what became of the famed lobster of Gérard de Nerval, but we would not be at all surprised to discover it still lumbering mournfully around Paris, seeking its owner and the subtle secrets that only dreams can tell…
But what if it’s chilly? Does this living national treasure of Symboilist Symbolist Poetry shivver in the chill miasma rising off the Seine? I shudder to think it.
Behold, the solution:
Benjamin Franklin on Despotism
So today we get TWO quotes o’ the day, but when presented with a bounty one must simply accept it and share it with one’s friends. Really, this one is a stunner. I’d add my own thoughts, but what Benjamin Franklin and Gore Vidal have said really cannot be improved upon by my words. It would be like painting the Lincoln Memorial or something.
From We Are the Patriots, by Gore Vidal, here is what Benjamin Franklin had to say about the future and the implications of the newly-written Constitution of the United States of America:
“There is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”
And here is what Gore Vidal has to say in his opening paragraphs:
I belong to a minority that is now one of the smallest in the country and, with every day, grows smaller. I am a veteran of World War II. And I can recall thinking, when I got out of the Army in 1946, Well, that’s that. We won. And those who come after us will never need do this again. Then came the two mad wars of imperial vanity—Korea and Vietnam. They were bitter for us, not to mention for the so-called enemy. Next we were enrolled in a perpetual war against what seemed to be the enemy-of-the-month club. This war kept major revenues going to military procurement and secret police, while withholding money from us, the taxpayers, with our petty concerns for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
But no matter how corrupt our system became over the last century—and I lived through three-quarters of it—we still held on to the Constitution and, above all, to the Bill of Rights. No matter how bad things got, I never once believed that I would see a great part of the nation—of we the people, unconsulted and unrepresented in a matter of war and peace-demonstrating in such numbers against an arbitrary and secret government, preparing and conducting wars for us, or at least for an army recruited from the unemployed to fight in. Sensibly, they now leave much of the fighting to the uneducated, to the excluded.
During Vietnam Bush fled to the Texas Air National Guard. Cheney, when asked why he avoided service in Vietnam, replied, “I had other priorities.” Well, so did 12 million of us sixty years ago. Priorities that 290,000 were never able to fulfill.
Gore Vidal on The Long War and Brainwashing
Where is Metro when you need him? Probably sulking because Blogger won’t let me leave any golden droppings in his comment section.
Stolen from the comments on Gawker:
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Oh, look what’s lying right here on the coffee table, one of my favorite passages by Gore Vidal:
“Although the Soviets still wanted to live by our original agreements at Yalta and even Potsdam, we had decided, unilaterally, to restore the German economy in order to enfold a rearmed Germany into Western Europe, thus isolating the Soviet, a nation which had not recovered from the Second World War and had no nuclear weapons. It was Acheson– again– who elegantly explained all the lies that he was obliged to tell Congress and the ten-minute-attention-spanned average American: “If we did make our points clearer than truth, we did not differ from most other educators and could hardly do otherwise…Qualification must give way to the simplicity of statement, nicety and nuance to bluntness, almost brutality, in carrying home a point.” Thus were two generations of Americans treated by their overlords until, in the end, at the word “Communism”, there is an orgasmic Pavlovian reflex just as the brain goes dead.”
Gore Vidal, Dreaming War, New York, Thunder’s Mouth Press, p.117-118.
Bonus points for the following as well:
- “When she was running for the Senate, Hillary’s psephologists discovered that the one group that really hated her was white, middle-aged men of property. She got the whole thing immediately — I heard she said, “I remind them of their first wife.”
The Definitive Act of the Twenty-First Century
For Realz.
And that is: not “quoting Tionna Smalls.” Although that’s a close runner-up. No; no indeed, the definitive act of the Twenty-First Century is, naturally, something that first surfaced on YouTube. Because you, the reader, are so finely attuned to nuance and Zeitgeist and other foreign-sounding words, you are reading it here before it registers on the consciousness of the tastemakers at Gawker Media, the Times, or CBC. Ahead of the curve, in front of the pack, on the top of the heap, and (perhaps?) good for loaning me twenty bucks till the end of the month?
Yes, that is the raincoaster blog devotee!
And just for you we present the following video, another Brian Atene monologue, but this one may be somewhat familiar in parts, if you’ve survived high school English. I had all of the great “To be or not to be” speech memorized by the time I was ten because it was on the cover of my best friend’s mother’s cookie tin and it would always take her ten or fifteen minutes to talk her mom into letting us get at the Peek Freans, so I had plenty of time to go over the lines. I used to recite them to her poodle when I was pet-sitting, just to discombobulate it.
It was a nasty little dog, and I’m a bitch. What can I say?
So here it is, the video containing the plan for the definitive act of the twenty-first century. And what might that act be, you wonder? Well, I’ll tell you. But I’ll tell you over the jump, because I’m like that.
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raincoaster 