Daily Archives: February 4, 2011

Quote of the Day: “Fools should have full liberty to speak”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-x6MP4-ZrA

Glenn Beck yesterday — and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

Frye in one of the late notebooks:

What is important about free speech in a democracy is not only that everyone has the right to express an opinion, however ill considered, but that fools should have full liberty to speak so that they can be recognized as fools.  (CW 3, 410)

“Full mooner” is the term emerging from the mainstream punditocracy to describe the increasingly unhinged Glenn Beck, whose rants are more and more like watching Plan 9 from Outer Space; jaw-droppingly awful but also inadvertantly hilarious.  It’s got to be the most licit approximation there is to being high on shrooms.

Patricia Highsmith

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxaIV897PkQ

The trailer for Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game

On this date in 1995 Patricia Highsmith died (born 1921).

From Frye’s 1950 diary:

The thriller is quite a suggestive form actually: it’s the opposite of the detective story, where we get the smug primitive identification with the group & see the individual marked down by a process of hocus-pocus.  In the thriller we’re identified rather with the fugitive from society.  The archetype of all thrillers is The Pilgrim’s Progress, where the refugee from the city of destruction is hounded on by a nameless fear, & has to do battle with various members of its police force like Apollyon.  (CW 8, 343)