Category Archives: Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day: “Propagandists Masquerading as Journalists”

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“The conservative movement’s strategy is to delegitimize the media regardless of its fairness and accuracy. In its place, we’ve seen the rise of  broadcasters whose foremost loyalty isn’t to informing their audience. What we have are propagandists masquerading as journalists.” — Ex-pat Brit, advocate for G.W. Bush in two presidential elections, and gay HIV-positive libertarian conservative Andrew Sullivan posts on Hugh Hewitt today.

Frye in Words with Power:

We distinguish two forms of rhetoric which, if not always debased, are certainly suspect: propaganda and advertising.  They are suspect because their approach is ironic . . . [O]nly the forms of rhetorical propaganda that are backed by threats and penalties designed to eliminate the ironic response are actively debased. (CW 26, 38)

With entities like Fox News we get no journalism, no irony, propaganda funded by advertising, and a steady stream of threats and penalties.

Quote of the Day: “Our job is to resist such language”

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“The irritable reaching after fact and reason may take a long time, and there’s no guarantee that we won’t forever remain in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubt about the motives of the Arizona killer. But regardless of what we do or do not discover, the use of language that frames one’s political opponents as prey to be shot has no place in civic discourse. No negative capability is required to take that position. As Frye says, every society has some measure of mob rule and lynch law, and the language of both, in his words, ‘congeals into a mood of anticipatory violence.’ Our job is to resist such language.”  — Bob Denham, in the comment thread today

Quote of the Day II

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“I hate violence. I hate war. Our children will not have peace if politicos just capitalize on this to succeed in portraying anyone as inciting terror and violence.” — An email from Sarah Palin read today on Glenn Beck’s radio show.

The syntax is sufficiently gnarled that it’s not entirely clear what she means, but the menace is obvious enough.  Somehow or other there will not be peace because others — not her — will be the cause of it.

Quote of the Day I

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“For as long as I can remember, I have heard conservatives blaming everything that is wrong in the universe, from violent crime to declining test scores to teen pregnancy to rude children to declining patriotism to probably athlete’s foot  . . . upon Dr. Spock, Hollywood liberals, the abolition of prayer in school, Bill Clinton, the “liberal 1960s,” the teaching of evolution — in other words, upon symbols, rhetoric, cultural norms, and the values expressed by political and media leaders. Yet from the moment when someone gets a gun in their hands, apparently, society ceases to have any influence whatsoever on the outcome and individual responsibility takes hold 100%. Something is driving the tripling of death threats against congressmen (and the concomitant rise in threats against Federal judges and other villains of the right, from Forest Service rangers to climate scientists) and it isn’t the sunspot cycle.” — Stephen Budiansky

(h/t Daily Dish)

Quote of the Day: “Nobody to blame, except everybody”

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Thinking about the recent horrors of runaway laissez-faire capitalism and what its alternative might be has brought me around to this entry in one of Frye’s “Third Book” notebooks:

Elie Wiesel, Legends for our Time.  The last chapter, “A Plea for the Dead,” describes how nobody made any real fuss when six million Jews were murdered in Germany.  Nobody to blame, except everybody.  This is the kind of thing that makes it impossible for me to be a Buddhist, to accept ignorance and enlightenment as ultimate categories.  The terrible burden of guilt simply has to be accepted: we can’t cast it off even on Christ.

What we can do about it involves organization — moral organization.  Communism cannot produce this: it’s only the other side of capitalism, and accepts all its economic-man stereotypes.  Teaching people one by one to be more sympathetic is futile.  Western organization is the key, though no Western society has it.  Our fumblings for “participatory democracy” really have as their goal a society in which one almighty yell can go up, almost automatically, when East Pakistan or black Rhodesia or whatever gets out of line with our moral sense.  We don’t really lack moral feelings; what we lack is a social structure in which to embody them.  (CW 9, 321)

In the absence of such a moral social structure we get the Tea Party, which is itself a creation and a tool of a deeply entrenched and self-serving oligarchy.  (That is, the top 1% of the population that owns 38% of the wealth and takes in 25% of the income — and still demands tax cuts.)

Quote of the Day II: “Applies lipstick in the vicinity of her mouth”

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Courtney in her “kinderwhore” phase

After a day of rather gloomy posts, an uplifting quote of the day might dilute the fug a little.

Jenna Sauers of Jezebel explains, and very well too, “Why Courtney Love Matters.”

Courtney Love has been the subject of vicious takedowns and spirited defenses for over twenty years. The vastly different interpretations served up, I would suggest, say more about the journalists who write them and the audiences who consume them than they do about Love herself. For Love presents a conundrum: even at her most drug-addled, she’s as cheerful and self-secure as she is self-destructive. We truly don’t have enough women capable of or willing to play the bad girl with a smile — and without a trace of victimhood.

So even though she is a bad singer (the point of Courtney Love is kind of that she’s a bad singer, just like it’s kind of the point of Dylan) and (probably) a bad mother, and even though her Twitter was like a harrowing download from her Id, and even though I do not really understand what she was doing wandering a hotel naked with Anselm Kiefer and I do not believe that “a combination of Zoloft and a cocktail” really explains it, I love Courtney Love. Because she’s not a role model — and, even more, because she has never aspired to be. Because she’s not passive. Because she’s a woman who takes issue with the view that she ought to be defined by who she used to fuck in the early 90s and who she gave birth to as a result. Because she auditioned for the bloody Mickey Mouse Club at age 12 by reciting Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy.” Because she is subjected (and subjects herself) to industrial-strength moral and legal scrutiny at every turn and still gets up in the afternoon, applies lipstick in the vicinity of her mouth, and faces the world. Are these achievements too small to cheer? In a world that still orders up sacrificial pop virgins — Britney, Lindsay, Demi — to swallow down whole, I’d argue they’re anything but.

After the jump, a video from Courtney’s heyday, “Celebrity Skin.”  She’s always been a consistently smart lyricist — that talent has never failed her — and the lyrics here are typically ingratiating and sardonic: “Oh make me over, I’m all I wanna be / A walking study in demonology.”

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Quote of the Day II: Rush Limbaugh, Dessert, and Liberal Lies

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To insanity and beyond.  This used to be an SNL skit.  Now it’s real life.  Rush Limbaugh advises his listeners:

What have I told you about diet and exercise?  Exercise is irrelevant…. “How do you know all this?”  One of the reasons I know what I know is that I know liberals, and I know liberals lie, and if Michelle Obama’s gonna be out there ripping into “food desserts” and saying, “This is why people are fat,” I know it’s not true.  “Rush, do you really believe that? It’s that simple to you, liberals lie?”  Yes, it is, folks.  Once you learn that, once you come to grips with that, once you accept that, the rest is easy.  Very, very simple.  Now, my doctor has never told me to restrict any intake of salt, but if he did, I wouldn’t.  I’d just spend more time in the steam or the sauna sweating it out.

(Via the Daily Dish)