11 quotes
The idea of choice is easily debased if one forgets that the aim is to have chosen successfully, not to be endlessly choosing.
Within the Context of No Context (1980)
The fact is that fifty percent of our national mind is a giant, explosive blowup of a Xerox of a 1970s rock-and-roll press list.
My Pilgrim’s Progress (1999)
Celebrities have an intimate life and a life in the grid of two hundred million. For them, there is no distance between the two grids of American life. Of all Americans, only they are complete.
Within the Context of No Context (1980)
I don’t just like Ike; I love him. I think he’s the guy of guys, I think he’s uniquely American, and I’m sorry we’re not going to have him anymore.
My Pilgrim’s Progress (1999)
USA Today is back-formed from the Assumed Dominant Mind of television.
My Pilgrim’s Progress (1999)
The work of television is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts; finally, to establish the context of no-context and to chronicle it.
Within the Context of No Context (1980)
With Eisenhower, we’re dealing with something after the fact, a kind of Diocletian grace of God to rule over us, for a time, while we figure out who we are, as rulers.
My Pilgrim’s Progress (1999)
[O]ne loss in our era has been any interest in stories told from the top down.
My Pilgrim’s Progress (1999)
The 1960s weren’t the 1920s again; they were the Liberal Arts expressed in the negative. The 1970s, despite the hedonism, weren’t the 1920s; they were the Negative out to get all the rewards formerly held by the Positive. The Goat and Adding Machine Ritual is now.
Collapsing Dominant (1997)
Wonder was the grace of the country.
Within the Context of No Context (1980)
Each one of these social generations—from the ‘50s, from the ‘60s, from the ‘70s, from the Reagan era, from now—thinks of its social aesthetic as definitive. In fact, they are all in a process: encouraged toward, and beyond, hubris, by demography.
Collapsing Dominant (1997)