Reviews and Comments

Some quotes • "MONSTERS EXIST, BUT THEY ARE TOO FEW IN NUMBER TO BE TRULY DANGEROUS. MORE DANGEROUS ARE THE COMMON MEN, THE FUNCTIONARIES READY TO BELIEVE AND TO ACT WITHOUT ASKING QUESTIONS. PRIMO LEVI" • "If your community is founded on an injustice, that injustice cannot be questioned." • "There’s something interesting about the rate at which men in prison are raped: it’s lower than the rate at which women are raped in the culture at large." • "the stereotype of Klan members as mere buffoons was almost entirely false, sleight of mind that, to this day, allows all of us to acknowledge the existence of racism while pretending it is equal to unsophistication and stupidity." • "“Nobody talks about this,” he said, “but they’re branches from the same tree, different forms of the same cultural imperative….” “Which is?” “To rob the world of its subjectivity.” “Wait—” I said. “Or to put this another way,” he continued, “to turn everyone and everything into objects.” Again he paused, before he said, “The methodology used by each is different. Corporations are carriers of ruin, turning everything they touch to money. They are culturally sanctified, supported, and protected in their role of turning the living—forests, oceans, mountains, rivers, human lives—into the dead: ...more" • "hatred felt long enough and deeply enough no longer feels like hatred. It feels like economics, or religion, or tradition, or simply the way things are. Rape is not a hate crime because our hatred of women is transparent. Child prostitution is not a hate crime for the same reason that beating a child is not a hate crime, because our hatred of children is transparent." • "for example Mohenjo-Daro, where the great food storehouse was located within the citadel’s heavy walls, protected, by armed soldiers, not against foreign marauders but against the citizenry itself. Social critic Lewis Mumford noted with characteristic understatement the placement of this storehouse. “Planned scarcity and the recurrent threat of starvation played a part from the beginning in the effective regimentation of the urban labor force.”" • "And I’m misogynistic. I admit that, too. I’m a shitty cook, and a worse housecleaner, probably in great measure because I’ve internalized the notion that these are women’s work. Of course, I never admit that’s why I don’t do them: I always say I just don’t much enjoy those activities (which is true enough; and it’s true enough also that many women don’t enjoy them either), and in any case, I’ve got better things to do, like write books and teach classes where I can feel morally superior to pimps." • "Those who say that seeing is believing have it all wrong. Only when we believe do we begin to see (what we are supposed to see)." • "In 1828, Joseph Glass improved the design of a chimney-cleaning machine invented some years earlier. The machine could cheaply and efficiently clean flues of any size or design, and cost only four pounds. But boys were cheaper, so for many years they continued in common use." • "It is impossible to understand all the social and environmental impacts of a computer or a car made in a dozen different countries. That’s why consumers and industry are so enamored with the idea of certifying products so that the consumer can just walk into the store and buy the computer with a green star on the box. No thinking, no feeling, just confident consuming." • "I wondered also how many of the things I am told are good for me actually are, and how many are nothing more than rationales for exploitation: sweet words to keep me from perceiving my own predicament." • "if the rhetoric of superiority works to maintain the entitlement, hatred and direct physical force remain underground. But when that rhetoric begins to fail, force and hatred waits in the wings, ready to explode." • "What does it mean that the most private parts of ourselves—how we are in relationship to ourselves and to those we love—have been designed in great measure by those who have no interest in us other than that we feel insecure enough to buy their products?”" • "I’d asked George if that means television is representative of our culture. He’d responded, “No, it’s representative of the power structure. Not the culture. This means those in power are overrepresented, they’re more likely to be successful, and they’re more likely to inflict violence than to suffer it.” “This means,” I’d said, “that it’s not really even representative of the power structure, but instead the fantasies of those in power.”" • "The man who would, once again, through force or economic exigency, benefit from the slavery (wage or otherwise) of another, must likewise deaden his own empathies. The man who would beat a woman must step away from the part of himself who wants, expects, or hopes for her love. The human who would exploit the nonhuman must reject his own embeddedness in the sensual animal world he would so use." • "David Edwards, the author of Burning All Illusions, said to me, “If the first rule of a dysfunctional system is ‘Don’t talk about it,’ then our primary goal should be to tell the truth, to be as honest as we can manage to be." • "He was eager to tell me about them, and since I offered no opinions, there was no need for him to tell me what I didn’t understand."