"The best the slaughtered can usually hope for is a cameo in some kind of art. Mostly, we need a Guernica to remind us of Guernica."
"I remember seeing an interview with him on TV, it might have been a Nova episode on global warming in the mid-eighties. It was basically the first time I had ever heard of global warming. And Gore was the young senator from Tennessee. He very articulately explained what politics is. Politics is people worrying about next year and right now. The problem you have when the more you know about global warming as a politician is the more you realize you can’t do anything with it. Experts bombard you with cold, hard facts about what’s going to happen fifteen years from now. You look at your children. You know they’re going to be living in that world. You can see the train coming down the track. Gore said one of the most frustrating things is that you can’t run on that because the public is not interested in wisdom and the public is not wise. The public is actually reactive. So unless you can create is as a scenario that’s going to work for them right now, it’s just something you have to do behind the scenes. You have to figure out how to sell your idea to people within the system.”
“In the first day or two [after 9/11] the flags were plastered everywhere, seeing them was heartening because they indicated that we’re all in this sorrow together. The flags were purely emotional. Once we went to war, once the president announced that we were going to retaliate against the ‘evildoers,’ then the flag again represented what it usually represents, the government. I think that’s when the flags started making me nervous."
"The more history I learn, the more the world fills up with stories. Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey café mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle’s Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top. No wonder it costs so much. And, thanks to Sophie and Michael Coe’s book The True History of Chocolate, I remembered that cacao beans were used as currency at the moment of European contact. When Christopher Columbus’s son Ferdinand captured a Mayan canoe in 1503, he noticed that whenever one of the natives dropped a cacao bean, ‘they all stooped to pick it up, as if an eye had fallen.’ When you know such trivia, an act as mundane as having an overpriced breakfast drink becomes imbued with meaning, even poetry. Plus, I read a women’s magazine article called ‘5 Fabulous Morning Rituals,’ and it said that after you ‘bask in bed’ and ‘walk in nature’ you’re supposed to ‘ponder the sins of the conquistadors.’"
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