Book: Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution:: Selected Essays, 1977-1992
Quotes of Book: Jack London, Hemingway, and
That a president is inevitably put forward and elected by the forces of established wealth and power means usually that he will be indentured by the time he reaches office. But in fact he is the freest of men if he will have the courage to think so and, at least theoretically, could be so transported by the millions of people who have endorsed his candidacy as to want to do the best for them. He might come to solemn appreciation of the vote we cast, in all our multicolored and multigendered millions, as an act of trust, fingers crossed, a kind of prayer. Not that it's worked out that way. In 1968 Richard Nixon rebounded from his defeat at the hands of Jack Kennedy, and there he was again, his head sunk between the hunched shoulders of his three-button suit and his arms raised in victory, the exacted revenge of the pod people. That someone so rigid and lacking in honor or moral distinction of any kind, someone so stiff with crippling hatreds, so spiritually dysfunctional, out of touch with everything in life that is joyful and fervently beautiful and blessed, with no discernible reverence in him for human life, and certainly with never a hope of wisdom, but living only by pure politics, as if it were some colorless blood substitute in his veins-that this being could lurchingly stumble up from his own wretched career and use history and the two-party system to elect himself president is, I suppose, a gloriously perverse justification of our democratic form of government." book-quoteOne of Winston's colleagues in the Ministry of Truth who is working on the dictionary explains the beauty of Newspeak: You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words-scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone.… It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.… Take good, for instance. If you have a word like good, what need is there for a word like bad? Ungood will do just as well.… You haven't a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston. In the end, we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.… In fact, there will be no thought as we understand it now. book-quote
