"Don’t castigate individuals who’ve been successful."

Mitt Romney said that. More fully:

“I think it’s important for people to make sure that we don’t castigate individuals who’ve been successful.”

Bow down before him, people. He's a success. Thou shalt not castigate the capitalist. Or, as Obama put it in his latest State of the Union:

"We don’t begrudge financial success in this country. We admire it."

R.A. Maynard offers a simple reason not to fall for this crap:

What kind of men are shaped by a system, the golden rule of which is the famous one of David Harum's in a horse trade: "Do to the other fellow as he would like to do to you, but do him 'fust.'"

[...]

The position in which men at the head of great modern business enterprises find themselves is not conducive to the development of the highest traits of character.

"All the first-grade people took the other side of the street when they saw him coming."

He said some extravagant things
And planted a few stings
Under the rich man’s hide.
And one of the sensational newspapers
Gave him a line or two for cutting capers
In front of the Palace of Justice and the Church.
But all the first-grade people took the other side
Of the street when they saw him coming

[...]

And this city had illustrious Pharisees,
And this city had a legion
Of men who make a business of religion—
With eyes one inch apart,
Dark and narrow of heart—
Who give themselves and give the city no peace,
And who are everywhere the best police
For Life as business.
And when they saw this youth
Was telling the truth,
And that his followers were multiplying,
And were going about rejoicing and defying
The social order, and were stirring up
The dregs of discontent in the cup
With the hand of their own happiness,
They saw dynamic mysteries
In the poems of lilies and trees:
Therefore they held him for a felony.

[...]

What he had in mind was simply Love.

But he was prosecuted
As a rebel, and as a rebel executed—
Right in a public place where all could see.
And his mother watched him hang for the felony.
He hated to die, being but thirty-three,
And fearing that his poems might be lost.
And certain members of the Bar Association,
And of the Civic Federation,
And of the League of Public Efficiency,
And a legion
Of men devoted to religion,
With policemen, soldiers, roughs,
Loose women, thieves and toughs,
Came out to see him die;
And hooted at him, giving up the ghost
In great despair and with a fearful cry!

- Edgar Lee Masters, from "A Life in a Life" (1916)

The undignified return of Stella under construction...

Some of you may know me as Dorothy Anderson, but she has left the building.  Say good bye, and hello to me, Stella, who is slowing deleting spam and returning home.

I have accidentally deleted some readers' comments, so all apologies.  We are only a small corner of cyberspace, but we'll say what we want and let you do the same...

Upton Sinclair's other masterpiece

Here's a book not to be missed by those who sympathize with or participate in Occupy Wall Street!

In 1915, Upton Sinclair self-published The Cry for Justice : an Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest. Jack London provided a foreword. In this book of 891 pages, the reader will find "the writing of philosophers, poets, novelists, social reformers, and others who have voiced the struggle against social injustice."

Sinclair called it "a Bible of the future, a gospel of the new hope of the race ... a book to cheer the discouraged and console the wounded in humanity's last war of liberation."

It really is a wonderful thing. See for yourself at the Internet Archive.

"AH, gentlemen, if the governing classes could go down among the unfortunates! But no, they prefer to remain deaf to their appeals. It seems that a fatality impels them, like the royalty of the eighteenth century, toward the precipice which will engulf them; for woe be to those who remain deaf to the cries of the starving, woe to those who, believing themselves of superior essence, assume the right to exploit those beneath them! There comes a time when the people no longer reason; they rise like a hurricane, and rush onward like a torrent. Then we see bleeding heads impaled on pikes."

- Auguste Vaillant, 1894

"As for culture, I usually use that word in its anthropological sense. When I hear it, I load my shotgun. Cheers! Ed."

Ed Abbey said that.

He also said: "Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down."

"Bombing should be a war crime."

Phil Donahue:

Where is the valor? A guy sits in a cage or a control room somewhere in Maryland or maybe Nevada and he sees in the nose cone camera of the unmanned aerial vehicle, there’s the insurgents, how they know, I’m not sure, and they fire an incendiary device, and we kill children, children! And this is on Obama’s watch.

You know, I don’t see how anybody who engages in this kind of killing can claim to be brave. You know, Grenada. We bombed a mental hospital. We don’t have ground troops to go in and take care of Morris Bishop, the communist? And the endangered lives of those medical students? We don’t have to bomb people. It’s just easier. I’m convinced of this. And I also have this totally unassailable position that bombing should be a war crime.

You know, if a Marine goes into a Fallujah home and blows away the family with an AK47 that’s a war crime. If we drop a bomb on that house and incinerate the family, it’s collateral damage. We are in denial. And we are creating language to help us continue to be in denial. This is awful.

(h/t Bad Attitudes)

"We have an obligation to never say anything we don’t believe to be true."

Katrin Becker:

I am one of those people that believes there is no such thing as a white lie – there are only lies (some say it is a disorder). There are many who imply that lying is a normal and necessary part of social interaction. I don’t believe that. While it is not necessary to say everything that pops into your head, it is possible to be honest without being hurtful. I think we have an obligation to never say anything we don’t believe to be true.

"What kind of asshole straps his dog to the roof of the car for twelve hours?"

[source]

"Do you think these plastic weirdos will treat the country any better than they treated Seamus?"
- OHollern

"You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is."

Mark Twain, from "Corn-Pone Opinions":

...I had a friend whose society was very dear to me because I was forbidden by my mother to partake of it. He was a gay and impudent and satirical and delightful young black man -a slave -who daily preached sermons from the top of his master's woodpile, with me for sole audience.

[...]

I listened to the sermons from the open window of a lumber room at the back of the house. One of his texts was this:

"You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is."

[...]

The black philosopher's idea was that a man is not independent, and cannot afford views which might interfere with his bread and butter. If he would prosper, he must train with the majority; in matters of large moment, like politics and religion, he must think and feel with the bulk of his neighbors, or suffer damage in his social standing and in his business prosperities. He must restrict himself to corn-pone opinions -- at least on the surface. He must get his opinions from other people; he must reason out none for himself; he must have no first-hand views.

I think Jerry was right, in the main, but I think he did not go far enough.

1. It was his idea that a man conforms to the majority view of his locality by calculation and intention. This happens, but I think it is not the rule.

2. It was his idea that there is such a thing as a first-hand opinion; an original opinion; an opinion which is coldly reasoned out in a man's head, by a searching analysis of the facts involved, with the heart unconsulted, and the jury room closed against outside influences. It may be that such an opinion has been born somewhere, at some time or other, but I suppose it got away before they could catch it and stuff it and put it in the museum.

I am persuaded that a coldly-thought-out and independent verdict upon a fashion in clothes, or manners, or literature, or politics, or religion, or any other matter that is projected into the field of our notice and interest, is a most rare thing -- if it has indeed ever existed.

“Adopt a policy of being joyful.”

Jane Brody:

Enter an invaluable source of help, if anyone is willing to listen while there is still time to take corrective action. It is a new book called “30 Lessons for Living” (Hudson Street Press) that offers practical advice from more than 1,000 older Americans from different economic, educational and occupational strata who were interviewed as part of the ongoing Cornell Legacy Project.

Its author, Karl Pillemer, a professor of human development at the College of Human Ecology at Cornell and a gerontologist at the Weill Cornell Medical College, calls his subjects “the experts,” and their advice is based on what they did right and wrong in their long lives. Many of the interviews can be viewed at legacyproject.human.cornell.edu.

[...]

ON HAPPINESS Almost to a person, the elders viewed happiness as a choice, not the result of how life treats you.

A 75-year-old man said, “You are not responsible for all the things that happen to you, but you are completely in control of your attitude and your reactions to them.” An 84-year-old said, “Adopt a policy of being joyful.”

The 90-year-old daughter of divorced parents who had lived a hardscrabble life said, “I learned to be grateful for what I have, and no longer bemoan what I don’t have or can’t do.”

Even if their lives were nine decades long, the elders saw life as too short to waste on pessimism, boredom and disillusionment.

“If you’re not getting happier as you get older, then you’re fuckin’ up.”
- Ani DiFranco

Which Side Are You On, Righteous Babe?

In anticipation of Ani DiFranco's new album - due out on January 17th - here she is singing Which Side Are You On? in 2010.

Aaaaaaaannniiiiiiiiii!

"Smart enough — hip enough — to watch CNN."

[source]

Paul Duffy:

Anderson’s the guy in the black tee shirt, you know, the one with prematurely gray hair you’ve seen on billboards looking resolute as he plunges through jungles and treks across Saharan wastes chasing the news. What a guy! The message on the billboards, spoken and unspoken, is that Anderson will go anywhere, risk any danger, bear any burden, to get the story for TV news viewers smart enough — hip enough — to watch CNN.

[...]

A lot of people think Anderson is adorable and it doesn’t much matter what he’s saying as long as he keeps on wearing those black tee shirts. Whatever. The point is, if you like your news lighter than air, you are not going to improve on Erin Burnett and Anderson Cooper. So cute!

But just to round out the picture, let’s not forget that Cute News Network doesn’t have a corner on cute news. There is cuteness to be found elsewhere on the cable channels — over at MSNBC, for instance, where Rachel Maddow spins a unique brand of irony and sarcasm that is irresistibly witty and charming, and nauseating. Like the News Kids over at CNN, Rachel is one of the leading lights of the new generation of TV news broadcasters who are unmistakably accomplished, smart as whips. And cute as buttons.

Sometimes it pays to be neither smart nor hip.