What kind of people do we wish to become, and how do we know an American when we see one? Is it possible to pursue a common purpose without a common history or a standard text?
Of what does politics consist except the making of imperfect decisions, many of them unjust and quite a few of them deadly?
Power broken into a thousand pieces can be hidden and disowned.
When we talk about the foreign, the question becomes one of us versus them. But in the end, is one just the opposite side of the other?
Unlike every other nation in the world, the United States defines itself as a hypothesis and constitutes itself as an argument.
The rich, like well brought up children, are meant to be seen, not heard.
At this late stage in the history of American capitalism I’m not sure I know how much testimony still needs to be presented to establish the relation between profit and theft.
The days of my youth I remember as nearly always in need of explanation, and not as much fun as advertised in the promotions for board games and breakfast cereal.
The American press is, and always has been, a booster press, its editorial pages characteristically advancing the same arguments as the paid advertising copy.
The substitution of meaning accounts for the grasping of misers as well as the extravagance of spendthrifts. Karl Marx well understood this peculiar transformation of flesh into coin.
The pose of innocence is as mandatory as the ability to eat banquet food and endure the scourging of the press.
The playing field is more sacred than the stock exchange, more blessed than Capital Hill or the vaults of Fort Knox. The diamond and the gridiron – and, to a lesser degree, the court, the rink, the track, and the ring – embody the American dream of Eden.
Since the eighteenth century the immense expansion of the worlds wealth has come about as a result of a correspondingly immense expansion of credit, which in turn has demanded increasingly stupendous suspensions of disbelief.
Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.
Democracy is a difficult art of government, demanding of its citizens high ratios of courage and literacy, and at the moment we lack both the necessary habits of mind and a sphere of common reference.
As a child growing up in the precincts of wealth, and later as a college student, newspaper reporter and resident of New York’s Upper East Side, I got used to listening to the talk of financial killings and sexual misalliance that animates the conversation of the rich and the familiars of the rich.
Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors.
Let the corporations do as they please – pillage the environment, falsify their advertising, rig the securities markets – and it is none of the federal government’s business to interfere with the will of heaven.
The world goes on as before, and it turns out that nobody else seems to to notice the unbearable lightness of being.
Given lesser opportunities, Kissinger would have done very well as a talk show host. Fortunately for him, although not so fortunately for the United States, he found his patron in Nelson Rockefeller instead of William Paley.
War is easier than peace. The government elects to punish an enemy it perceives as weak because it is easier to send an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf than to attempt the harder task of making American society not so wretchedly defaced by its hungry children, its crowded prisons, and its corporate thieves...