What Is the Light at the End of the Tunnel?

“False consciousness.” - Adorno

“The Chinese dream!” – Xi Jinping

"A book deal." - Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

“A fucking awesome statue of me.” – Recep Erdoğan

“Somewhere in Russia.” – Bashar al-Assad

“Damascus, Lawrence, Damascus!” – John McCain

“A rave in Ibiza.” – Prince Harry

“Jazz!” - Wynton Marsalis

“A feeding tube.” – a Guantanamo Bay detainee

“But a memory.” – Barack Obama

“Nothing as bright as I thought.” – Edward Snowden

“YOU CAN SEE IT TOO?!” – Bradley Manning

“Mine.” – Google

“Sex, I hope.” – puberty

“College.” – a high schooler

“Default.” – a college student

“Graduate school.” – the precariat

“Teaching high school.” – a graduate student, if s/he’s lucky

“It has gone out for ever.” – a teacher

“It’s all around us, baby! I’m having a great time!” – Bill Clinton

“Hell.” – the Editors

The Ecstasy of Being Told What to Do

“I am your mother.” - Barack Obama

“Cook your freshly grown food real slow like a proud white man.”
- Michael Pollan

"You'll never buy beer after 10 again!" - Recep Erdoğan

"Not in front of Dad!" - South Africa

“All of modernity has been leading up to this moment.” - Xi Jinping on the Dehui slaughterhouse fire

“The ‘Chinese People’ are the vanity mirror of the Communist Party.”
- Peng Liyuan

“Why Hong Kong? To martyr himself on the rack of his residual liberalism? I’d despise him just as much if he’d leaked all the files and fled to Cuba. At least then he could have lived a long and exceptionally healthy life of mojitos, brown-skinned women, and old-fashioned cars.” - John McCain on Edward Snowden

"I'm telling you, this guy is way more fringe than he lets on." - Rand Paul to his bunker maid

"This looks like a job for--CHINESE GANGSTERS!"
- John Kerry, gunned down at a P. F. Changs in Rancho Mirage, CA

"The People are like women in classic Hollywood films: they don't realize they love you until after you've fucked them."  - Mark Sanford

"Your representatives have not failed you. You have failed yourselves through your representatives." - Lindsey Graham

“Even the rich people I like, I hate.” - Warren Buffet

"I've given up fucking for saving the world, but I remain motivated by the same narcissistic sense of entitlement." - Bill Clinton, the William F. Buckley Dark Tubs, Davos

"I deserve to be mayor. I deserve to be loved." - Anthony Weiner

"I don't know where to go without an admissions test to show me the way." - the overachiever confronts the end of the line  

“We will only achieve Reform when we have liquidated the teacher as a class.” - Michelle Rhee

"There are those who would say that what we need is a new Master. I tell you: the Master you have been looking for is already inside you, waiting to surrender." - George R. R. Martin

“Yes, I can.” - Barack Obama

Open Your Mouth For Destiny

"As they say in Italy these days, it is time to put on the white gloves." - Eric Holder

"I think this is perhaps the most important Slave Code case that this court has heard in decades." - Samuel Alito

"This is the only way to save the White Race!" - Charles Murray, from the gallery

"This case isn't about property."
"Property?"
"Oh, sorry I meant to say liberty."
- Anthony Kennedy, Sonia Sotomayor

"I don't spit for free." - Elena Kagen

"Everyone knows that the way to get to the boss is to roll his capos and whores. Human genomes are so many pins, counselor." - C.J. Roberts, oral argument

"Can you imagine some damn commoner putting his hands in your mouth?!" - Anthony Scalia

"Nino is a flamboyant barbarian, but, man, it's fun to be friends with a real honest-to-goodness white ethnic!" - Ruth Bader Ginsburg

"Wow, this guy is smart!"
"No, but stupid loves itself."
- Charlie Rose and an intern on Scalia

Justice Scalia Retires to Colonial Williamsburg

"The DNA of every black man in the country shall be collected into a single serum, and I shall drink the serum." - Clarence Thomas

"This may surprise you, but I don't think we really need DNA sniffers. Racism works just fine." - Ray Kelly

"Aren't you excited?"
"Objectivity and efficiency aren't exciting, nothing will ever make me as happy as the 1968 Democratic Convention."
- Reporter and Cop

"I'll never be safe!" - Dan Rather gurgling vodka

"Whoever is against this ruling is against the future, a glittering world of obsidian skies, cloud consciousness, insta-death, sexual automation!" - Robert Mueller passes out from excessive blood flow to his Control Boner

"Big Data will never be free if we continue to allow individuals to stand in its way." - Eric Schmidt, amicus brief

"I'm fine with this as long as it doesn't apply to military sex crimes, that's for the Chain of Command to decide." - Lindsey Graham

"It seems no matter how dire the times, throughout human history someone is having a great time of it all." - fmr. Justice John Paul Stevens drinking with Jon Hamm, Ft. Lauderdale