The Work of a Generation

"Why start a union when you could do the Harlem shake?”
- Young Americans

"I've never seen a generation so worth Losing." - Eric Hobsbawm

“I love this company so much, I don’t deserve rights!” - a Noogler

“Our children must be the best educated in the world so that they are prepared for the New Slavery.” - Arne Duncan

"Ruthless competition is good in all things because I am Virtuous." - Joseph A. Craig High School Junior Class President for Life Paul Ryan

"There's a young person in all our hearts, and they crave a master."
- David Brooks

"Nothing grieves me more than being in touch with the youth." - David Bowie

"Fame is one long internship." - Morrissey

"Sorry, can't come to the party, doing unpaid overtime just coz, u know? Tweet me pics!" - The New York Times Presents: This Is 20-Something

“‘The thought of suicide gets one through many a bad night,’ says Nietzsche. But what if there are only bad nights?” - Lena Dunham

"Yeah so we hooked up and I made her do all this stuff and then I never called her again, and I thought, 'How can we make a business model out of this?'" - the inventor of the modern internship

"This is valuable time, and I'm not even getting paid for it! I could be working on my novel!" - Andrew Garfield in Oliver Stone's Intern Nation

"So, do literary magazines have interns?" - New York City Patrolmen's Benevolent Association President Pat Lynch

 China Offers Internship to Tibet

"Why can't I be free!?"
"I'm sorry, wog. The good Lord gave your Agency to me."
- Arkansas, Castle Walmart

"I’ve been so depressed all day, but I won’t complain because whenever I do it feels like a lie." - Georgina Bloomberg

“Life is a battle against Circumstance for Honor.” - the Last Man... he died some time ago...

"This vacation is a pit." - Adorno

“Having a child shackles you, even more than to your family, to your job.” - Priscilla Zuckerberg

"Much of recent history consists of younger generations coming of age and suddenly realizing that they've been had: life isn't good and it was never going to be. They spend the rest of their lives making war on their elders and then defending themselves against the next generation. What's truly nihilistic is that so far no generation has ever had the resolve to strike the problem at its root." - Anton Webern, On Suicide

"All things tend towards the placidity of death. Why should we resist?"
- James Franco

Q: Why kill your children?
A: It's the only humane thing to do.

¡BAILE, BAILE, BAILE!

"Llora el cielo, llora el mar; lloran los desiertos, lloran los manantiales del llano. Lloran los tambores y los tiples. Llora la Madre Tierra." - la Madre Patria

"At long last, we can stop pretending we liked him." - the American Left

"The enemy of my enemy... is insufferable." - Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

"I know how hard this musn't be for you." - Barack Obama extends his condolences to South American leaders

"There is no greater joy for a leader than to outlive his disciples."
- Fidel

"Two for one!" - John Kerry, on learning that a grief-stricken Oliver Stone has retired from filmmaking

"I wish we were still competent enough to pull that kind of shit off in Latin America." - John Brennan on the possibility of nefarious Infection

"He was truly overbearing." - Stephen Sackur

"I can finally order for myself when I go out to eat!" - Evo Morales

"Was he the new Bolívar?"
"Bolívar, no. Elvis, maybe."
- Charlie Rose, Mauricio Funes

"No, I don't think that Chavez's legacy poses any lasting challenges to, well, to anything, if only because it never really worked. If his highly centralized, strong-armed tactics had been wildly successful in really changing the country, perhaps there would be something to think about in terms of whether there's a viable alternative to democracy in popular mobilization behind progressive, redistributionary, pseudo-authoritarian regimes. Instead, Chavez's accomplishments were modest at best, at least compared to what might have been, and often merely symbolic, while elsewhere there were quite substantial reductions of freedom and basic failures to help the people that supported him. It makes you think, the whole idea of a philosopher-king just doesn't work because no one is really that competant." - Noam Chomsky

"I think he was just a powerful man doing what he thought was right by History." - George W. Bush

"He was better than nothing, but not better than Nothing."
- Subcommandante Marcos

"Can you hear that?"
"Hear what?"
"Exactly."
- Juan Carlos I, Antonio Banderas

"Maduro doesn't need to steal home plate, the People will give it to him freely." - Danny Glover arguing with his third base coach, the ghost of Hugo of Chavez, Angels in the Outfield 4: Concrete Diamond

"Manifest Destiny!" - Néstor Kirchner, Pablo Neruda, and Simón Bolívar toasting in the really cool part of Hell

Falling Asleep at the Wheel of History

I. Over the Cliff

"I have a fool proof strategy that will accomplish nothing but continued stalemate while allowing me to keep my job." - John Boehner

"My asshole is self-cleaning!" - Paul Ryan

"Sequestration? Is that like fecal withholding?" - Dr. Koop

"What's all this spending you're railing against?"
"Spending is a feeling, Cokie."
- Eric Cantor

"As the weakness of communism is attested to by accidental scarcity, so the greatness of the capitalist system is confirmed by artificial scarcity." - Steven Levett and Stephen Dubner

"How about the Pentagon, the jobs, and the Iron Dream?"
"We believe, and the Heritage Foundation has done studies to show, that the Pentagon cuts will reduce incidence of Air Force rape."
- Jim Demint 

"I have this fantasy about being dipped in a lake of liquid nitrogen by the Ice Queen and then, while I remain fully conscious, she snaps off my extremities, one at a time, starting with my digits, then my limbs, then my tongue and my ears, and finally my member." - Saxby Chambliss in the Secret Steam Room

"Aaron, where's the spirit of the West Wing, the walking down hallways together?"

"I was freebasing cocaine when I wrote that."
- David Gregory and Aaron Sorkin trapped in an Acela rapidly filling with water

"Totally did not mean to gank yr lighter, yet it seems I did. That's just how degenerate I am: it's a reflex. Pity me, but do not forgive." - text message from Obama to Boehner after the Talks

"Self-destruction is tragic in individuals, predictable in institutions, and inevitable in civilizations." - Nate Silver on Prediction

"Yes, we're all living on borrowed time--borrowed from the future. Today that future has come to collect." - Xi Jinping, Day 0

II. Into the Ravine

"What I crave is not pleasure so much as intensity." - John Boehner, Club Fist, Day 1

"Why do anything when you could stay in all day and slowly kill yourself with Velveeta?" - the Ginch, Day 17

"The only way I can do hygiene is by thinking of it as a war against the self." - Bob Corker flossing until his gums bleed, Day 61

"There is no limit to how bad I can make myself feel.”
- Karl Rove, Day 127

"When the devil came, he was not red. He was a social scientist."
- Rand Paul, the Nursery, Day 523

"God, give us the strength to endure more of your torments." - shaman Lindsay Graham leads the Morlocks in sacrifice, Day 619

"Let hate be your laser." - Gen. Stanley DarkChrystal commands the Yale Leadership Seminar Special Forces in the Battle Against the Mechanical Birds, Day 743

"The things I've done to survive!"
“There is nothing in this world to feel guilty about.”
- Jay Carney and Lawrence Summers after the Defeat of the Children's Brigade, Day 1,051

"It's not too late, we can rebuild!"
"EAT HIM!!!"
- the Last Stand of Sergey Brin, Day 7,191

“They're all dead.”
“I’ll sleep when their ideas are dead.”
- Leader of the Resistance Chelsea Clinton, Last of the Sighted Paul Krugman, Day 15,073

"What do you publish?"
"Whatever burns."
- If You Can See This Ritual Dance Representing the Origin of the Cosmos in a Conflagration Caused By an Ancient Race of Warring Gods, You're Lying

The Notebooks of Barack Hussein Obama II

My best years are behind me, or rather my capacity to have had best years...

I was young once, but I fucked it up.

Comfort rots the brain like sugar rots teeth.

Do not ask yourself, "Am I a good person?" Ask yourself, "Am I the person I want to be?"

To be is not to be: that is not a question. Self-annihilation is redundant.

If only I could recapture the hatred of my youth, my puritanical intolerance for anything that was not on the bleeding edge. If only there were a real, visionary Evil, something I could believe in...

Life is always worse than you want, but never as bad as you dream.


I dreamt I was a coyote ripping open a jackrabbit's throat... I dreamt of velvet and hissing and hard thrusts... something roiling in the night...


Sleep deprivation is the new black.


Is it shameful to laugh at these lines, which are, afterall, but the echo of oppression?
We don’t have any other choice.

The only Beatles records I can listen to anymore are The White Album and Let It Be.
What the hell is wrong with me?

If you haven't seen Ecstasy of the Angels, you have no reason to live, or rather to die.

To what extent is my infatuation with sexually explicit art films responsible for my real life sexlessness? What, for that matter, of my love for political art?

I wish there were a third or fourth gender. Life would be richer...

...or at least more complexly impoverished...


...thoughts form like mist and dissipate... but through the fog... the muffled roar of bombs...


Just because you live in a country where nothing ever changes doesn't mean that's the way it's supposed to be.

Nowhere in this world are any two peoples at war with one another: There are people living their lives, and then there are people trying to rule them.

The thing about Americans is their zeal for letting others kill on their behalves.

...the preciousness with which imperial nations treat (most of) their own citizens lives, equaled only by the vindictiveness with which they persecute their enemies...

We are all J. Christopher Stevens. We are all Sean Smith. We are all Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods. We are all Gilad Shalit.


Only a King can enslave. Therefore, only a King can make free.


One can help society by helping individuals and vice versa. And can help individuals without helping society and versa vice. Yet the idea that rules the age is to help society by not helping individuals and to help individuals by not helping society.

"Society" and "individuals": two lips that never kiss.

All that Modernity has accomplished, it has done by treating human beings as matter.


...the urge to say something, to have something to say...


...my mind searches for a salve, yet all is poison...




We owe it to ourselves to speak the truth, and we owe it to truth to remain silent.




I'm comfortable with the regrets I'll have.

- from the Tablet of Barack Hussein Obama II

The Phantom Menace

"Okay, okay, I admit it: the Internet is a hoax!" - Al Gore
  
"Life is a struggle to accept defeat." - Al Gore

"I've never understood: Why do the poor have children?" - Al Gore 

“You don't care about these people. You don't have any relationship with them at all other than the one you inherited. Get the fuck out of here.” - a mildly drunk Al Gore chases College Democrats out of a soup kitchen

"It's not that I don't want to give you money. I'll give you the money, whatever you want. I just don't want to acknowledge that we exist in the same universe." - Al Gore to a homeless person or Tipper

"Help me. Help my body.” - Al Gore

"At worst, love makes people who shouldn't feel good about themselves at all feel great about themselves for no reason. At best, it is a way for two people to reassure themselves that they are not crazy, that there is some one else who understands just how bad things really are." - Al Gore

“Anyone who denies their own same sex attractions is a hypocrite and a hick.” – a mildly drunk Al Gore delivers the 2006 Maryville College commencement speech before trying to kiss the provost

"You know, I'm not sure I'll ever get laid again. Or want to. Handsome as I am (and I am too vain not to regard myself as handsome), I fear that my corporeal decrepitude has taken me out of the game for good. No matter how interesting and charming some one is, if their body is repulsive, they will be alone forever, sexually at least. I know this is true because it's true for me: I cannot desire anyone with a body like mine, and so I do not expect anyone to desire me. I could change my life in an effort to become desirable, but why? I've been lucky enough to experience reciprocated romantic love once, and that will have to do. If I'm unlucky in love, I am lucky in friendship. Thank God I have you all to help me through it." - Al Gore to his dollhouse

"Girls have it more often!" - George W. Bush, soft but loud in Al Gore's ear

"Make love, goddamnit,  real love!" - Al Gore yelling at the television during the Super Bowl XLVII blackout

“Why did you do it?”
“I’m a gambling addict.”
- Michael Jordan and Al Gore, watching their children scavenge garbage off Space Jam Highway

"I spend most my life wishing I were dead." - Al Gore

"Every time I trim my beard, no matter how little I take off, I am immediately overcome with regret, and what's worse is that no one else seems to notice the change, it's just a horrible, existential stain that only I can see, and it gets the point where, lacking the ratification of my self-perception by others, I hardly even know what's real any more." - Al Gore to Ted Nugent

"If you just structure your life around having regular, tidy bowel movements, everything else locks into place." - Al Gore, in fluent Japanese, in an onsen at the base of Mt. Fuji, December 29, 1989

Scream of Stone

"I have often thought about the theory of panpsychism, what the coltan thinks, whether it can scream..." - former Cabot Corporation CEO and US Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman

"It just works!" - Steve Jobs on the internet/slave labor

"This rock. Beautiful, isn't it?"
"How do you know if it's quality?"
"Your nose starts to bleed just looking at it."
- Chuck Hagel and Charlie Rose on a motorcycle tour of Africa

"Giant boulders in the sky..." - Tim Cook passes out in the sun after too much overseeing

"There's no such thing as humane mining." - Frederick Engels

"And when the last Foxconn worker committed suicide there was silence on heaven and earth for half an hour." - John of Patmos

"I put on the Google Goggles, it was just like They Live!" - Gavin Newsom

"And worst of all, there were no day care services at the mine." - Nicholas Kristof

"With our new app, you can tell what part of the mine your children are working in!" - Mark Zuckerberg, Facelessbook Inc. HQ

"Any doubts that the world was my oyster were quickly dispelled by my trip to Kinshasa." - Priscilla Zuckerberg

"Leave your heart in San Francisco. You won't need it here." - Sergey Brin

"I hate to say it, but Leopold was way ahead of his time." - SFchaz415, Yelp user review of the La Trappe Gastropub on Russian Hill in San Francisco, California, USA

"You know, Beethoven may have been of African descent." - Paul Kagame shouting over the cacophony

"When will this war end?"
"Whenever we pick the winner."
"HAW HAW HAW!"
- the G20 share a hardy laugh about the Permanent Congo War
 
"I have a suspicion that boycotts are not really about fighting anything but about beautiful souls wanting to stay stain-free, a desire that dovetails neatly with a, I won't say prejudice but distaste for certain kinds of people. For the movement to boycott conflict minerals, the stain is black flesh." - Judith Butler

"Read your shrill anti-mining post on my iPhone, way to go!" - #billclinton

"Would I do it all over again? Yes." - Steve Jobs

Like Tears in Rain

"I believe that one day a double-amputee athlete will be able to bash his fucking woman's brains in even more ferociously than his able-bodied peers." - Oscar Pistorius

"Is there no happiness in this life?" - Manti Te'o

"This is going to sound insensitive, but I can't help but admire it." - Lance Armstrong

"Good athletes are all fucking jacked up atavist rapists." - O. J. Simpson

"Better to be Jodi Arias than Reeva Steenkamp." - Nicole Brown Simpson

"Nothing turns me on more than pictures of dead girls." - The New York Post 

"Every new detail that emerges about this grisly crime is more erotic than the last." - Jacob Zuma

"Entitlement, paranoia, and barbarism: a perfect distillation of white South Africa." - Jack Abramoff

"Just look at South Africa: there is an enlightened place, where every man has the right to protect his trophies from his trophy." - Wayne LaPierre

"I did not think I was shooting at my girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp. I thought I was firing blindly at the black man in my bathroom." - the Confession

"It's legally impossible for a paraplegic to commit murder. Every man of science knows that the black humors accumulate around the knees." - the Defence 

"Why'd you do it!"
"It wasn't me, judge! It was the performance enhancing drugs I intentionally took to excel at largely symbolic events!"
- the Exoneration

"O, my country, you have no heroes." -  Nelson Mandela, awaking from a dream about a snail crawling across the edge of a razor unscathed

"No amount of gates and guns and armored guards can protect you from love." - Chris Brown

"Hate will find a way." - Desmond Tutu