The American Dream

[jochen stremmel]

To Benjamin Dill, the corridors of the Carroll Arms still reeked of
old-style tag-team politics, and of its cheap scent and loveless sex and
hundred-proof bourbon and cigars that came wrapped in cellophane and were
sold for a quarter one and two at a time. Although he considered himself a
political agnostic, Dill liked most politicians – and most laborskates and
consumer fussbudgets and civil rights practitioners and professional whale
watchers and tree huggers and antinuke nuts and almost anyone who would
rise from one of the wooden folding chairs at the Tuesday night meeting in
the basement of the Unitarian church and earnestly demand to know ‘what we
here tonight can do about this.’ Dill had long since despaired that there
was not much anyone could do about anything, but those that still believed
there was interested him and he found them, for the most part, amusing
company and witty conversationalists.

>From Briarpatch, one of the better novels of 1984.

2015-04-21 16:13 GMT+02:00 Otto <ottosell at googlemail.com>:

> Ferguson...
> http://cdn1.spiegel.de/images/image-838388-galleryV9-iqgx.jpg
>
> 2015-04-21 15:56 GMT+02:00 jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>:
> > That question is rhetorical, right?
> >
> > 2015-04-21 15:44 GMT+02:00 Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>:
> >>
> >> Why isn't that last sentence as oft-quoted as the famous Amer Dream
> >> sentence at the End of Gatsby?
> >>
> >> On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 9:00 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> > "Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was
> >> > worth
> >> > controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely
> >> > inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system
> >> > created.
> >> > Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers,
> if
> >> > they
> >> > asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved
> >> > henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for
> >> > committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the
> >> > American
> >> > dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of
> >> > cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun."
> >> > -- Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, 1965
> >> -
> >> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> >
> >
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20150421/3bc3fbef/attachment.html>