There are three great cities in the United States: there’s Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York – in that order.
L.A. is the apocalypse: it’s you and a bunch of parking lots… The city, ironically, is emotionally authentic. It says… you’re the least important person in the room; get over it.
The whole thing is ridiculous. It’s the most ridiculous city in the world – but everyone who lives there knows that. No one thinks that L.A. “works,” or that it’s well-designed, or that it’s perfectly functional, or even that it makes sense to have put it there in the first place; they just think it’s interesting. And they have fun there.
And the huge irony is that Southern California is where you can actually do what you want to do; you can just relax and be ridiculous. In L.A. you don’t have to be embarrassed by yourself. You’re not driven into a state of endless, vaguely militarized self-justification by your xenophobic neighbors…
The desert, the ocean, the tectonic plates, the clear skies, the sun itself, the Hollywood Walk of Fame – even the parking lots: everything there somehow precedes you, even new construction sites, and it’s bigger than you and more abstract than you and indifferent to you… You’re free.In L.A. you can grow Fabio hair and go to the Arclight and not be embarrassed by yourself. Every mode of living is appropriate for L.A. You can do what you want.
Los Angeles is the confrontation with the void… It’s the confrontation with geology through plate tectonics and buried oil, methane, gravel, tar, and whatever other weird deposits of unknown ancient remains are sitting around down there in the dry and fractured subsurface. It’s a confrontation with the oceanic; with anonymity; with desert time; with endless parking lots.
And it doesn’t need humanizing. Who cares if you can’t identify with Los Angeles? It doesn’t need to be made human. It’s better than that.
Greater Los Angeles, Geoff Manaugh, 2007
The true gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good-will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness, but always with sincerity and sympathy, and whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others rather than his own; who appears well in any company and who is at home what he seems to be abroad—a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe.
John Walter Wayland, The Baltimore Sun, January 31, 1909
Twenty years ago today I started posting to this site. A year later I marked the occasion. And now, another anniversary: 20 years. Blogging still works and remains proof of a better way in a world of social networks. As humble as this site is, it contributed to major real-world experiences in my life. So a sincere thanks to all of you for reading and writing in!
No amount of homage paid to the past is a sure indication of living virtue. On the contrary, the more profusely it is bestowed, the more clearly it will be seen that it is designed as a cloak to cover moral cowardice or arrant apostasy. Nothing is easier, nothing more common, than to honor “Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”; to build and garnish the tombs of the old prophets; to celebrate the deeds of Jesus and his Apostles. Nothing is more difficult, nothing more rare, than to walk in their footsteps and imitate their example; to live, in our day, as they did in theirs, without reputation, hated, despised, persecuted, for righteousness’ sake.
William Lloyd Garrison
I enjoyed the following letter from George Catlett Marshall to Charles J. Graham, found in the Marshall Foundation library and included in We Cannot Delay (a decade later he would echo the sentiment in public remarks). At the time, Marshall was the Chief of Staff of the Army, a post he held for the duration of WWII:
September 23, 1941
Dear Charlie:
I wish it were possible for me to accept your tempting invitation to the Woodmont Rod and Gun Club’s first shoot of the season on the 15th of November. There is nothing I would like better than to be a member of your party but unfortunately for me, I expect to be in Panama at that time.
Am sure that I would enjoy meeting Wendell Willkie, particularly under such informal and agreeable circumstances, and as to my political faith—I have never voted, my father was a democrat, my mother a republican, and I am an Episcopalian.
Thank you many times for asking me to join you on this alluring outing, I am indeed sorry that I cannot be with you.
Faithfully yours,
A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change.
Richard Rorty
I’ve tumbled this one over-and-over this week. Rational argument doesn’t cause us to change our positions. But when we hear something novel (to us) we are more willing to consider we may have been holding our position for insufficient reasons (until now). (via swissmiss)
Free men are aware of the imperfections inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, and so on are far from absolute, that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect. The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestations of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity.
Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time
I found I belonged somewhere ideologically, which was comforting. I discovered that I was, instinctively, a liberal, as though I had been born with a gene that made my political vision sensitive to one color and not another. “Liberal” has a somewhat beaten down and despised connotation in the United States today. People shun the label, which is a pity. Liberalism in the classic sense is one of the great intellectual movements of Western civilization; its belief in individual freedom inspired the American Revolution. In the modern sense, liberalism has much to be proud of: not least the idea that government should create minimum conditions for a decent existence for its citizens. Western societies may quibble over the definition of “minimum conditions” — or safety net — but that aspect of liberalism remains a fundamental fact of life.
Instinctively, I find it more satisfying to belong with those people in all countries who put their trust in Man’s best quality, his rational intellect and its ability to recognize and solve problems. It is distressing that the recent course of American politics has caused that trust to be ridiculed or dismissed as some sort of soft-headedness, inappropriate to a virile nation confronting the dangerous world. It will be unfortunate if being a “liberal” remains an embarrassment, if young Americans should begin to believe that conservatives are the only realists.
Each has its absurd extreme: liberalism tending to inspire foolish altruism and unwarranted optimism; conservatism leading to unbridled selfishness and paranoia. Taken in moderation, I prefer the liberal impulse: it is the impulse behind the great forces that have advanced mankind, like Christianity.
Robert MacNeil, The Right Place at the Right Time