Noel Ignatiev's Blog

Poked in the Eye with a Sharp Stick

I loathe public life and politicians. This aversion has not saved me from prolonged brushes with the species, but it has exempted me from run-of-the-mill mandates, the ones accepted by the look-at-me-types who jostle for places on the platform. Even today I have barely got the better of this odious and puerile superiority complex (‘I’m worth more than all those demagogies, manipulators, killers, cynics, twisters, carpetbaggers, sleaze merchants, etc., etc.’) What I most dreaded in the clamor of the forum was the workless ephemera, those febrile short-lived entities, those ten weak-witted characters whose faces, whose nervous tics, the timbre of whose voices, amplified daily by radio and television (whose sole vocation this seems to be), obsess us for 30 years until the tide of time erases them like faces drawn in the sand. – Regis Debray, Praised Be Our Lords.

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