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The Monday Morning Memo

“To live sanely in Los Angeles (or, I suppose, in any other large American city) you have to cultivate the art of staying awake. You must learn to resist (firmly but not tensely) the unceasing hypnotic suggestions of the radio, the billboards, the movies and the newspapers; those demon voices which are forever whispering in your ear what you should desire, what you should fear, what you should wear and eat and drink and enjoy, what you should think and do and be. They have planned a life for you from the cradle to the grave and beyond which it would be easy, fatally easy, to accept. The least wandering of the attention, the least relaxation of your awareness, and already the eyelids begin to droop, the eyes grow vacant, the body starts to move in obedience to the hypnotist’s command. Wake up, wake up before you sign that seven-year contract, buy that house you don’t really want, marry that girl you secretly despise. Don’t reach for the whisky, that won’t help you. You’ve got to think, to discriminate, to exercise your own free will and judgment. And you must do this, I repeat, without tension, quite rationally and calmly. For if you give way to fury against the hypnotists, if you smash the radio and tear the newspapers to shreds, you will only rush to the other extreme and fossilize into defiant eccentricity.”

– Christopher Isherwood,
from “Los Angeles,” Exhumations, (1966)

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Random Quote:

“

Did Columbus commit atrocities? Of course, but people back then were generally atrocious… ‘Presentism’ is judging everyone in the past by the standards of the present. It’s the belief that people who lived 100 or 500 or a thousand years ago, ‘really should have known better.’ It’s like getting mad at yourself for not knowing what-you-know-now when you were 10… ‘Presentism’ is just a way to congratulate yourself about being better than George Washington because you have a gay friend and he didn’t. But if he was alive today, he would, too. And if you were alive then, you wouldn’t… Being woke is like a magic moral time machine where you judge everybody against what you imagine you would’ve done in 1066, and you always win.

“

- Bill Maher, RealTime

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