More good passages from his Poetry Night at the Ballpark and Other Scenes from an Alternative America
"[T]he Cinematic World On Its Head Act of 1991 . . . mandated that all judges in movies and TV be stern black females while the meaty criminal parts must go to white actors, preferably those who can affect Southern accents and play characters named Dean."
"Before perpetual war and suffocating bureaucracy, this used to be a helluva country, as Jack Nicholson mused through a haze of marijuana smoke in Easy Rider."
"When Sam and his cousins asked her, 'Did you kill lots of people?' Aunt Harriet disappointed them by answering no. 'Why not?' they wondered. 'Whuffoh I want to kill folks?' replied Harriet Tubman. 'Nobody nevah kill me.'"
"[T]hose Americans not blinded by Second World War nostalgia understand that war and militarism are the family's most ferocious enemies."
"The idea that at this very moment a teenager in Butte, a down-and-outer in El Paso, and a grandmother in the Great Smoky Mountains are absorbing the same televised soma fills me with dull dread. Television has done more to erase local culture and color than any other noxious device in our place-effacing empire."
"Russell Kirk famously threw a TV out of a second-story window of his home in Mecosta, Michigan, but the damned things are like zombies: they keep coming on, no matter how furiously one fights them off. My friend Kara Beer tells me that one of Kirk's daughters had friends audiotape episodes of “Charlie's Angels,” to which she would listen intently at recess. (I love that image: listening to “Charlie's Angels.”)"
"H.L. Mencken as grad student is no more plausible than Bill Clinton as Benedictine."
"Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis–A regionalist dystopia by a Minnesota Firster. George Babbitt is a fool not because he is provincial but because he has bought into the lie of mass culture. If you drink at Starbucks and watch Sex and the City, you're Babbitt."
