Charlie Rose

Chomsky  07/30/2012 09:50 PM Report

It's preposterous to suggest that filmmakers and video game developers should self-censor because SOME crazy people MIGHT be negatively influenced by the violence on screen.

A tiny, tiny minority of people are criminally insane. I don't want any sort of a misguided attention to that rare number to dictate what screenplays get filmed or what concepts become video games.

Janosh  07/25/2012 09:51 PM Report

I suppose I'll check the book out (Library) but Anderson seems to me to be peddling the generic 60s line that people who weren't there (he wasn't) accept.

For example, he buys the "do your own thing" line. In my experience (ahem) in Haight Ashbury and in Berkeley, we were not seeking our own individual truths, we were trying to find some common understandings and strategies.

We "protested" but we weren't "protesters." That is, we did try to cripple the "war machine" but we didn't restrict ourselves to placards and marches. We went further, and in large numbers. We knew what we were about, and none of us claimed perfect knowledge.

NOBODY cared about James Bond fergawds sake. He came to America's attention through Playboy Magazine, which means he was of interest to 40year old midwesterners in the 60s and of no interest to people who live in the vital guts of the US, which means the coasts.

chawlydoodahdolly  07/25/2012 08:07 PM Report

I thought love was only true in fairytales; and then for someone else but not for me. Love was out to get me, or so it seems, yadduh yadduh yadduh. Then I saw her face! Now I'm a Believer! Not a trace, or doubt in my mind! I'm in love! I'm a Believer! I'm a Believer! I wanna eat her Beaver! I'm a Believer! yeah yeah yeah!

chawlydoodahdolly  07/25/2012 07:59 PM Report

Forrest Gump, Daniel Boone, and Davy Crockett

chawlydoodahdolly  07/25/2012 07:57 PM Report

Now about this book, Forrest Gump

chawlydoodahdolly  07/25/2012 07:56 PM Report

What do you mean, John? Nobody says, "Trust Me" anymore. Everybody just says, "Good Luck" these days.

and that's how it is.

Good Luck

Gelles  07/25/2012 05:51 PM Report

"True belief" in America as an Empire determined to decline in favor of growth of worse nations in its place, fits the Sixty's not the Forty's.

Sixty years later, we still say "Trust Me", my true belief is right and your's is not.

Have we changed the economic order?

Can we continue to make American computers in China?

Are we alive or are we characters in our favorite book (fiction or not)?

REMant  07/25/2012 12:59 PM Report

He was born a little too late for this subject. There was a big difference between those graduating from high school in the early '60s, drafted to fight in Vietnam, and those graduating a decade later, but it's a myth, common tho it has become, to suppose that the public, even youth, were innately opposed to that war.

We find a lot of myths in history writing: the jazz age and lost generation; the forgotten man, etc. It occurs to me we'd be a lot better off teaching current affairs in schools, and history only when kids are able to understand it, rather than teaching them notions inapplicable, because mythical. Coincidentally, I've been studying the life of a young man, a teenager in the Revolution, later becoming one of the country's greatest jurists, whose beliefs appear to have been substantially distorted, to some extent by his own maturing sentimentalism.

IMHO our moral problems are the result of monetary and fiscal policies, not vice versa, tho it is, as I mentioned in connection with Mr Churkin, rooted in religious reform, whose hypocrisy Mandeville skewered long before David Brooks, and it is quite clear that such sentimentalism evolved hand in hand with increasing privacy and privatization. Richard Sennett, William Whyte, C. Wright Mills, Robert Putnam, Herbert Marcuse, and many others have commented on it, but Tocqueville had already put his finger on most aspects. I used to think with Morton Horwitz the idea of contract must have had something to do with it, but contract is classically Liberal or republican and a matter only of jealousy, while the idea that we are naturally social is Whiggish. That involves dependency, shame, envy, psychological compensation, not a little of which we see at the movies, because the more isolated we've become, the more vicariously we live.

"True Believer," BTW, was the phrase used by longshoreman cum sociologist Eric Hoffer in his 1951 book of that name, to characterize utopian reformers, which while it came close to describing the phenomenon, is too devoid of historical understanding and influenced by neo-Freudian post-war psychological theorizing. The work was a staple of sociology classes for decades, along with The Lonely Crowd, and, in a supreme irony, became a neocon favorite, Reagan awarding the author the Presidential Medal of Freedom.