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That is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.
Again: This was only 1934, and World War Two was still a long way off. It was a long way off, that is, if five years can be considered a long way off. So flying a Nazi flag in Midland City was no more offensive than flying a Greek or Irish or Confederate flag, or whatever.
This aged well
I was not only fingerprinted. I was faceprinted, too. The police pushed my hand and then my face into a shallow pan of gummy black ink. I was straightened up, and one of the policemen commented that I was a proper-looking nigger now. Until that moment, I had been willing to believe that policemen were my best friends and everybody’s best friends.
Police brutality
“My wife has been killed by a machine which should never have come into the hands of any human being. It is called a firearm. It makes the blackest of all human wishes come true at once, at a distance: that something die. “There is evil for you. “We cannot get rid of mankind’s fleetingly wicked wishes. We can get rid of the machines that make them come true. “I give you a holy word: DISARM.”
Disarmament
Someday all we neuters would come out of our closets and form a parade. I even decided what banner our front rank should carry, as wide as Fifth Avenue. A single word would be printed on it in letters four feet high: EGREGIOUS. Most people think that word means terrible or unheard of or unforgivable. It has a much more interesting story than that to tell. It means “outside the herd.” Imagine that—thousands of people, outside the herd.
Asexual rights
“It’s a widely accepted principle,” he says, “that you can claim a piece of land which has been inhabited for tens of thousands of years, if only you will repeat this mantra endlessly: ‘We discovered it, we discovered it, we discovered it….”’
Colonialism
We all see our lives as stories, it seems to me, and I am convinced that psychologists and sociologists and historians and so on would find it useful to acknowledge that. If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended, and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.
“To be is to do”—Socrates. “To do is to be”—Jean-Paul Sartre. “Do be do be do”—Frank Sinatra.
