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where he roosted long enough for the letter to catch him—catch him like a javelin, quivering squarely between the shoulder-blades of his spirit.
beneath this stinging veneer of fine health and spirits he was cold and...
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“Almost nobody’s competent,
enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.”
What he still had to learn was that without rank, without guest privileges, he lived on a primitive level of social justice.
The greatest part of its mass, the part that called forth such poisonous emotions, was undefined: an amalgam of perversions, filth, disease, a galaxy of traits, any one of which would make a man a despicable outcast. The saboteur
wasn’t a wrecker of machines but an image every man prided himself on being unlike.
This was goodbye to his life so far, to the whole of his father’s life. He hadn’t had the satisfaction of telling someone he’d quit, of being believed; but he’d quit. Goodbye. None of this had anything to do with him any more.
I quit too, but called it early retirement …
“Or a W-255.” “Public relations,”
“Please, what are public relations?” said Khashdrahr.
“that profession specializing in the cultivation, by applied psychology in mass communication media, of favorable public opinion with regard to controversial issues and institutions, without being offensive to anyone of importance, and with the continued stability of the economy and society its primary goal.”
because of the economics of the thing. In order to be self-supporting, a book club has to have at least a half-million members, or it isn’t worth setting up the machinery—the electronic billers, the electronic addressers, the electronic wrappers, the electronic presses, and the electronic dividend computers.”
Goodreads if you would…
“Well, a fully automatic setup like that makes culture very cheap. Book costs less than seven packs of chewing gum.
Prescient … Bezos e books bargain bin for $1.99!
my husband says somebody’s just got to be maladjusted; that somebody’s got to be uncomfortable enough to wonder where people are, where they’re going, and
why they’re going there. That was the trouble with his book. It raised those questions, and was rejected. So he was ordered into public-relations duty.”
In its first two years the football team had paid for itself. In the next three,
and four new professorial chairs: the Philosophy of Creative Engineering, Creative Engineering History, Creative Public Relations for Engineers, and Creative Engineering and the Captive Consumer.
Cornell was going to get progressive, or they could find themselves another coach, Roseberry told himself. Now, Tennessee—there was a progressive setup. They kept their team in Miami Beach, and no wonder Milankowitz went there for $35,000, after he turned down Chicago for $40,000.
“And then we get back to basic values, basic virtues!” said Finnerty. “Men doing men’s work, women doing women’s work. People doing people’s thinking.”
Yikes -progressive?
In the early light, the town seemed an enormous jewel box, lined with the black and gray velvet of fly-ash, and filled with millions of twinkling treasures: bits of air conditioners, amplidynes, analyzers, arc welders, batteries, belts, billers, bookkeeping machines, bottlers, canners, capacitors, circuit-breakers, clocks, coin boxes, calorimeters, colorimeters, computers, condensers, conduits, controls, converters, conveyers, cryostats, counters, cutouts, densitometers, detectors, dust precipitators, dishwashers, dispensers, dynamometers, dynamotors,
And so on…
At the wheel of the limousine was Doctor Edward Francis Finnerty. Beside him was Doctor Paul Proteus. In the back seat were the Reverend James J. Lasher and Professor Ludwig von Neumann,
“The Renaissance comes to upstate New York! We’ll rediscover the two greatest wonders of the world, the human mind and hand.”
like the Indians’ massacre of Custer and his men,” said Lasher reflectively. “The Little Bighorn. One isolated victory against an irresistable tide. More and more whites where Custer came from; more and more machines where these came from.
chance to give a savage blow to a close little society that made no comfortable place for him.
