Catawampusland Quotes

“Donald Trump is magnificently terrifying to reasonable Americans because his popularity, win or lose, illuminates a massive stratum of voting, gun-toting Americans who want desperately to be told that their binary values are valid. They want someone to enunciate for them what they know in their heart of hearts: that they and their prejudices and their lust for violence and their stalwart refusal to take part in a complex world of political moving parts puts them in league with the men who waited for the British, guns in hand at Concord Bridge.”
― Dan Johnson, Catawampusland

“You cling to culture like an orphan drags her rag doll from foster home to foster home. It is your last soiled reminder of what you think you were. You'd rather die at the stake than adapt or evolve because change is scary. So you guard the same tired shit as if it's a precious, sacrosanct relic from the holy crusades of your ancestors when, in fact, it is a withered turn wrapped in butcher paper.”
― Dan Johnson, Catawampusland

“It must be nice to sit back in your study and look at your Thomas Jefferson biographies and think to yourself, 'thank God we're finally killing this big government leviathan" without having to reconcile the fact that the kill off isn't elevating you, the common man, to new autonomy. It's facilitating the enshrinement of extremely wealthy jerk off ideologues who see the world as something to be sold off to the highest bidder. Big gub'ment in the hands of presumptuous elites? No thanks. The world turned into a regulation free marketplace with no avenue for recourse against the profit-at-any-cost set? Double no thanks.”
― Dan Johnson, Catawampusland

“Los Angeles was built as a machine of transformation. it mirrors industrialism and the triumph of progress over recalcitrance. But progress is a mixed bill. It has easily brought as much sorrow as joy. We must try to remember that its greatest success is the tilling of raw materials into a dubious finished product.”
― Dan Johnson, Catawampusland

“See, all this shit in the Middle East is not really about religion or age-long battles between civilization and barbarism. This whole kit and caboodle is about major powers manipulating a zone of instability to accumulate vast fortunes and consolidate new axes of power. The whole anti-ISIS frenzy is a totally sweet brand, don't get me wrong. But it's not exactly selling justice and peace in the Middle East. More like the idea of justice and peace as a sweet vinyl skin stretched over the promotional SUV that the marketing manager sends out to steal a shitload of oil.”
― Dan Johnson, Catawampusland

“That word again. 'Freedom.' It is the golden tuning fork wielded by pied pipers and charlatans alike to realign a vast demographic of people who fundamentally crave simplicity. Since the birth of the steam engine and the rapid march of industrialism, a ceaseless parade of phony advocacy has tried to wield the hate and frustration of an American underclass that has been zapped and eroded time and time again by future shock. The playbook is simple: play off of differences, vilify anyone who can be made to appear as other, stress moral purity, canonize simplicity, decry any sort of establishment within convenient hating distance, code power with subtle signs of sex, and convert a foundation of fear to its stronger, more virile corollary--military power. When in doubt, capitalize on deeply ambiguous ideological symbols such as 'freedom,' re-appropriate historical moments as examples of conservative triumph, and constantly wave the red, white, and blue.”
― Dan Johnson, Catawampusland

“The carnival is in full swing around us. Unspeakable depravities are occurring in the shadows behind the tent. Sinister cabals of dark wizards make blood pacts with the mutants on stage. The paranoid hear voices rich with ominous foreboding. Somewhere, someone is getting raped and it may as well be all of us. We're trying to rationalize our way out of a situation where we've been made to believe a moral stand is all that separates us from destruction. But we're fundamentally immoral people. Our morality can be summed up as such: 'I have to get mine.”
― Dan Johnson, Catawampusland

“The American people have a nasty habit of waiting until it's far too late to start giving a shit. By and large, your average eligible voter tunes in to politics once every two or four years because they have been scared, shocked, bullied, cajoled, stimulated, seduced, suckered, or outright fear fucked by one or more extremities of the hideous mutant that is our electoral process.”
― Dan Johnson, Catawampusland

“Don't assume your elected officials have your best interest in mind. Read the entire book before you see the movie. Stop Instagramming your goddam twenty-dollar quinoa salad. Don't buy that new pair of pants. Go on a hike instead of watching the game. Don't get your history from the Walt Disney Company. Seek authenticity at whatever cost. Take difficult journeys of body and mind for no reason other than proving to yourself that they are possible. Double check the facts you take for granted. Form your own well-researched opinions. Take great pains not to add any more heartache to the world. Strive to see the impact of your actions as they echo in the universe beyond.”
― Dan Johnson, Catawampusland

“Los Angeles, you've got to be more than the sum of your hats.”
― Dan Johnson, Catawampusland

“Ours isn't a perfect world. It's downtown--a gilded toilet where people defecate in the streets, where untreated crazies run amok, where Business Improvement District dispatchers get stabbed in the back, where residents gleefully attend midnight arson, where cars pin people to walls, where tourists disintegrate in water tanks, where old men get beaten to death outside their apartments.”
― Dan Johnson, Catawampusland

“I propose a rebranding. Let's call downtown what is is: visceral. Downtown is passing notes of perfume and feces and wood-smoked cuisine wafting through the streets between piles of vomit left over from last night's bender. It is silence cut by sirens. It is 2 a.m. drunk shouts and 3 a.m. screams for help. It is smog-tinted sunsets framed by century-old buildings and draped with a parade of shabby tents. It is the maddening frustration of traffic jams borne of closed streets and the ecstasy of jasmine in bloom by the cathedral on a warm spring night.”
― Dan Johnson, Catawampusland

“We can't fix society until we fix the schools. We can't fix the schools until we fix the neighborhoods. We can't fix the neighborhoods until we fix the economy. We can't fix the economy until we fix politics. We can't fix politics until we fix the pernicious effect of basic human insecurities. We can't fix the pernicious effect of basic human insecurities until we fix society. We can't fix society until we fix the schools.”
― Dan Johnson, Catawampusland

“Now personally I stand for the National Anthem. But that a man refusing to stand for the Star-Spangled Banner is a greater affront to your sense of American honor than a stacked roster of flag-waving hypocrites using Old Glory as a symbolic excuse to commit untold atrocities at home and abroad is probably a good sign that you've lost all reference.”
― Dan Johnson, Catawampusland

“Mostly, we swaddle ourselves in the sacrilege of self-justification and kowtow to a God we have silently rechristened ego. All things are acceptable in the all-seeing eyes of self-interest. Within the walls of our flimsy Jericho, we court ruin.”
― Dan Johnson, Catawampusland

“Americans can afford to disregard 'thou shall not kill' and 'thou shall not covet.' We sidestep 'blessed are the meek' and 'blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness.' We dance around the particulars of 'again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God' as we change money in this earthen temple.”
― Dan Johnson, Catawampusland

“Life is absurd; we must learn to enjoy the beautiful amber that coats the fossils of death strewn all around us.”
― Dan Johnson, Catawampusland

“One of the prime motivators behind the lock step political organization of evangelical Christians is an idea of a "war on Christianity." It's a testament to the efficacy of that false victim mentality that a country built on the separation of church and state has been co-opted by supposed followers of Christ who peddle the same sort of venal, profane, blasphemous, manipulative, soul-selling, fear-mongering, false idol worshipping bull shit. There's nothing wrong with turning the other cheek and humbling yourself before the idea of a higher power and treating one another as you would be treated--with dignity and respect. Unfortunately, that's not the substance of mega-church, imperial, for-profit Christianity. Instead we've got pestilent little golems sucking the life blood out of Americans with promises of divine grace and eternal salvation that amount to abstract snake oil used to lubricate their own materialism. That's the Christianity that people willfully antagonize. That's the Christianity that alienates anyone whose aversion to false morality is greater than their fear of life without a con man's blessing. That's the sort of vulgar perversion of spirituality that cheapens the symbolic cross and leads a nation away from the yoke of power hungry pastors who preach whatever gospel keeps them in control of the coffers. You want a ministry? Live it. Take off your fancy suit. Give up your mansion. Wash those feet. Crucify your ego. Bless the whores. Forgive the sinners. Live it. Otherwise you're nothing but another leach preying on weakness to aggrandize your own mortal ambitions.”
― Dan Johnson, Catawampusland

“Despite the many cinematic qualities of life in America, this country is not a film. It lacks the real-time clarity and cohesive story-telling that makes a silver-screen epic so palatable. Instead, it is a muddy, confused, noisy, unwieldy thing that we are forced to come to grips with after the fact and often erroneously.”
― Dan Johnson, Catawampusland