Essayists From The United States

"Wonderful coffee. Meal in itself"

"And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want. 'Cause what could be more satisfying than to be able to go, at the age of eighty-four, into twenty or thirty different cities, and pick up a phone, and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people?"

"Nobody dast blame this man. Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back — that's an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you're finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory."

"Isn't that — isn't that remarkable? Biff — he likes me!"

"Why am I trying to become what I don't want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am!"

"You cut your life down for spite!"

"Spite, spite, is the word of your undoing!"

"Ben, that funeral will be massive! They'll come from Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire! All the old-timers with the strange license plates — that boy will be thunderstruck, Ben, because he never realized — I am known! Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey — I am known, Ben, and he'll see it with his eyes once and for all."

"Work a lifetime to pay off a house — You finally own it and there's nobody to live in it."

"After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive."

"One main problem in Rawl’s defense of “justice as fairness” is that Rawls believes that no one can deserve his or her advantages or assets in life—it’s all a matter of luck. As he puts it, “No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting point in society.” The reason? Because even a person’s character (i.e., the virtues he or she practices that may provide him with ways of getting ahead of others) “depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit”…"

"I retract nothing. What I said has been validated beyond my wildest expectations, to tell you the truth, so let's just say that I rest my case. A lot of people were outraged by my remark, of course, but … the people upset were the fucking Eichmanns. Look in the mirror and own it, guys. You identified yourselves by frothing at the mouth for being called by your right name."

"Would you render the same level of support to someone who hadn't conscientiously objected, but rather instead rolled a grenade under their line officer in order to neutralize the combat capacity of their unit? … Conscientious objection removes a given piece of the cannon fodder from the fray; fragging an officer has a much more impactful effect."

"By 1970, approximately two-thirds of the marriages of those on the tribal rolls were to people who were not, with the result that only 59 percent of births reflected a situation in which both parents registered themselves as possessing any Indian blood at all; U.S. Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare, A Study of Selected Socio-Economic Characteristics of Ethnic Minorities Based on the 1970 Census, Vol. 3: American Indians (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974) pp. 74, 78. For effects in terms of the "blood quantum" criteria by which native identity is officially defined in the U.S., see Thorton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival, pp. 174-5. The implications are clear: "Set the blood quantum at one-quarter, hold to it as a rigid definition of Indians, let intermarriage proceed as it [has] and eventually Indians will be defined out of existence"; Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest; The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York; W.W. Norton, 1987) p. 338."

"Insofar as the genocide embodied in residential schooling arises as an integral aspect of colonialism, then colonialism must be seen as constituting that source... To be in any way an apologist for colonialism is to be an active proponent of genocide."

"Mel H. Buffalo, an advisor to the Samson [Cree] band in Hobbema, Alberta, reported that "every Indian person I've spoken to who attended these schools has a story of mental, physical or sexual abuse to relate.""

"Among the worst examples is that of the Alberni Indian Residential School where, during the 1920s, children caught "talking Indian" suffered the hideous ordeal of having sewing needles pushed through their tongues."

"Your first thought was, "Oh shit, that plays right into what they want to do to us." Well, then, welcome to the club. Welcome to the club along with 565,000 Iraqi children who were systematically starved, and denied medical attention, to death, in less than 10 years, while Madeleine Albright goes on television, on 60 Minutes no less, receives the number, says, "Yes, I've heard it, we've decided it's worth the cost." Welcome to the club with the rest of the world, a little bit. I don't care if it plays into the hands of what they had in mind for you, unless you're doing something tangible to make it stop, what's already being done to those people on the receiving end. Why should you be exempt and immune? So, instead of "Oh shit", "Right on"."

"You carry the weapon. That's how they don't see it coming. You're the one. They talk about 'color blind or blind to your color.' You said it yourself. You don't send the Black Liberation Army into Wall Street to conduct an action. You don't send the American Indian Movement into downtown Seattle to conduct an action. Who do you send? You. With your beard shaved, your hair cut close and wearing a banker's suit. There's probably a whole lot more to it, you know that, but there is where you start. Who carries the front-end? Why is it always people of color carrying the weight on this, when people who are much more proximate in terms of acceptability to the centers of power, professing solidarity and principled nonviolence on the one hand, and critiquing the practice of those who are carrying the weight on the other. Why is that?"

"And why, by the way, did it take Arabs to do what people here should have done a long time ago?"

"People have a bad habit of blaming the victims. [Sarcastically] Damn Jews! If hadn't been for them the Nazis wouldn't have exterminated 'em all!"

"As to those in the World Trade Center… True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent?… They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire—the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved—and they did so both willingly and knowingly.… If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it."

"I hear Republicans and Libertarians and so forth talking about property rights, but they stop talking about property rights as soon as the subject of American Indians comes up, because they know fully well, perhaps not in a fully articulated, conscious form, but they know fully well that the basis for the very system of endeavor and enterprise and profitability to which they are committed and devoted accrues on the basis of theft of the resources of someone else. They are in possession of stolen property. They know it. They all know it. It's a dishonest endeavor from day one."

"White domination is so complete that even American Indian children want to be cowboys. It's as if Jewish children wanted to play Nazis."

"Rawls's work, for better or worse, is not inspired by this kind of epic ambition. His very modesty and lack of speculative curiosity are what exclude him from the ranks of the great philosophers. Rawls is not an Isaiah Berlin with his anguished sense of the conflict of goods which besets human life; nor is he a Leo Strauss with his vivid awareness of the forces of persecution with which philosophy has always to contend; nor is he a Michael Oakeshott with his diagnosis of the dangers posed by excessive rationalism to the goals of a free society. Rawls is a philosopher for our time. His desire is to render both theoretically and practically legitimate the redistributivist policies of the prosperous North Atlantic welfare states. There is already more than a whiff of nostalgia about this project. This is by no means a contemptible goal, but it is well to remember that this project of rationalization is one — but only one — way in which philosophy can be practiced."

"Rawls’s analysis of fairness, justice, institutions and behaviour has illuminated our understanding of justice very profoundly and has played – and is still playing – a hugely constructive part in the development of the theory of justice. But we cannot make the Rawlsian mode of thinking on justice into an intellectual ‘stand-still’. We have to benefit from the richness of the ideas we have got from Rawls – and then move on, rather than taking a ‘vacation’. We do need ‘justitia’, not ‘justitium’."

"When we make that basic criticism, however, we are not only following Rawls's methodological suggestion - that we search for reflective equilibrium by holding up theoretical alternatives to our own considered judgments, in Socratic fashion. We are also bringing one deep part of Rawls's own conception to bear against another, saying that the contract doctrine may not do full justice to the idea that each person has an inviolability based upon justice. Even in moving away from Rawls, we are fully engaged with him. Surely that is a sign of his work's depth and enduring significance."

"Rawls' notion of liberty, however, is the impoverished notion of contemporary liberals, for whom liberty consists in the expressive or lifestyle freedom to say what one wants and have sexual relations with the species of one's choice. So, for example, being subject to a 75 percent tax on one's income or being subject to the seizure of 90 percent of one's peacefully acquired property does not count at all as an abridgment of liberty. Indeed, it is not really clear that chaining the talented and energetic to their desks should, for Rawls, count as an infringement of their liberty as long as these individuals are still permitted to express their views, cast their votes, meet with their chosen sexual partners, and, perhaps, are paroled on weekends to travel to their preferred cultural events. In any case, Rawls does not view anything the modern welfare state does in the name of income redistribution as an abridgment of liberty."

"To make concrete what [Rawls's] theory regards as justice, compare two of our society's worst-off. The first, a mugger who has never held a job, is vicious when he can get away with it and spends his ill-gotten gains on drugs. The second, a mother of three, has been abandoned by her husband; she earns the minimum wage at a menial job and is trying hard to raise her children well. According to what Rawls calls justice, these two are entitled to the same resources from society simply because they are among the worst-off. The mugger's viciousness and lack of effort and the mother's decency and struggle create no morally relevant difference between them. [¶] Now change the scenario a bit. The mugger continues as before, but the mother's efforts have borne fruit. She has found a better job and is doing well at it. Her family now is moderately secure and comfortable but hardly affluent. On Rawls's view, justice requires taking some of the mother's resources in order to give them to the mugger. [¶] in deeming this blatant injustice just, Rawls repudiates the conception—accepted from the Old Testament to recent times—that justice consists in giving people what they deserve: reward for good conduct and punishment for bad. [...] Rawls is explicit about his repudiation..."

"In the Rawlsian paradigm, such a person is likely to be a northwest European or North American with a certain way of asking and answering questions of this sort, even if deprived of self-knowledge of the more circumstantial kind. The liberalism that predictably results from such a mental experiment has always been vulnerable to the charge that it lacks purchase upon real-world challenges: it neither derives from present circumstances nor responds to past experience. Perhaps this would not matter if the Rawlsian approach to grounding liberal thought were primarily addressed to persons of a liberal predisposition. But that would be pointless. The test of such a theorem is how effective it is at convincing persons not already so disposed. And even then, the question remains of exactly how such liberals should act when dealing with persons and societies that do not correspond to their preferences. On this Rawls is by no means silent, but he is forced to introduce external considerations that cannot be derived from the model itself."

"Rawls’ main interest was certainly not religion. It was social justice. He formulated two principles: first, that a just society should guarantee the basic liberties to all, including freedom of conscience; second, that social and economic inequalities are justified only if they work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society. For him, the first principle prevailed over the second: it was not admissible to deny the basic liberties to promote social justice. The second principle embodied his criticism of both unregulated capitalism and Marxism. Economic inequalities, he believed, are natural and unavoidable, but they are not against social justice only if they are part of a system where they are made to work to also benefit those at the lower level of the social scale. Actually, the poor may and do benefit from the presence of the rich, who support social welfare with their taxes, create workplaces, and may spend their money to create institutions, including cultural and educational, that benefit everybody. The rich would not do so spontaneously only, Rawls believed, and may need some compulsion by the state. This is why he was after all a philosopher of the left, although calling him a socialist may be an exaggeration. …I was not myself a follower of Rawls and my own political and philosophical ideas were closer to the American conservatives he opposed. Yet, I found it interesting that even in the Democrat and liberal camp the most elegant theorist acknowledged the religious roots of the very idea of social justice and agreed that the American experiment, in all its possible versions, should affirm freedom of religion as fundamental."

"This means society should build what Rawls calls an 'infrastructure of justice' that ensures everyone has access to key primary goods - some reasonable level of income and material wellbeing, opportunity and basic rights and liberties - which allow them to consider they have been given a proper chance to achieve full membership of society. Moreover, the rich must recognise that their incomes can only be allowed to reach the level consistent with ensuring that the position of the poor is the best it could possibly be, so that were the positions to be swapped, the rich could accept their reduced position as fair."

"Rawls challenged the view that utilitarianism, or some variant of social liberalism, was the only way to construct a social order. In A Theory of Justice, published in 1971, he laid out his alternative. Imagine, he postulated, that you have to make a choice about what social order you would want to be born into behind 'a veil of ignorance', in which you don't know beforehand your sex, skin colour, skills or the class of your parents. Your overriding concern would be to ensure that it was fair, because if you drew a short straw you would want to know that, as far as possible, society had structures that would redress the balance."

"The ultimate merit of Rawls’s work did not lie only in his own theory, but in the extraordinarily broad discussion that it generated. Rawls’s work provided a framework for a flurry of counter-theories, such as G.A. Cohen’s in Rescuing Justice and Equality, which challenged Rawls from the left and advocated a stricter egalitarianism; and Robert Nozick’s sophisticated libertarian response in Anarchy, State, and Utopia; and Michael Walzer’s development, in Spheres of Justice, of a communitarian approach to the problem."

"The idea that seems to be presupposed by the doctrine of the veil of ignorance—namely, that one can in some way get a better grasp or understanding of the power relations in society and how they work by covering them up, ignoring them, or simply wishing them away—seems very naïve. … To think that an appropriate point of departure for understanding the political world is our intuitions of what is “just,” without reflecting on where those intuitions come from, how they are maintained, and what interests they might serve, seems to exclude from the beginning the very possibility that these intuitions might themselves be “ideological.”"

"If the basic assumption of the theory of ideology is at all tenable, namely, that the general power relations embodied in our social structures can exert a distorting influence on the formation of our beliefs and preferences without our being aware of it, then we are definitely not going to put that kind of influence out of action by asking the agents in the society to imagine that they didn’t know their position. To think otherwise is to believe in magic: imagine you are “impartial” and you will be. In fact, doing that will be more likely to reinforce the power of these entrenched prejudices because it will explicitly present them as universal, warranted by reason, etc."

"The key innovation in Rawl's scenario, designed to ensure that undue selfishness among the participants in this exercise in reflection cancels itself out, is what he calls the "veil of ignorance". Everyone gets to vote on a favored design of society, but when you decide which society you would be happy to live in and give your allegiance to, you vote without knowing your particular role or niche in it will be. You may be a senator or a surgeon or a street sweeper or a soldier; you don't get to find out until after you have voted. Choosing from behind the veil of ignorance ensures that people will give due consideration to the likely effects, the costs and benefits, for all the citizenry, including those worse off."

"Why then in Britain has secularism become seen to be hostile to religion? Because neutrality is too often assumed to require the bleaching out of all traces of faith, excluding religious belief and discourse from public life. But it doesn't, and we can see why by appeal to the notion of public reason, articulated most clearly by the late political philosopher John Rawls. Rawls was quite clear that the religious have no obligation at all to keep their faith entirely to themselves. "Reasonable comprehensive doctrines, religious or non-religious, may be introduced in public political discussion at any time," he wrote, "provided that in due course proper political reasons – and not reasons given solely by comprehensive doctrines – are presented that are sufficient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrines are said to support.""

"Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first, they are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second, they are to be to the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society."

"I have tried to set forth a theory that enables us to understand and to assess these feelings about the primacy of justice. Justice as fairness is the outcome: it articulates these opinions and supports their general tendency."

"The hazards of the generalized prisoner's dilemma are removed by the match between the right and the good."

"At best the principles that economists have supposed the choices of rational individuals to satisfy can be presented as guidelines for us to consider when we make our decisions."

"The extreme nature of dominant-end views is often concealed by the vagueness and ambiguity of the end proposed."

"Being happy involves both a certain achievement in action and a rational assurance about the outcome."

"Men resign themselves to their position should it ever occur to them to question it; and since all may view themselves as assigned their vocation, everyone is held to be equally fated and equally noble in the eyes of providence."

"That persons have opposing interests and seek to advance their own conception of the good is not at all the same thing as their being moved by envy and jealousy."

"Many conservative writers have contended that the tendency to equality in modern social movements is the expression of envy. In this way they seek to discredit this trend, attributing it to collectively harmful impulses."

"The intolerant can be viewed as free-riders, as persons who seek the advantages of just institutions while not doing their share to uphold them."

"Justice is happiness according to virtue."

"Ideal legislators do not vote their interests."