“…the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens’ ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors…”

~Naomi Wolf from 10 Steps to Close Down an Open Society

The following post appeared on Craigslist recently summing up the growing resentment for hipsters in San Francisco’s Mission District.

Date: 2007-10-18, 3:20PM PDT

Hi! We’re a happy home of mindless, supra-judgmental hipsters. We can’t even critically think, are narcissistic and a-sexual, and spend most of our time mouth-breathing and admiring each other’s creepily tight clothes. Are you 22-years-old, from some shit-ass suburb where you were just some ugly, boring honky and then came to S.F. to manifest yourself anew as a cocky brat and lord over the working class in need of housing with your parent’s money and credit? Great, then come gentrify the shit out of the Mission with us! You’ll be at home with us in your 6″ by 9″ room in the Mission that’ll only cost you $23000 a month – if you’re cool enough. I don’t know – do you like Guitar Wolf? We love Guitar Wolf … but only ironically. So you have to like Guitar Wolf ironically too. Great! So send us an e-mail so we can set up an appointment to stare at you and decide if you’re cool enough to live with and talk shit about all day. Okay, so we gotta go now and not be prepared to turn 30 before we know it and realize that idiot vanity was an impractical means of personal development and then sell out and move back to the burbs after we ruined S.F. by imposing our Shit Head Non-culture on it.

Thanks! And s**k our limp d***s ’cause like or not we’re the ruling class =)

16th at Mission.

“In order to achieve ‘peace with honor,’ Nixon and Kissinger wanted to show Hanoi that the new President would use extreme force to prosecute the war; that he was capable of anything–an idea called The Madman Theory. Less than a month into Nixon’s presidency, Kissinger began planning an attack against North Vietnamese sanctuaries in neighboring Cambodia. The Americans started bombing Cambodia in 1969, soon after Nixon came into office because they had a problem. The problem was that whole areas of Eastern Cambodia, which was, in theory, a neutral country not on the side of the North Vietnamese or the South Vietnamese…whole areas of the country had been taken over by the North Vietnamese Communists, and they were using them as staging areas and bases for their attacks on the South Vietnamese armies in South Vietnam and upon the American army in South Vietnam.”

~The Trials of Henry Kissinger, documentary.

Famous speech by Mario Savio from the Berkeley Free Speech Movement:

“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

Other quotes:

• On politics: “I am not a political person. My involvement in the Free Speech Movement is religious and moral. … I don’t know what made me get up and give that first speech. I only know I had to.”

• On civil disobedience: “You can’t disobey the rules every time you disapprove. However, when you’re considering something that constitutes an extreme abridgement of your rights, conscience is the court of last resort.”

• “The ‘futures’ and ‘careers’ for which American students now prepare are for the most part intellectual and moral wastelands. This chrome-plated consumers’ paradise would have us grow up to be well-behaved children. But an important minority of men and women coming to the front today have shown they will die rather than be standardized, replaceable, and irrelevant.” (“An End to History”, from Humanity, December 1964)

I just realized that all of Sadegh Hedayat‘s works have been banned in Iran since November 2006.

I have only read The Blind Owl, for which an icon is engraved into his tombstone at Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

But here is a good quote from Haji Aqa, in which his characters explore the lack of meritocracy in Iran:

“In order for the people to be kept in line, they must be kept hungry, needy, illiterate, and superstitious. If the grocer’s child becomes literate, he not only will criticise my speech, but he will also utter words that neither you nor I will understand…. What would happen if the forage-seller’s child turns out intelligent and capable and mine, the son of a Haji, turns out lazy and foolish?”

…A comment true of any society that prevents qualified people from reaching their potential. When I visited his grave in summer of 2001, a few visitors preceded me; they laid single, red roses.