“The true edge is not where you choose to live, but where they situate you against your will. This event is infinitely deeper and more electrifying than anything you might elect to do with your own life. You know what this is? This is twenty-six guys from Harvard deciding our fate. Dig it. These are guys from the eating clubs and the secret societies. They have fraternity handshakes so complicated it takes three full minutes to do all the moves. One missed digit you’re fucked for life. Resign from the country club, forget about the stock options and the executive retreat
Picture it, twenty-six guys in Clark Kent suits getting to enter a luxury bunker that’s located about half a mile under the White House.
Powerless. Understand, this is how they remind us of our basic state. They roll out a periodic crisis. Is it horizontal? One great power against the other. Or is it vertical, is it up and down?”
On the 29th he was back in New York, doing a midnight show at Carnegie Hall:
“We’re not going to die. Yes, they saved us. All the Ivy League men in those striped suits and ribbed black socks that go all the way to the knee so when they cross their legs on TV we don’t see a patch of spooky white flesh between the sock and the pants cuff.
They saved us in their horn-rimmed glasses and commonsense haircuts. They got their training for the missile crisis at a thousand dinner parties. Where it’s at, man. This is the summit of Western civilization. Not the art of the schlocky museums or the books in the libraries where bums off the street infest the men’s rooms. Forget all that. Forget all that. Forget the playing fields of Eton. It’s the seating plan at dinner. That’s where we won. Because they toughed it out. Because they were tested in the cruelest setting of all. Where tremendous forces come into play and crucial events unfold. Dinner parties, dig it, in the Northeast corridor. Your mother used to say, Mix, sweetheart. There was anxiety, a little hidden terror in her voice. Because she knew. Mix or die. And that’s why we won. Because these men were named and raised for this moment. Yes, tested at a thousand formative dinners. It started in adolescence. Seated next to adults, total strangers, and forced to make conversation. What a sadistic thing to say to a kid. Make conversation.”
full: http://www.variant.randomstate.org/30texts/Jbarker.html
Everybody's got to believe in something. I believe I'll have another beer." - W. C. Fields http://www.iww.org/culture/official/preamble.shtml
Sick of deleting your inbox? Yahoo!7 Mail has free unlimited storage. http://au.docs.yahoo.com/mail/unlimitedstorage.html