Harley Cokliss, J.G. Ballard, Crash/ The Atrocity Exhibition, 1971
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(Excerpts from Wendell Berry’s essays). “If we say we are lovers of America and peace and freedom, then this must be what lovers of America and peace and freedom do … Our public discourse has been reduced to the manipulation of uprooted symbols: good words - bad words, the names of Gods and Devils, emblems, slogans, flags. For some, the flag no longer stands for the country, it is the country; they plant their crops and bury their dead in it.” “Once we have peace, we say, or abundance, or justice or truth or comfort, everything will be allright… It is an old dream. It is a vicious illusion. For the discipline of ends is no discipline at all. The end is preserved in the means: a desirable end may perish forever in the wrong means. Hope lives in the means, not the end…” … “That good ends are destroyed by bad means is one of the dominant themes of human wisdom… The I Ching says, "If evil is branded it thinks of weapons, and if we do it the favor of fighting against it blow for blow, we lose in the end because thus we ourselves get tangled in hatred and passion. Therefore it is important to begin at home, to be on guard in our own persons against the faults we have branded. …. For the same reasons we should not combat our own faults directly.. As long as we wrestle with them, they continue victorious. Finally, the best way to fight evil is to make energetic progress in the good. Confucius said of riches that "if not obtained in the right way, they do not last.” In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil…” [And for that text Ken Kesey supplies the modern exegesis: “As soon as you resist evil, as soon as its gone, you fold, because its what you’re based on.”]
[From Alive On All Channels archive]
As a friend of mine says [someone who has decided to work less and get involved in local political action more] “It’s time for us do-gooders to do some good.”
