Lewis H. Lapham
American writer.
If we could let go of our faith in money, who knows what we might put in its place?
The state of perpetual emptiness is, of course, very good for business.
Most American cities shop to their best advantage when seen from a height or from a distance, at a point where the ugliness of the buildings dissolves into the beauty of an abstraction.
The substitution of meaning accounts for the grasping of misers as well as the extravagance of spendthrifts. Karl Marx well understood this peculiar transformation of flesh into coin.
But the line of thought that I'd been chasing for several days was implicit in the ruins of the old Roman Empire, which gradually destroyed itself by substituting the faith in a legion of miraculous words for the strength of armies and the weight of walls.
Once having proclaimed our loyalty to the abstract idea that all men are created equal, we do everything in our power to prove ourselves unequal. Among the world's peoples, none other belongs to so many clubs, associations, committees and secret societies.
Seeking the invisible through the imagery of the visible, the Americans never can get quite all the way to the end of the American dream.
The rich, like well brought up children, are meant to be seen, not heard.
In the garden of tabloid delight, there is always a clean towel and another song.
Nobody wants to say, at least not for publication, that we live in a society that cares as much about the humanities as it cares about the color of the rain in Tashkent.
At this late stage in the history of American capitalism I'm not sure I know how much testimony still needs to be presented to establish the relation between profit and theft.
Never in the history of the world have so many people been so rich; never in the history off the world have so many of those same people felt themselves so poor.
Surely they knew that the very idea of the future came in an American box - complete with instructions for assembling a Constitution, a MacDonald's hamburger franchise, a row of Marriot hotels and a First Amendment.
What kind of people do we wish to become, and how do we know an American when we see one? Is it possible to pursue a common purpose without a common history or a standard text?
We are a people captivated by the power and romance of metaphor, forever seeking the invisible through the image of the visible.
The playing field is more sacred than the stock exchange, more blessed than Capital Hill or the vaults of Fort Knox. The diamond and the gridiron - and, to a lesser degree, the court, the rink, the track, and the ring - embody the American dream of Eden.
Wars might come and go, but the seven o'clock news lives forever.
The world goes on as before, and it turns out that nobody else seems to to notice the unbearable lightness of being.
Let the corporations do as they please - pillage the environment, falsify their advertising, rig the securities markets - and it is none of the federal government's business to interfere with the will of heaven.
Power broken into a thousand pieces can be hidden and disowned. If no individual or institution possesses the authority to act without of everybody else in the room, then nobody is at fault if anything goes wrong.