Gilliamesque: A Pre-posthumous Memoir

Gilliamesque:  A Pre-posthumous Memoir by Terry Gilliam and Ben Thompson

NY:  Harper Design, 2015

ISBN 978-0-06-238074-6

(7)  It’s crazy how isolated the Western world has become from reality.  Apart from anything else, nothing sets your imagination free like a direct connection to the planet you actually live on.

(177)  One thing I did learn from my time spent at Hollywood's sharp end is that there's only one other town in America like it, and that's Washington.  The two places function in exactly the same way -  they're all about being seen at the right places, and all the real business is done over breakfast.  In Washington obviously you're looking at lobbyists rather than agents, but the primacy of getting the deal done over the likely benefits (or otherwise) to mankind seems to be the same whether what's being punted is an oil deal or a blockbuster sequel.

(252-253)  George [Harrison] was someone who never really did anything but good, and was incredibly generous about supporting people whose work he approved of.  He loved hanging out with his mates and playing music, and spent the rest of his time lovingly restoring the thirty-six acres of gardens at Friar Park - the magnificent Gothic revival mansion which he’d put up as collateral to enable us to make “The LIfe of Brian.”  And he didn’t just pay other people to do it for him and turn up every now and again to order them around like most rock stars would - he physically did it himself, basically turning himself into a manual labourer.

(274)  I realise this probably sounds very superstitious, but I’ve never read Freud for the same reason - because I wouldn’t want to mess with what gives me the good stuff.  I know I’ve got all sorts of weird fucking shit floating around up there in my head, but I don’t want to analyse it - I want to put it to work. 

(281)  I think it was author William Gibson who suggested that global stocks of cognitive dissonance are currently so high they threaten to make the traditional idea of science fiction redundant.  And once you reach my age, you tend to find that the individual days become really long, but the years get shorter, which only distorts your temporal perspective still further.

The Iron Heel

The Iron Heel by Jack London

NY: The Regent Press, 1907

(page 219) Our Benevolent Feudalism by W. J. Ghent (1902) - evidently a muckraking book of the era, cataloguing the effects of poverty

(300-301) They, as a class, believed that they alone maintained civilization. It was their belief that if ever they weakened, the great beast would engulf them and everything of beauty and wonder and joy and good in its cavernous add slime-dripping maw. Without them, anarchy would reign and humanity would drop backward into the primitive night out of which it had so painfully emerged. The horrid picture of anarchy was held always before their child's eyes until they, in turn, obsessed by this cultivated fear, held the picture of anarchy before the eyes of the children that followed them. This was the beast to be stamped upon, and the highest duty of the aristocrat was to stamp upon it. In short, they alone, by their unremitting toil and sacrifice, stood between weak humanity and the all-devouring beast; and they believed it, firmly believed it.

I cannot lay too great stress upon this high ethical righteousness of the whole oligarch class. This has been the strength of the Iron Heel, and too many of the comrades have been slow or loath to realize it. Many of them have ascribed the strength of the Iron Heel to its system of reward and punishment. This is a mistake. Heaven and hell may be the prime factors of zeal in the religion of a fanatic; but for the great majority of the religious, heaven and hell are incidental to right and wrong. Love of the right, desire for the right, unhappiness with anything less than the right - in short, right conduct, is the prime factor of religion. And so with the Oligarchy. Prisons, banishment and degradation, honors and palaces and wonder-cities, are all incidental. The great driving force of the oligarchs is the belief that they are doing right. Never mind the exceptions, and never mind the oppression and injustice in which the Iron Heel was conceived. All is granted. The point is that the strength of the Oligarchy to-day lies in its satisfied conception of its own righteousness.

-----------------------

Self-righteous victimization of the Trmped Conservative