Orgies are vile …

Over the years I have been collecting bits and piece of witty snarks and insightful comments in a file I called “Wit and Wisdom”. I pulled it up last week and found that I had a little over one page of items, meaning I had lost the original. But wait! There were two files by that name, one with a different suffix, and it turned out to be 31 pages. I remember sitting at our dining room table in Bozeman when I first decided I needed a way to save stuff, and putting these gems onto my laptop. That it survived all these years, perhaps twenty or more, is no tribute to my competency, but rather to good luck, nothing more.

I’ve gone over those 31 pages now, and found quite a few items that I am going to repeat here, a few at a time. There’s a lot in there that I would not now take trouble to record, notably Edward Abbey, whose every written word (except some of his fiction, which I found over-the-top) I have read. I also made it a point to read everything written by George Orwell, but he does not turn up very often in this file. I suspect that is because somewhere I have a separate file for him.

I was surprised that I have nothing, nada, from Ralph Nader, but then as I recall I didn’t find the man very quotable. He wrote books, but I never made it through them. Once, I think when he accepted the nomination for president from the Green Party in 2000, he criticized the corporate culture for wearing people down and reducing our ability to offer a decent critique to leaving phone messages to no one, of removing humans from the interface. In that speech, as I recall, he said “Sometimes when I want to listen to classical music, I call American Airlines.” That’s it from Ralph, now 90 years of age.

Noam Chomsky … I was a big fan, in fact, to my embarrassment, like David Barsamian of Boulder, was a “Mineme” to him. I have, no doubt, a massive Chomsky file somewhere in my “system”. I have one Barsamian quote in there referring to the oligarchy: “A collective unspoken understanding of shared interests…” No doubt Noam said that first. I spoke to David on the phone one time while I lived in Billings. He wanted to come there and give a talk and asked me to organize it. Finally I had to tell him that no one I knew recognized his name. That was personally hurtful for him, but true.

Anyway, here goes, ten of my favorites to be followed by more in the future when I am out of ideas, a frequent occurrence.

1. 1. Football features two of the worst aspects of American life – violence and committee meetings. (George Will)
   2. American college students are like American colleges – each has half-dulled faculties.  (James Thurber)
   3. Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults. (Peter DeVries)
   4. They say that money talks, but the only thing it ever tells me is goodbye. (Paul Warner)
   5. Whenever a friend succeeds, I die a little. (Gore Vidal)
   6. My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met. (Rodney Dangerfield)
   7. When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible, and we had the land. They said, “Let us pray”. We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible, and they had the land. (Bishop Desmond Tutu)
   8. I’m a good Christian and orgies are vile, But I like an orgy, once in a while.” (Ogden Nash)
   9. Trying is the first step towards failure. (Homer Simpson)
   10. Remember, evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb. (Mel Brooks, Spaceballs)

If you want to join this party, feel free. Like Ogden Nash, I like a good orgy.