[MD] Quality decline

[pholden at davtv.com]

Quoting ARLO J BENSINGER JR <ajb102 at psu.edu>:

> Yes. Bemoaning the decay of society (the "Quality Decline") is a matter of
> perspective. And the knife wielded by nightmare politicians (foreign and
> domestic) who promise to protect us from the boogeymen, while ferrying us back
> to "the good old days".

Speaking of bemoaning the decay of society:

"Phaedrus wasn't sure but he seemed to detect a peculiar gentleness here on the
streets now that he didn't remember from the past. It was an ominous gentleness found
in old and corrupt cultures, the gentleness one hears in Neapolitan street songs and
in old Mexican canciones. It comes not from an absence of violence but from an excess
of it. Live and let live. Avoid trouble. It was the gentleness of someone who has
given up fighting openly because it is too dangerous to do so. He had the sickening
feeling that something like the fall of the Roman Empire was beginning to happen
here. What was so sinister now about New York was that the patterns that built it no
longer seemed understood-or those who understand the patterns are no longer in
control of those who don't.

"What seemed to allow this deadly night to descend was that the intellectual patterns
that were supposed to be in charge of things, that should comprehend the threat and
lead the fight against it, were paralyzed. They were paralyzed, not by any external
force, but by their own internal construction, which made them unable to comprehend
what was happening.

"It was like watching the spider waiting while the wasp gets ready to attack it. The
spider can leave any time to save its life but it doesn't do so. It just waits there,
paralyzed by some internal pattern of responses that make it unable to recognize its
own danger. The wasp plants its eggs in the spiders body and the spider lives on
while the wasp larvae slowly eat it and destroy it." (Lila, 24)

The good old days when good and evil were easily recognized seems preferable to
the current slow decline of Quality.

Platt 


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