[MD] Doing Some Good

[plattholden at gmail.com]

On 28 May 2009 at 10:48, John Carl wrote:

>  Has anyone here also read the whole collection by the same name and
> especially The Day Superman Died - about Neal Cassady?
> 
> Platt, you amazing,  ever-spouting fount of Lila quotations you, where does
> Pirsig mention Cassady?  I remember, but I don't remember exactly what he
> said and I can't find Lila to save my soul.

Hey John,

Can't find anything on Cassady, but perhaps you're thinking of Cassidy. 
>From Chapter 3  or Lila:

"Whether the American cowboy ever really was like William S. Boyd 
is not really relevant. What is relevant is that in the 1930s, during the 
darkest days of the Great Depression, Americans shoveled out millions 
of dollars to look at his movies. They didn't have to. Nobody forced 
them to. But they went anyway, just as they later went to see Butch 
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. They did so because those movies were 
a confirmation of the values they believed in. Those movies were 
rituals, almost religious rituals, for transmitting the cultural values of 
America to the young and reconfirming them in the old. It wasn't a 
deliberate, conscious process; people were just doing what they liked. It 
is only when one analyzes what they liked that one sees the assimilation 
of Indian values"

Platt