A people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical. And just as a democracy can die of too many lies, that kind of orthodoxy can kill us, too.
Jon Stewart is a remarkable satirist and parodist in the vein of Mark Twain, because Jon Stewart understands what Mark Twain knew, which is that the truth goes down more easily in a democracy when it’s marinated in humor.
The Interfaith Alliance has to become an ongoing sustaining and powerful movement whose interest is to prove that religion has a healing side as well as a killing side, and that democracy is the consequence of conscience
We seem to prefer a comfortable lie to the uncomfortable truth. We punish those who point out reality, and reward those who provide us with the comfort of illusion. Reality is fearsome .. but experience tells us that more fearsome yet is evading it.
Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it’s time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.
Why is the country not having this conversation, the kind of conversation that requires the politicians who are responsible for the war to be specific to the concerns of the American people.
You do it because there’s a story to be told. I can tell you that the job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is about as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place.
Democracy doesn’t begin at the top; it begins at the bottom, when flesh-and-blood human beings fight to rekindle what Arlo Guthrie calls ‘The Patriot’s Dream.
