Mailing It In

My vacation starts in less than 48 hours and I'm mailing my performance in during all walks of life this week. (Though I am working hard at beer drinking and listening to Farther Along: The Best of The Flying Burrito Brothers.) Here's some neato quotes from cool books I've paged through lately:

"Over the last quarter-century, perhaps in response to the latent totalitarianism of the Left in the late Sixties, the Right transformed itself accordingly. It moved far beyond Reaganism, not to mention the libertarianism of Barry Goldwater. It still gave lip service to the principle of individual freedom unfettered by the power of centralized government, but it was difficult to remember when a contemporary conservative spokesman of significance energetically, heatedly championed the rights of the criminally accused, for instance, or an individual's freedom to express an unpopular, even arguably anti-American thought. In fact, it was difficult to remember when any significant conservative spokesman last championed any specific individual freedom other than freedom from taxes or the freedom to own a gun. Since the administration of Richard Nixon, the true priorities of the Right were not liberty but authority, not singularity but conformity."

- Steve Erickson in American Nomad (1997)


"For God's sake, don't let's become conformists - please. Just do your thing in your own way. Don't ever let fame and fortune or recognition or anything interfere with what you feel is here - if you feel you are a creative individual. Then don't let the companies get this going real good and buy up all the rights of the individual some way or the other. That's not right."

- Sam Phillips in Peter Guralnick's Lost Highway (1979)