Archives for July 5, 2016

From 2006:

I’m not one of those people who thinks everything was better when he was young, nor do I suffer from excessive respect for politicians, but I do have sharply mixed feelings about the process that brought us from Jack Paar and After Two Years: A Conversation With the President to Peri Gilpin on The Tony Danza Show and George and Laura on Larry King Live. I was tempted for a moment to say that TV did it to us, but of course we did it to ourselves: America is a democracy in the deepest and most far-reaching sense of the word, a truly popular culture whose citizens believe devoutly that they’re as good as anyone else, and who for this reason prefer their celebrities and politicians to be just like everyone else….

Read the whole thing here.

“I felt in that last glimpse of him that many of the ordinary ties of human relationship and of friendship were denied him. He could have enemies and faithful subordinates and obsequious bootlickers, but he could have no friends in the conventional sense. He had attained the category of power that made friendship and sympathy a weakness. He was a piece on the chessboard again, remote, insulated and alone.”

John P. Marquand, Melville Goodwin, U.S.A.