#lewislapham

The future turns out to be something you make instead of find. ~Lewis Lapham #inspiration #qotd #inspirationalquotes #instaquote #lewislapham #hollarobrob

All I have today on this day of grief. Not hopeful, but thoughtful. From the always-thoughtful Lewis Lapham. Time to think, America. No one yell, pontificate, analyze, predict until you’ve spent a good, long time thinking. A lost art.

Lewis Lapham, Conquest of Nature and What We Have Lost. http://www.thenation.com/article/conquest-nature-and-what-weve-lost/

The reduction of individual human expression to a “primitive, retrograde activity” accounts for the product currently being sold under the labels of “election” and “democracy.” The candidates stand and serve as farm equipment meant to cultivate an opinion poll, their value measured by the cost of their manufacture; the news media’s expensive collection of talking heads bundles the derivatives into the commodity of market share. The steadily higher cost of floating the fiction of democracy -- the sale of political television advertising up from nearly $200 million in the presidential election of 1996 to $2 billion in the election of 2008 -- reflects the ever-increasing rarity of the demonstrable fact.