Words matter. These are the best Todd Gitlin Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The manufacture of desire isn’t at the heart – if it isn’t absurd to speak of a heart – of the media torrent. Chronic dissatisfaction is at the heart of the matter.
My book is focused on the power of the American state, not least because the government of the United States governs so much that the case could be made that everybody around the world ought to have a vote in determining some of its policies.
Collectively, we are in thrall to media – because they deliver to us many of the psychic goods we crave, and we know no other way to live.
As I write at the end, if we step back and face the enormity of the torrent, then we have taken the first step to imagining what we might want to do about it.
Like Americans, people outside America want fun, want an emotional compensation for the utilitarianism and calculation that mark the rest of their lives.
The moguls are driven by their respective desires for profit – period.
Today’s global justice movement may be the biggest, most diverse and energetic in history.
So American culture is itself a hybrid and lends itself to use in other people’s hybrids.
Sure, I’ve often been misrepresented – anyone frequently quoted has this experience.
The fancy term for what America has squandered in the past year and a half or so is legitimacy.
To win power anywhere you have to convince people that you can do something for them.
American movies and music deliver themes of freedom, innocence, and power that appeal to others – partly because America itself was put together out of a multiplicity of national traditions.
Navigation is power of a limited sort – it enables us to manage the immensity of the media torrent.
I am a realist as well as an idealist, and I think that it is incumbent upon those of us in opposition to try to work within what are always arduous circumstances to stretch the limits of the possible.
Some versions of patriotism come close to the tribal, which we all want to surpass, and some don’t.
My position is not that John Kerry is either Jesus Christ or the prophet Mohammad. My position is that John Kerry is the possibility of restarting politics.
The mobilisation which Bush has been able to perform since 11 September 2001 has to be fought – at least by Americans – in the name of a wise, honourable and democratic patriotism.
The only people available to change the world are the people now living in it, with all the beliefs they bring along – however retrograde those beliefs may appear to those of us who see ourselves as enlightened.
I first came to think about media and politics in the late 1960s, having observed some distortions up close, but since then I wouldn’t say that my personal experience has remained an important motive for my writing about media.
Some fine day, Democrats may figure out how to get on the right side of the value divide – how to define America as a place of the common good and not a playground of the strong.
So every day I’m mindful as I watch the Bush crowd extend their sway into policies of every imaginable variety, and over almost every square foot of earth, that the control of the American state is a matter of urgency.
A century of convulsive change leaves huge demographic gouge marks.
