A Quote by David Talbot
A lot of my idealism was frustrated by the end of the '60s because of the way things went with the assassinations and the sense that the political establishment was so fixed in its ways you couldn't change anything.
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The way I look at the world is establishment versus change agents. The establishment is those people who want to keep things the way they are. Change agents are people like me.
After so many years now, it's just suspected by most people that there simply is no way to change the direction Washington's going or the country's going or to do anything about that small group of establishment elitists in both parties that end up running things for themselves.
In North America, people get a sense that something is really wrong in government and in our culture. There is a corruption, not only in politics, but of spirit as well, when people are so quick to be violent with one another. I think everybody would like to be able to find a solution to make things better. We have the desire to reform inside of us, and we get frustrated because we don't know how to change things, even if it comes to our own behavior. Sometimes you get frustrated because you don't know how to stop that thing that you know is either hurtful to yourself or someone else.
I was saying to Paul Schrader that he missed the idealism and the passion of that era in Hollywood, but also in American life, that '60s sense of optimism and hope.
The political world is changing rapidly. What the establishment has learned, what the Democratic establishment, the Republican establishment, the media establishment, is the world is not quite what they thought it was. With the middle class disappearing, with people working longer hours for lower rages, with people worried about the future of their children, what you are seeing is a lot of discontent at the grassroots level all over this country. And that's what's going on right now.
Addressing politics in my music' is such a phrase, a sentence on paper, that I hate. That's not really me because at the end of the day, I wasn't a political science major and I wasn't educated in that sense so I hate when people talk about things they don't know anything about.
I don't ever want to do anything that's obvious, and I also want to find ways to do things that are extremely new and exciting and can make sense in bizarre ways. I always want things to make sense in really bizarre ways.
I find I get fixed in my ways if I don't change. I think I take too many things for granted.
I couldn't change anything without changing the end position, and I'm perfectly happy now. So whatever I feel in some sense may have been a mistake in the past is, in another sense, not a mistake, because it's left me here.
History, in the end, is only another kind of story, and stories are different from the truth. The truth is messy and chaotic and all over the place. Often it just doesn’t make sense. Stories make things make sense, but the way they do that is to leave out anything that doesn’t fit. And often that is quite a lot.
Anything can be changed. Anything can be fixed. Things that are broken can be fixed. And you don't have to be some billionaire or millionaire to do it. You just have to be a person with a vision and the passion to do it, and be willing to fight for it every day.
I would think a sense of the absurd is more important for a political cartoonist, because that could define things like a sense of hypocrisy or a sense of the things one has to be skeptical about.
I don't know what you wanna describe as Rock 'n' Roll, but I certainly thought that 60s stuff, Bob Dylan and the Beatles, changed the world a little bit. But the effect seems to have retreated. I think it's harder than we think to change the world. These things go in cycles. It doesn't seem to have done an awful lot of good, does it? You know, all the talk of racial harmony and equality in the world... we haven't got a long way since the 60s.
In so many ways, a lot of the drive I've had to do certain things has been because of this sense that I have both the opportunity and in some sense the obligation to ratify that my parents' life had purpose.
I think my father had a lot of anti-establishment in him. He came through the '60s.
The idealism of the left is a very selfish idealism. In their war against 'the rich' and big business, they don't care how much collateral damage there is to workers who end up end up unemployed.
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