A Quote by Henry Giroux
We have in this country something remarkable. We have the local version of the Soviets' Pravda. It trades in ignorance and lies and opinions, and makes the claim that they are "truth," and it does so with people who are stupid, who don't know anything, and are basically entertainers. It merges a fundamentalist ideology with celebrity culture.
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You live in a country that's marked by celebrity culture, you know, that basically infantilizes people, paralyzes them, eliminates all notions of civic literacy, turns the school into bastions of ignorance. They completely kill the radical imagination in any fundamental way.
Stupid religion makes stupid beliefs, stupid leaders make stupid rules, stupid environment makes stupid health, stupid companions makes stupid behaviour, stupid movies makes stupid acts, stupid food makes stupid skin, stupid bed makes stupid sleep, stupid ideas makes stupid decisions, stupid clothes makes stupid appearance. Lets get rid of stupidity from our stupid short lives.
When people say that L.A. doesn't have a culture, I think it really does: a very old culture, and very specific. There's streets named after entertainers, and statues of entertainers, and it's great. Entertainment is still art, even if it makes billions of dollars. So it's like a city built on entertainment, and art in a way.
That Solidarity was a religious movement no one, least of all the Soviets, can deny. In November 1981, Pravda denounced 'religious fanaticism' as a grave challenge to socialism; failure to contain it, Pravda said, was at the root of the problems in Poland.
When ignorance does not know something, it says that what it does not know is stupid.
Today, as we have seen, fascism and communism are discredited, but are replaced by a paraphilic consumer culture driven by fantasy, desperately in search of distractions and escalating sensations, and a fundamentalist culture wherein the rigors of a private journey are shunned in favor of an ideology that, at the expense of the paradoxes and complexities of truth, favors one-sided resolutions, black-and-white values, and a privileging of one's own complexes as the norm for others.
What good does it do to remain tied to an ideology if you don't achieve anything by it? I have an ideology myself - you can't work in a vacuum; you have to have faith in something.
Intelligent people know they are intelligent. They also know that one person cannot know all, hence a person is not stupid simply because he is ignorant of one thing or another. They know that, to another intelligent person, they will not appear stupid in asking for an explanation of what they do not know, and so their ignorance on any particular issue does not become an embarrassment.
Let's take Pravda in the 1980s. I mean you could have read things in Pravda saying that it was a stupid error to invade Afghanistan: "it was a dumb thing to do, we have to get out, it's costing us too much." I mean that U.S. analog of that would be "extreme liberalism," and it has been pretty well studied.
Ideology makes people stupid.
Every photograph is a fiction with pretensions to truth. Despite everything that we have been inculcated, all that we believe, photography always lies; it lies instinctively, lies because its nature does not allow it to do anything else.
I try to basically keep my opinions to myself when it comes to people who are charged with crimes that I don't know anything about.
Why should I crowd the world with my opinions? Live and let live. That's it. Let people have their own opinions, and you just keep yours to yourself. There are too many opinions - some unnecessary, some great, some ridiculously stupid - so I think I rather not say anything and keep my opinions to myself.
It does no harm just once in a while to acknowledge that the whole country isn't in flames, that there are people in the country besides politicians, entertainers, and criminals.
I got overwhelmed by the magnitude of the celebrity culture in America. My background is as a news journalist, and newsrooms in the US are shrinking - investigation teams are being terminated or shrunk on newspapers all around the country. The one aspect that's expanded is coverage of celebrity culture.
We are struggling with the global war on the truth. And if what we used to think of as the domain of the Soviets, the kind of celebration of lies and press as propaganda, that now we realize is not something that is unique to the Soviet state. It's within ourselves as well here in the West.
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