...não tem limites. Neste exato momento, um milhão de abobados se reúne em Copacabana para assistir quatro sexagenários encarquilhados saltitando ridiculamente em um palco. Com este povo, Lula está reeleito."
JP Coutinho: "O historiador A. J. P. Taylor escreveu algures que o problema central de Chamberlain foi acreditar que, do outro lado, estava alguém tão racional quanto ele. Se por «racional» entendermos «civilizado», no sentido «iluminista» do termo, percebe-se a observação. Lembro Taylor por estes dias: o Governo português lamenta os desenhos do Profeta porque acredita que, do outro lado, está gente «racional» e «civilizada». Acredita mal"
Fred Reed (via Claudio Avolio): "The fear of social inferiority always concerns the peasantariat: 'You ain’t no gooder’n me.' Until the sudden florescence of pay packets occurred, the lower orders had either accepted that they were the lower orders, however resentfully, or tried to rise. They might learn to speak good English, read widely, and cultivate good manners. Or they might not. If they did, it was likely to work, since in America those who behave and speak like gentlefolk (another inadmissible word) will usually be accepted as such. In either case, they did not impose their barbarousness on others.
Ah, but with their new-found and enormous purchasing power, they discovered that they could do more than compel the production of skateboards, trashy television, and awful music. They could make boorish childishness and ignorance into actual virtues. And did. Thus wretched grammar is now a sign of 'authenticity,' whatever that might mean, rather than of defective studies. Thus the solemnity with which rap 'music' is taken. Briefly the sound of the black ghetto, it is now around the world the heraldic emblem of the angry unwashed. Thus the degradation of the schools: It is easier to declare oneself educated than to actually become so, and the half-literate now had the power to have themselves so declared.
With the debasement of society came a simultaneous, though not necessarily related, extension of childhood and adolescence. In the remote prehistorical past, which for most today means anything before 1900, the young assumed responsibility early. It wasn’t a moral question, but a practical one. If the plowing didn’t get done, the family didn’t eat. By the age of eighteen, a boy was likely to carry a man’s burdens."
