Because not one of those people said: “Please pass this so that I won’t be able to do something I know I should stop.” Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them “for their own good” — not because speaker claimed to be harmed by it.

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.

America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve got to want it bad, because it’s going to put up a fight. It’s going to say, “You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil; who’s standing center stage, advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.” You want to claim that this land is the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest.

Now show me that. Defend that. Celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.

Public media should not contain explicit or implied descriptions of sex acts… Ponography is pornography, regardless of the source.

Whenever I think that the human race has reached the ultimate level of stupidity, I see the benchmark get 1-upped… amazing.

Gimme charcoal to the measure two,
Send the bullet where you want it to.
Gimme sulfur to the measure three,
Make that powder gonna keep you free.
Gimme saltpeter, measure fifteen –
Sweetest shootin’ that you’ve ever seen!

Amid all the fuss about the impeachment proceedings, a friend who fled here from a country without democracy raised a truly amazing thought the other day: In the entire year the Monica thing has been going on — or in all the years Ken Starr has been searching for something indictable — not once has it occurred to any of us to look at a Potomac River bridge and wonder if tanks are going to roll across. As my friend said, there are a lot of places where, with the civilian government this weakened or ridiculed, and the legislature this paralyzed by politics, the army would roll on in and take over. And it never occurs to us to wonder that it doesn’t happen. Maybe that says more about America than anything else.

There is an intermittent debate, in these last dying millennia of puritanism, about the connection between sexual orthodoxy and the exercise of power. If a President can’t keep his pants on, does he lose the right to rule us? If a public servant cheats on his wife does this make him more likely to cheat on the electorate? For myself, I’d rather be ruled by an adulterer, by some sexual rogue, than by a prim celibate or zipped-up spouse. As criminals tend to specialize in certain crimes, so corrupt politicians normally specialize in their corruption: the sexual blackguards stick to fucking, the bribe-takers to graft. In which case it would make sense to elect proven adulterers instead of discouraging them from public life. I don’t say we should pardon them — on the contrary, we need to fan their guilt. But by
harnessing this useful emotion we restrict their sinning to the erotic sphere, and produce a countervailing integrity in governing. That’s my theory, anyway.

[I]n an age that is beyond embarrassment, it’s rarely clear what a “reasonable person” would find offensive. For every Duchess of York who objects to being captured, by telephoto lens, in a topless romp, there’s a Jennifer Ringley, a twenty-one-year-old exhibitionist in Washington, D.C., who has a camera trained on her bedroom twenty-four hours a day, transmitting images on the Internet at Jennicam.org. Who’s the more reasonable person—Fergie or Jenni?

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.