Truth and Representation

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. Listen to Rat Kiley. Cooze, he says. He does not say bitch. He certainly does not say woman, or girl. He says cooze. Then he spits and stares. He's nineteen years old-it's too much for him-so he looks at you with those big sad gentle killer eyes and says cooze, because his friend is dead, and because it's so incredibly sad and true: she never wrote back.
You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty. Listen to Rat: "Jesus Christ, man, I write this beautiful fuckn' letter, I slave over it, and what happens? The dumb cooze never writes back."

- Tim O'Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story" in The Things They Carried

Advertising has taken over...

...the moral responsibility for all of society and replaced a puritan morality with a hedonistic morality of pure satisfaction.

A facade of fearlessness

Pryor did not grow up in grinding poverty, but he had a childhood that marked him for life and that he mined repeatedly for his comedy. Born Dec. 1, 1940, in Peoria, Ill., his mother, Gertrude, was a prostitute and cocktail waitress and his father, Buck, who he saw beat his mother regularly, was a pimp and bartender. His grandmother, who raised him from the age of 10, owned a brothel.

Even though Pryor was in some ways fearless onstage — there was nothing he wouldn't talk about, from impotence to his crack addiction — there was sometimes a hint of the skinny little Peoria kid lurking behind his eyes as he performed, watching fearfully for bullies.

He dropped out of school after eighth grade, got in and out of minor trouble, then joined the Army and was sent to Germany. Discharged for getting into a knife fight, he landed back in Peoria in 1960, where he started singing and telling jokes in local black nightclubs. The jokes went over better than the singing, and in 1963 Pryor moved to Greenwich Village, where he performed at fabled clubs like The Bitter End and befriended Bill Cosby and George Carlin. "He had a sort of pain that was fairly evident," Carlin recalled of those early days. Read more...

Uncited Sources |All Is Sillyness|

By him I have been made to go in the dark where there is no light. Lamentations 3:2

"One thing, be sure of why you are in this discussion. Pride only fogs the lenses. Play is the most powerful way. Like a child; see, as in the heart of a child, play isn't concerend with what's right or wrong. It just plays; it just is; remember that truth is arrived at through many ways but that the heart shapes the mind and vice versa; what this entails = you want to show, know, be, or say truth, shape the heart, watch it within you and desire to know truth and love it above all your own wants - with God's help, all things can be known. ...remember, true answers necessitate being, not speculation."