“The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps”

“The real enemy" is the totality of physical and mental constraints by which capital, or class society, or statism, or the society of the spectacle expropriates everyday life, the time of our lives. The real enemy is not an object apart from life. It is the organization of life by powers detached from it and turned against it. The apparatus, not its personnel, is the real enemy. But it is by and through the apparatchiks and everyone else participating in the system that domination and deception are made manifest. The totality is the organization of all against each and each against all. It includes all the policemen, all the social workers, all the office workers, all the nuns, all the op-ed columnists, all the drug kingpins from Medellin to Upjohn, all the syndicalists and all the situationists.”

“Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing — or rather, they died for work. But work is nothing to die for.”

“Looking for work sounds almost as bad as finding it.”

“You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education.”

“Crimson flames tied through my earsRollin' high and mighty trapsPounced with fire on flaming roadsUsing ideas as my maps"We'll meet on edges, soon," said IProud 'neath heated brow.Ah, but I was so much older then,I'm younger than that now.Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth"Rip down all hate," I screamedLies that life is black and whiteSpoke from my skull. I dreamedRomantic facts of musketeersFoundationed deep, somehow.Ah, but I was so much older then,I'm younger than that now.”

“Philip Sharpe was a soldier in God's army," says the minister. "Now he marches with the angels.”