Book Notes/2

With the left hand, I touch my hair above my ear. I hear the watch on an unchained left wrist. I vow to be responsible for the audacity of truth which respires involuntarily.

Reading a collection of books:

King Leopold's Ghost
In The Hot Zone
Writings For A Democratic Society
(and later, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda And the Road to 9/11)

Recently finished and recommend:

The White Tiger
My Guantanamo Diary: Stories The Detainees Told Me
Conversations With Saul Alinsky


Quotable quotes:

When I once wrote endlessly about the Vietnamese, I was now witnessing the suffering and struggles of Iraq. It seems like a circle ever enlarging, but returning always to its own beginnings. - Tom Hayden (Writings For... p15)

"When you get here, you'll be told we Indians invented everything from the Internet to hard-boiled eggs to spaceships before the British stole it all from us. Nonsense. The greatest thing to come out of this country in the ten thousand years of its history is the Rooster Coop. Go to Old Delhi, behind the Jama Masjid, and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundreds of pale hens and brightly covered roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages, packed as tightly as worms in a belly, pecking each other and shitting on each other, jostling just for breathing space; the whole cage giving off a horrible stench-- the stench of terrified, feathered flesh. On the wooden desk above the coop sits a grinning young butcher, showing off the flesh and organs of a recently chopped-up chicken, still oleanginous with a coating of dark blood. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know they're next. Yet they do not rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop.
The very same thing is done with human beings in this country." Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger... p148)

So called power institutions get away with a lot because they’re not challenged. You see, power is not just what the status quo has; it is more in what we may think it has. It may have ten soldiers but if we think a thousand soldiers, then for all practical purposes the status quo has a thousand soldiers. Rarely do they have the power we think they have and it’s amazing what happens when you just suddenly stand up and say, “Who do you think you are?” Saul Alinsky (Conversations... p57)