Last Words

From Philip K. Dick's final interview, 1982 (via here, continuing from here):

"We’re not seeing the clock turned back to 1912, before the graduated income tax was enacted; we’re seeing it turned back to Imperial Rome, where I think it was Seneca who said, “There’s no use giving food to the starving. It’ll just prolong their miserable lives.” Rabbi Hertz quotes him. The Roman attitude was that being hungry, poor, and sick, you deserved to die anyway. Aristotle, Plato, Virgil, Seneca and all of these people, don’t even include it as a virtue — they actually include it as a vice, that you would help the needy. We’re now seeing a return to the old imperial system of, “Let the disadvantaged sink to the bottom, let ‘em die.” This is so tragic and so inhumane.

“But I can’t work up any animosity toward Reagan. I see him as caught up in historic trends that are so powerful, he was literally brought to power, the way Hitler was, which was legally and by a very large majority. And look what happened last week with Tip O’Neill’s fight against Reagan’s budget cuts. Did you see Tip O’Neill standing there at that microphone? The guy was ruined. His face was sagging, he was shaking. You didn’t even have to have the sound on.

“There is one thing in Deuteronomy where he says, “You must always pay the hired man before sunset. For he is poor and has his heart set on it.” And in the notes Rabbi Hertz has for that, there is: “The workman is so poor that unless he is paid by sunset, he will not be able to buy food for his family.” I just lay there thinking about that, “For he is poor and has his heart set on it.” It is so incredible that we have fallen away from something that was so basic to our civilization, for maybe as many as 2,000 years.

“We are in a time when there is a cruel spirit across the land, and it seems to be gathering momentum. I have some very close, personal friends who are showing symptoms of great cruelty…”

Centenary

So Much for the Good News...

I have to admit that I don't know firsthand what it was like over in the U.K. at the time -- how it was precisely that the 1980s got underway, if there was any sense of a decisive lurch in a certain direction being taken. Here in the U.S., the decade more or less started with a bang. A bang that was ironically accompanied by a whimper, a whimper (or maybe it was more like a groan) that some folks had labeled a "mandate"...






A fair amount of elementary arithmetic, there. Everything easily quantifiable. Throughout the prior decade, you could rely on Gil Scott-Heron to know the score; to call the action as he saw it, size it up for what it was. Wry knowing looks all around. "Back to a time when movies were in black and white, and so was everything else." Heads nod in agreement. "...And common sense is at an all-time low, with heavy trading." Indeed. Sometimes, before even the opening credits unfurl, you can sense that a movie's going to deeply and thoroughly suck.

By the time the decade had half run its course, many of those same black-and-white Hollywood films were being systematically "colorized" by Turner Broadcasting networks, Reagan had won a second term in office, and Gil Scott-Heron's recording career was on the wane. Scott-Heron would soon slip from the public eye for a long stretch; drifting off the grid somewhere in New York City, eventually (we would learn only years later) to be swallowed by the crack cocaine epidemic that was sweeping the country's inner cities.