bumper sticker philosophy

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/opinion/falser-words-were-never-spoken.html?src=me&ref=general

The New York Times must realize they are merely an echo chamber. Otherwise, they wouldn't allow this sort of truthfulness in their navel-gazing editorialists.

"When you start to become aware of these bogus quotations, you can’t stop finding them. Henry James, George Eliot, Picasso — all of them are being kept alive in popular culture through pithy, cheery sayings they never actually said.

Thoreau, Gandhi, Mandela — it’s easy to see why their words and ideas have been massaged into gauzy slogans. They were inspirational figures, dreamers of beautiful dreams. But what goes missing in the slogans is that they were also sober, steely men. Each of them knew that thoroughgoing change, whether personal or social, involves humility and sacrifice, and that the effort to change oneself or the world always exacts a price.

But ours is an era in which it’s believed that we can reinvent ourselves whenever we choose. So we recast the wisdom of the great thinkers in the shape of our illusions. Shorn of their complexities, their politics, their grasp of the sheer arduousness of change, they stand before us now. They are shiny from their makeovers, they are fabulous and gorgeous, and they want us to know that we can have it all."

Brian Morton, the director of the graduate program in fiction at Sarah Lawrence College, is the author of the novels “Starting Out in the Evening” and “Breakable You.”

I love that closing paragraph. Dr. Morton calls out the falseness, shallowness and cheapness of the narcissistic post-modern mush taken for wisdom on the Left today. Maybe there are misattributed or malformed quotations wafting through the conservative blogosphere and email distro lists. But probably not. And certainly not that are so thoroughly drained of meaning. And DEFINITELY not affixed to a Prius.