McLuhan vs. Mailer

Check out this google video with McLuhan and Mailer. Good stuff, especially watching it 40 years later! Who wins in hindsight?

"Around 1965, I went to church and heard a priest describe Vietnam as a holy war. That's when I walked out. Something told me he's dead wrong."

-----Martin Scorsese, from Rolling Stone interview (40th Anniversary edition)

Why we continue to ascribe God's name to ventures that run counter to His explicitly stated desires is beyond me. I wonder how many others have shut the door on God for similar reasons?

"It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy."

-----Czeslaw Milosz, from "The Captive Mind"

"As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it's only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though , but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let's-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way--hostile to my fantasy of being a true individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathesome, an insect on a dead thing."

-----David Foster Wallace, from the essay "Consider The Lobster" in "Consider The Lobster"