Quotes from Kurt Andersen

We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur. And in all probability it is not deliberate. In fact, that is part of the problem.

Back then I used to say that I despised the new coinage "quality time," that it was yuppie parents' smiley-face equivalent to lawyers' Ã¢â'¬Å"billable hours.

If underground militant cells were setting off hundreds of bombs and robbing banks around the country these days, of course, America would be crazed, consumed, talking of nothing else, and probably under martial law. The bombings back then seldom made the national news because a reasonable and rational Establishment was still in charge of the media discourse, determined to help Americans remain reasonable and rational.

America from the late 1960s on, equality came to mean not just that the law should treat everyone identically but that your beliefs about anything are equally as true as anyone else's.

A MAIN ARGUMENT of this book concerns how so many parts of American life have morphed into forms of entertainment. From 1980 to the end of the century, that tendency reached a tipping point in politics and the political discourse.

Then I read The Once and Future King, and for most of a year I was young Arthur, Dad was Merlyn, and it was my destiny to create the perfect kingdom of Camelot somewhere beyond northeastern Illinois.

In all this, financialization has done what people back in the 1950s and '60s and '70s worried and warned that the Communists would do if they took over: centralize control of the economy, turn Americans into interchangeable cogs serving an inhumane system, and allow only a well-connected elite to live well. Extreme Capitalism resembles Communism: yet another whopping irony.

The federal minimum wage is frozen for the entire decade, longer than ever, which translates to an effective pay cut of one-third for America's lowest-paid workers.