George W. S. Trow Quotes

World War II changed the demography. For a while, high seriousness was a part (only a part) of the mix. No one likes to think that the vector that has carried him into the demography could get lost in the demography, but that is what happens. Rock and roll—or the generating spirit of rock and roll—could get lost there, easily. And just think of all the ideas—and changes—there were implicit in the hegemony of rock and roll. We could be left with . . . just some of the music.

The 1960s weren’t the 1920s again; they were the Liberal Arts expressed in the negative. The 1970s, despite the hedonism, weren’t the 1920s; they were the Negative out to get all the rewards formerly held by the Positive. The Goat and Adding Machine Ritual is now.

Each one of these social generations—from the ‘50s, from the ‘60s, from the ‘70s, from the Reagan era, from now—thinks of its social aesthetic as definitive. In fact, they are all in a process: encouraged toward, and beyond, hubris, by demography.

The idea of choice is easily debased if one forgets that the aim is to have chosen successfully, not to be endlessly choosing.

Soon it will be achieved. The lie of television has been that there are contexts to which television will grant an access. Since lies last, usually, no more than one generation, television will re-form around the idea that television itself is a context to which television will grant an access.

The work of television is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts; finally, to establish the context of no-context and to chronicle it.

Celebrities have an intimate life and a life in the grid of two hundred million. For them, there is no distance between the two grids of American life. Of all Americans, only they are complete.

Wonder was the grace of the country.