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My education was dominated by modernist thinkers and artists who taught me that the supreme imperative was courage to face the awful truth, to scorn … - Ellen Willis
" "My education was dominated by modernist thinkers and artists who taught me that the supreme imperative was courage to face the awful truth, to scorn the soft-minded optimism of religious and secular romantics as well as the corrupt optimism of governments, advertisers, and mechanistic or manipulative revolutionaries. I learned that lesson well (though it came too late to wholly supplant certain critical opposing influences, like comic books and rock-and-roll). Yet the modernists’ once-subversive refusal to be gulled or lulled has long since degenerated into a ritual despair at least as corrupt, soft-minded, and cowardly — not to say smug — as the false cheer it replaced. The terms of the dialectic have reversed: now the subversive task is to affirm an authentic post-modernist optimism that gives full weight to existent horror and possible (or probable) apocalyptic disaster, yet insists — credibly — that we can, well, overcome. The catch is that you have to be an optimist (an American?) in the first place not to dismiss such a project as insane.
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About Ellen Willis
Ellen Willis (December 14 1941 – November 9 2006) was an American essayist and critic. She was director of the cultural journalism program at New York University and co-founder of the feminist group Redstockings. She played an important role in the development of sex-positive feminism.
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Alternative Names:
Ellen Jane Willis
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Additional quotes by Ellen Willis
The point of drugs, for me, was always the eternal moment when you felt like Jesus's son (and gender be damned); when you found your center, which is another word for sanity or, I assume, sobriety as Faith understands it. But I never found a drug that would guarantee me that moment, or even a more vulgar euphoria: acid, grass, speed, coke, even Quaaludes (I've never tried heroin), all were unpredictable, potentially treacherous, as likely to concentrate anxiety as to blow it away. Context was all-important-set and setting, as they called it in those days. My emotional state, amplified or undercut by the collective emotional atmosphere, made the difference between a good trip, a bad trip, or no trip at all. For me, the ability to get high (I don't mean only on drugs) flourished in the atmosphere of abandon that defined the '60s-that pervasive cultural invitation to leap boundaries, challenge limits, try anything, want everything, overload the senses, let go. (p 232)
I think it makes sense to look on violence as a tragic last resort, to ask of any violent act that it be necessary to prevent physical destruction or soul-destroying violation, and that it be directed as narrowly as possible to those most responsible for the conflict. I'm glad the French resistance used terror against the Germans-and I think our bombing of Dresden was a war crime. (“Ministries of Fear” November 1985)
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