Cult Movie Quotes

Now i'm home again and none of my usuals methods of escape are doing the trick. I tend to watch a lot of movies. Ideally, documentaries about loners, outcats, pioneers. Give me a cult leader, obscure historical figures, dead musicians. I want to see a misunderstood person who someone is finally taking the time to understand.

After all, we're currently living in a Bizarro society where teenagers are technology-obsessed, where the biggest sellers in every bookstores are fantasy novels about a boy wizard, and the blockbuster hit movies are all full of hobbits and elves or 1960s spandex superheroes. You don't have to go to a Star Trek convention to find geeks anymore. Today, almost everyone is an obsessive, well-informed aficionado of something. Pick your cult: there are food geeks and fashion geeks and Desperate Housewives geeks and David Mamet geeks and fantasy sports geeks. The list is endless. And since everyone today is some kind of trivia geek or other, there's not even a stigma anymore. Trivia is mainstream. "Nerd" is the new "cool.

I thank her for starting that rumor in my brain that I was lovable. I thank her for her one-woman cult of blood, cum, spit, and razors that called me exquisite and shunned all the winners, cheerleaders, cops, and clear-skinned Hollywood movie stars.

Secret ceremonies in which malevolent men and women cloaked in hooded robes, hiding behind painted faces and chanting demonic incantations while inflicting sadistic wounds on innocent children lying on makeshift alters, or tied to inverted crosses, sounds like the stuff of which B-grade horror movies are made. Some think amoral religious cults only populate the world of Rosemary's Baby, but don't exist in real life. Or, do they? Ask Jenny Hill.

Wes: I just wanted to say hi because you’re on my mind. Wes: Have a great day. Also—I just listened to “You Could Start a Cult” by Lizzy and Niall, and if you haven’t heard it, seems like a Buxbaum song. And he dropped a link. Damn him. How could he possibly know?

If life is a movie most people would consider themselves the star of their own feature. Guys might imagine they're living some action adventure epic. Chicks maybe are in a rose-colored fantasy romance. And homosexuals are living la vida loca in a fabulous musical. Still others may take the indie approach and think of themselves as an anti-hero in a coming of age flick. Or a retro badass in an exploitation B movie. Or the cable man in a very steamy adult picture. Some people's lives are experimental student art films that don't make any sense. Some are screwball comedies. Others resemble a documentary, all serious and educational. A few lives achieve blockbuster status and are hailed as a tribute to the human spirit. Some gain a small following and enjoy cult status. And some never got off the ground due to insufficient funding. I don't know what my life is but I do know that I'm constantly squabbling with the director over creative control, throwing prima donna tantrums and pouting in my personal trailor when things don't go my way. Much of our lives is spent on marketing. Make-up, exercise, dieting, clothes, hair, money, charm, attitude, the strut, the pose, the Blue Steel look. We're like walking billboards advertising ourselves. A sneak peek of upcoming attractions. Meanwhile our actual production is in disarray--we're over budget, doing poorly at private test screenings and focus groups, creatively stagnant, morale low. So we're endlessly tinkering, touching up, editing, rewriting, tailoring ourselves to best suit a mass audience. There's like this studio executive in our heads telling us to cut certain things out, make it "lighter," give it a happy ending, and put some explosions in there too. Kids love explosions. And the uncompromising artist within protests: "But that's not life!" Thus the inner conflict of our movie life: To be a palatable crowd-pleaser catering to the mainstream... or something true to life no matter what they say?

Being kind, making hard decisions, helping those in need, standing up for what’s right, pointing toward hope and truth, and embracing the power of persistence . . . those were the qualities of Superman that mattered to me far more than his ability to see through walls. Because all of us can do those other things, can be those things; we can be Superman whenever we choose.

Art is progressive; the more you do it, the better you get. I defy anyone to write fifteen short stories and not have story #15 be at least marginally better than story #1. It’s simply not possible. Setting a date-certain for surrender often results in giving up just as you’re starting to get good at your craft.

Do you know those movies about the scary cult of, like, creepy kids who can read minds and worship the devil and live in the cornfields or something? Well, if they were casting for one of those movies, this girl would get the part. They wouldn’t even have to audition her. They would take one look at her and be like, Yes, you are creepy girl number three.

Never let them stop you from telling the story you want to tell.

Sister Mary Cthulhu

It doesn't matter if you're seventeen or fifty-seven, if you come from a poor background or a rich one, if you went to the best schools or the worst. It. Doesn't. Matter. What matters is listening to the small voice at the back of your head that says *This is what gives me joy.* It's about fighting naysayers and self-doubt when you feel you can't fight for even one more second. It's about standing up when all you want to do is lie down until life stops hitting you. It's not easy. It was never *meant* to be easy. But it can be done if we *choose* to do it.

To be a victim is to be forever frozen in amber by that person’s actions at that moment. Victimization only looks backward, never forward, which is why my family was incapable of moving on or redefining themselves. If I allowed myself to be defined by what my father did to me, it would put him at the center of my identity. He would have control over me for the rest of my life, even once he was gone. Yes, I was stuck in a box with a monster, but wallowing in indulgent self-pity wasn’t the solution; the task before me was to survive the monster without becoming the monster. In a way, I was lucky that my father was as awful as he was. He had no good qualities to negate. Had he been a better human being, I would have become a worse one.

Whatever our history, whatever the root of our surnames, we remain a good and decent people, and we do not bow down and we do not give up. The fire of the human spirit cannot be quenched by bomb blasts or body counts. Cannot be intimidated forever into silence or drowned by tears. We have endured worse before. We will bear this burden and all that come hereafter because that's what ordinary men and women do. No matter what. This has not made us weaker. It has only made us stronger.

In recent years the world has seen the development of a kind of fictitious Taoism which is propagated in popular kung-fu movies. There also is nowadays a form of purely theoretical Taoism adhered to by intellectuals, therapists, acupuncturists, and public service officials (serving on the "National Association of Taoism") of the Chinese government. But true Taoism is not merely a cult, nor a system, nor a therapeutic technique. It is, above all, the liturgical structure of local communities; it therefore belongs to the daily life of the people.

It has become a cliché that the right teacher, in the right place, at the right moment can change someone’s life. But in this case the truth behind that cliché cannot be overstated. They invested time, effort, and belief into me at a time when nobody else even had me on their radar. They went through my stories line by line, word by word, and comma by comma, showing a very defensive young writer that it was possible to be critical of the work while still supporting the effort behind it. Everything I’ve ever achieved as a writer can all be traced back to the moment these two teachers entered my orbit.

...the ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that their solution has become a matter of habit. Distraction as provided by art presents a covert control of the extent to which new tasks have become soluble by apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses. Today it does so in the film. Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.

Bannon thrived on the chaos he created and did everything he could to make it spread. When he finally made his way through the crowd to the back of the town house, he put on a headset to join the broadcast of the Breitbart radio show already in progress. It was his way of bringing tens of thousands of listeners into the inner sanctum of the “Breitbart Embassy,” as the town house was ironically known, and thereby conscripting them into a larger project. Bannon was inordinately proud of the movement he saw growing around him, boasting constantly of its egalitarian nature. What to an outsider could look like a cast of extras from the Island of Misfit Toys was, in Bannon’s eyes, a proudly populist and “unclubbable” plebiscite rising up in defiant protest against the “globalists” and “gatekeepers” who had taken control of both parties. Just how Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty figured into a plan to overthrow the global power structure wasn’t clear, even to many of Bannon’s friends. But, then, Bannon derived a visceral thrill anytime he could deliver a fuck-you to the establishment. The thousands of frustrated listeners calling in to his radio show, and the millions more who flocked to Breitbart News, had left him no doubt that an army of the angry and dispossessed was eager to join him in lobbing a bomb at the country’s leaders. As guests left the party, a doorman handed out a gift that Bannon had chosen for the occasion: a silver hip flask with “Breitbart” imprinted above an image of a honey badger, the Breitbart mascot. — Bannon’s cult-leader magnetism was a powerful draw for oddballs and freaks, and the attraction ran both ways. As he moved further from the cosmopolitan orbits of Goldman Sachs and Hollywood, there was no longer any need for him to suppress his right-wing impulses. Giving full vent to his views on subjects like immigration and Islam isolated him among a radical fringe that most of political Washington regarded as teeming with racist conspiracy theorists. But far from being bothered, Bannon welcomed their disdain, taking it as proof of his authentic conviction. It fed his grandiose sense of purpose to imagine that he was amassing an army of ragged, pitchfork-wielding outsiders to storm the barricades and, in Andrew Breitbart’s favorite formulation, “take back the country.” If Bannon was bothered by the incendiary views held by some of those lining up with him, he didn’t show it. His habit always was to welcome all comers. To all outward appearances, Bannon, wild-eyed and scruffy, a Falstaff in flip-flops, was someone whom the political world could safely ignore. But his appearance, and the company he kept, masked an analytic capability that was undiminished and as applicable to politics as it had been to the finances of corrupt Hollywood movie studios. Somehow, Bannon, who would happily fall into league with the most agitated conservative zealot, was able to see clearly that conservatives had failed to stop Bill Clinton in the 1990s because they had indulged this very zealotry to a point where their credibility with the media and mainstream voters was shot. Trapped in their own bubble, speaking only to one another, they had believed that they were winning, when in reality they had already lost.

My sisters and I giggled at “Dance: Ten; Looks: Three” (“Tits and ass / bought myself a fancy pair / tightened up the derriere”) while our parents sat in the front of the car—my father at the wheel, my mom in the passenger seat—both distracted and nonplussed. We flipped through the Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins hardbacks in my grandmother’s bookshelf and watched The Exorcist on the Z Channel (the country’s first pay-cable network that premiered in LA in the mid-’70s) after our parents sternly told us not to watch it, but of course we did anyway and got properly freaked out. We saw skits about people doing cocaine on Saturday Night Live, and we were drawn to the allure of disco culture and unironic horror movies. We consumed all of this and none of it ever triggered us—we were never wounded because the darkness and the bad mood of the era was everywhere, and when pessimism was the national language, a badge of hipness and cool. Everything was a scam and everybody was corrupt and we were all being raised on a diet of grit. One could argue that this fucked us all up, or maybe, from another angle, it made us stronger. Looking back almost forty years later, it probably made each of us less of a wuss. Yes, we were sixth and seventh graders dealing with a society where no parental filters existed. Tube8.com was not within our reach, fisting videos were not available on our phones, nor were Fifty Shades of Grey or gangster rap or violent video games, and terrorism hadn’t yet reached our shores, but we were children wandering through a world made almost solely for adults. No one cared what we watched or didn’t, how we felt or what we wanted, and we hadn’t yet become enthralled by the cult of victimization. It was, by comparison to what’s now acceptable when children are coddled into helplessness, an age of innocence.

Despite the superficial similarities created by global technology, the dynamics of peer-orientation are more likely to promote division rather than a healthy universality. One need only to look at the extreme tribalization of the youth gangs, the social forms entered into by the most peer-oriented among our children. Seeking to be the same as someone else immediately triggers the need to be different from others. As the similarities within the chosen group strengthen, the differences from those outside the groups are accentuated to the point of hostility. Each group is solidified and reinforced by mutual emulation and cue-taking. In this way, tribes have formed spontaneously since the beginning of time. The crucial difference is that traditional tribal culture could be passed down, whereas these tribes of today are defined and limited by barriers among the generations. The school milieu is rife with such dynamics. When immature children cut off from their adult moorings mingle with one another, groups soon form spontaneously, often along the more obvious dividing lines of grade and gender and race. Within these larger groupings certain subcultures emerge: sometimes along the lines of dress and appearance, and sometimes along those of shared interests, attitudes, or abilities, as in groups of jocks, brains, and computer nerds. Sometimes they form among peer-oriented subcultures like skateboarders, bikers, and skinheads. Many of these subcultures are reinforced and shaped by the media and supported by cult costumes, symbols, movies, music, and language. If the tip of the peer-orientation iceberg are the gangs and the gang wannabes, at the base are the cliques. Immature beings revolving around one another invent their own language and modes of expression that impoverish their self-expression and cut them off from others. Such phenomena may have appeared before, of course, but not nearly to the same extent we are witnessing today. The result is tribalization.

In 1968, when an actress made it to star status, she automatically rejected all roles that called for nudity. But Fonda broke with convention; she was a major actress who sought out roles that required her to disrobe.

MGM’s 1956 science fiction film, Forbidden Planet. This cult classic movie centers on a rather eccentric but brilliant scientist named Dr. Edward Morbius (played by Walter Pidgeon) and his innocent teenage

Little House on the Prairie and Disney Sunday Movie were safe. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and Sesame Street were on the list, too, until the Prophet deemed them worldly and idolatrous because puppets, like cartoons, were an imitation of God’s creation.

The female editor chairing the session considered this for a moment, then said, “Well, you know, rape’s been very good to us, but do you have a new angle on the rape thing?” On one level, her statement was understandable given the scandals and tabloid-style sex stories that drove sales of People magazine in the ’80s. But for me, hearing a woman say “rape’s been very good to us” was life-changing. I believe there is a trapdoor under all of us that has a single pin keeping it closed; it only takes one nudge, at the right time, to pop it open. With that comment, my pin was pushed, the trapdoor opened, and I fell through.

Then I stumbled upon Max and Dave Fleischer’s Superman cartoons. They were beautiful, even a small black and white TV. The scene that lit up my brain like a Christmas tree showed Superman use his cape to protect Lois Lane from a cascade of molten metal. Rather than being angry at her for getting in trouble, he was gentle and brave and saved her. I imprinted on that moment like a baby duck and my child’s mind folded around a sudden understanding. No, Superman was never going to be my father but if I worked at it really hard maybe day could become Superman. (32)

He showed me that words can do more than tell stories, they can heal, and as long as you live inside the dignity of what you write, no one can take that away that what matters most. Those who hate you can kill you, but they cannot destroy you or the ideals that matter to you. To be decent writer you had to give yourself over to the power of words and a love of storytelling. (203)

Many people back then watched the news in abject horror. Hippies, militant black power groups, killer cults that brainwashed suburban kids to drop acid and rise up and kill their parents, young men (the sons of veterans) burning their draft cards or fleeing to Canada, your children calling your policemen pigs, violent street crime, the emergence of the serial killer phenomenon, drug culture, free love, the nudity, violence, and the profanity of the films of New Hollywood, Woodstock, Altamont, Stonewall, Cielo Drive.

Many people back then watched the news in abject horror. Hippies, militant black power groups, killer cults that brainwashed suburban kids to drop acid and rise up and kill their parents, young men (the sons of veterans) burning their draft cards or fleeing to Canada, your children calling your policemen pigs, violent street crime, the emergence of the serial killer phenomenon, drug culture, free love, the nudity, violence, and the profanity of the films of New Hollywood, Woodstock, Altamont, Stonewall, Cielo Drive. To many Americans it was a mosaic that scared the shit out of them

And soon I was getting involved in one of the most amazing projects. Someone asked me to help design the digital part of the first hotel movie system, which was based on the very earliest VCRs. No one had VCRs then, of course. I was thinking, Oh my god! This is going to be incredible—designing movies for hotels! I couldn’t get over it. Their formula was this. They’d line up about six VCRs. Then they had a method of sending special TV channels to everybody’s room. They could play the movies on those channels. There was a filter in each room to block those channels. But the hotel clerk in the lobby could send a signal to unlock the filter in a particular room. Then the guest could watch the movie they ordered on their TV. Someone in the VCR room had to literally start the movie, but this was still a really cool system.

Do you know those movies about the scary cult of, like, creepy kids who can read minds and worship the devil and live in the cornfields or something? Well, if they were casting for one of those movies, this girl would get the part. They wouldn’t even have to audition her.

We had to come up with a retail price for our literature. After all, we weren’t going to sell them just to Paul. We decided to price them at $666.66 each—a price I came up with because I liked repeating digits. (That was $500, plus a 30 percent markup.) And you know what? Neither of us even knew the number’s satanic connections until Steve started getting letters about it. I mean, what? The number of the Beast. Truly, I had no idea. I hadn’t seen the movie The Exorcist. And the Apple I was no beast to me.

And she’d seen that ancient movie Cocktail that her mum loved so much because she had – for some unfathomable reason – a crush on that dodgy guy from the cult who played the lead.

Do you know those movies about the scary cult of, like, creepy kids who can read minds and worship the devil and live in the cornfields or something? Well, if they were casting for one of those movies, this girl would get the part.

Animal is a cult movie. It depicts the love of a brother for his sister. It displays the love of a son for his father. It reiterates what the love of one's family means to a Man.

Holy shit, Gabby FaceTimed me earlier and showed me her room. You really ARE in a Hallmark movie. But seriously, are you hanging in there? HELLO? Where are you? Have you been indoctrinated into an Alpine cult? Don’t do that. I’d miss you.

On one of those nights in January 2014, we sat next to each other in Maria Vostra, happy and content, smoking nice greens, with one of my favorite movies playing on the large flat-screen TVs: Once Upon a Time in America. I took a picture of James Woods and Robert De Niro on the TV screen in Maria Vostra's cozy corner, which I loved to share with Martina. They were both wearing hats and suits, standing next to each other. Robert de Niro looked a bit like me and his character, Noodles, (who was a goy kid in the beginning of the movie, growing up with Jewish kids) on the picture, was as naive as I was. I just realized that James Woods—who plays an evil Jewish guy in the movie, acting like Noodles' friend all along, yet taking his money, his woman, taking away his life, and trying to kill him at one point—until the point that Noodles has to escape to save his life and his beloved ones—looks almost exactly like Adam would look like if he was a bit older. “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts.” – William Shakespeare That sounds like an ancient spell or rather directions, instructions to me, the director instructing his actors, being one of the actors himself as well, an ancient spell, that William Shakespeare must have read it from a secret book or must have heard it somewhere. Casting characters for certain roles to act like this or like that as if they were the director’s custom made monsters. The extensions of his own will, desires and actions. The Reconquista was a centuries-long series of battles by Christian states to expel the Muslims (Moors), who had ruled most of the Iberian Peninsula since the 8th century. The Reconquista ended on January 2, 1492. The same year Columbus, whose statue stands atop a Corinthian custom-made column down the Port at the bottom of the Rambla, pointing with his finger toward the West, had discovered America on October 12, 1492. William Shakespeare was born in April 1564. He had access to knowledge that had been unavailable to white people for thousands of years. He must have formed a close relationship with someone of royal lineage, or used trick, who then permitted him to enter the secret library of the Anglican Church. “A character has to be ignorant of the future, unsure about the past, and not at all sure what he/she’s supposed to be doing.” – Anthony Burgess Martina proudly shared with me her admiration for the Argentine author Julio Cortazar, who was renowned across South America. She quoted one of his famous lines, saying: “Vida es como una cebolla, hay que pelarla llorando,” which translates to “Life is like an onion, you have to peel it crying.” Martina shared with me her observation that the sky in Europe felt lower compared to America. She mentioned that the clouds appeared larger in America, giving a sense of a higher and more expansive sky, while in Europe, it felt like the sky had a lower and more limiting ceiling. “The skies are much higher in Argentina, Tomas, in all America. Here in Europe the sky is so low. In Argentina there are huge clouds and the sky is huge, Tomas.” – Martina Blaterare “It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same--people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.” – George Orwell, 1984

But after knowing Tommy for a decade and a half, I’ve never gotten a call or a knock. There were never any suspicious (or, really, any) people around him. Money is what allowed Tommy to not only produce and release The Room, but also to extensively advertise it and keep it alive in the dark time between its disastrous initial release and eventual cult success. The origins of all of this money are still unknown. Money, you could say, is the elephant in The Room.

get him killed by … someone. Someone scary enough that the huntress doesn’t want to get involved. She whacks like seven-eight of their guys, but she doesn’t want to get into this. Stupidly, Alpha Male charges ahead where the Goddess of the Hunt fears to tread. Because my rallying cry is “MORONS FORWARD!” or something of that sort. Mercy. I say none of this to Dr. Perugini, because a) she’s not going to believe me, and b) none of this makes me look cool, especially the part where I’m not the Big Damn Hero doing the saving. Also, there are a lot of tourists around us and most of them speak English. Call me self-conscious, but I don’t want anyone thinking I’m crazy. There is still a widely accepted cult of skepticism about the existence of metahumans, even after the Minneapolis incident. We go through a corridor of tapestries, and one of them has a Jesus that the tour guide swears is watching. I picture someone behind the wall like in the old movies, eyeballs staring out, then dismiss that thought as utter nonsense. Then I move, and I swear the tapestry’s eyes move with me. No, I am not a fan of the “Jesus is watching” tapestry. It’s like he can sense my impure thoughts about Dr. Perugini and he is not pleased. Come on, man, your dad supposedly intelligently designed her. Like this wasn’t predictable.

Human beings are contradictory, hypocritical, a mix of good and evil, selflessness and selfishness - and our countries cannot help reflecting that. Yes, the United States, as a superpower, has done many abhorrent things. It has also done many praiseworthy things. The first can also be said of the Soviet Union and China; neither merits the second. History and politics gave the United States responsibilities few would want. It accepted those responsibilities and the rest of us tagged along. And we in Canada were happy to tag along. We wanted to profit from their economy; we have. We felt free to reduce our military to inconsequence because they would protect us; they have. (In a military sense, do the Americans really need NORAD? Hardly.) We wanted to have the television and washing machines and dishwashers they have; we do. Yet we laughed at their simple-minded glitz, their ignorance of the world - all the while heading in droves for Las Vegas and Los Angeles. We wanted the American Dream - without the name and without the responsibilities; we have it, to a large extent - and it is this that allows us to caress our little sense of moral superiority. The number of Canadians who expressed sympathy for the victim while blaming him (and watching his movies and his TV sitcoms, listening to his music, eating his food and dreaming of Florida) attained, in a time of grave crisis, a level of self-satisfied hypocrisy that is usually found only in the NDP, those paragons of democratic values who have few good words for the Americans but much mindless applause for Castro. We're lucky in this country to have none of the international responsibilities the Americans do, because then we wouldn't be able to lord it morally over them - and then where would we be? Canadians have no problems anywhere in the world, we like to boast. What we don't realize is, it's not because we're likeable, it's because we're inoffensive. We're welcome by default.

Grant me the following in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Like a leper rotting in flesh, let all avoid me. Like a cripple without limbs, let me not move freely. Remove my cheeks, the tears may not roll down them. Crush my lips and tongue, that I may not sin with them. Pull out my nails, that I may not grasp nothing. Let my shoulders and back be bent, that I may carry nothing. Like a man with tumor in the head let me lack judgment. Ravage my body sworn to chastity leave me with no pride, and have me live in shame. Let no one pray for me. But only the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me.

The great thing about real life is that it will always surprise you. Nothing ever turns out the way you expect. I suppose that’s why I write nonfiction. If this were a movie, the organization would already have traced my number, bugged my phone, and kidnapped my brother. Instead I was being transferred to the publicist and media relations executive for a death cult.

I'll be like in that movie, that one where all the people walk around recitin' the books they memorized after all the books were burned. Form a retreat, a cult of over-specialized cold warriors like me. Recite the blue pubs, the yellow pubs, the red pubs, the black pubs. Muttering men keeping the data alive.

Even before the first Soviet tanks crossed into Afghanistan in 1979, a movement of Islamists had sprung up nationwide in opposition to the Communist state. They were, at first, city-bound intellectuals, university students and professors with limited countryside appeal. But under unrelenting Soviet brutality they began to forge alliances with rural tribal leaders and clerics. The resulting Islamist insurgents—the mujahedeen—became proxies in a Cold War battle, with the Soviet Union on one side and the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia on the other. As the Soviets propped up the Afghan government, the CIA and other intelligence agencies funneled millions of dollars in aid to the mujahedeen, along with crate after crate of weaponry. In the process, traditional hierarchies came radically undone. When the Communists killed hundreds of tribal leaders and landlords, young men of more humble backgrounds used CIA money and arms to form a new warrior elite in their place. In the West, we would call such men “warlords.” In Afghanistan they are usually labeled “commanders.” Whatever the term, they represented a phenomenon previously unknown in Afghan history. Now, each valley and district had its own mujahedeen commanders, all fighting to free the country from Soviet rule but ultimately subservient to the CIA’s guns and money. The war revolutionized the very core of rural culture. With Afghan schools destroyed, millions of boys were instead educated across the border in Pakistani madrassas, or religious seminaries, where they were fed an extreme, violence-laden version of Islam. Looking to keep the war fueled, Washington—where the prevailing ethos was to bleed the Russians until the last Afghan—financed textbooks for schoolchildren in refugee camps festooned with illustrations of Kalashnikovs, swords, and overturned tanks. One edition declared: Jihad is a kind of war that Muslims fight in the name of God to free Muslims.… If infidels invade, jihad is the obligation of every Muslim. An American text designed to teach children Farsi: Tey [is for] Tofang (rifle); Javed obtains rifles for the mujahedeen Jeem [is for] Jihad; Jihad is an obligation. My mom went to the jihad. The cult of martyrdom, the veneration of jihad, the casting of music and cinema as sinful—once heard only from the pulpits of a few zealots—now became the common vocabulary of resistance nationwide. The US-backed mujahedeen branded those supporting the Communist government, or even simply refusing to pick sides, as “infidels,” and justified the killing of civilians by labeling them apostates. They waged assassination campaigns against professors and civil servants, bombed movie theaters, and kidnapped humanitarian workers. They sabotaged basic infrastructure and even razed schools and clinics. With foreign backing, the Afghan resistance eventually proved too much for the Russians. The last Soviet troops withdrew in 1989, leaving a battered nation, a tottering government that was Communist in name only, and a countryside in the sway of the commanders. For three long years following the withdrawal, the CIA kept the weapons and money flowing to the mujahedeen, while working to block any peace deal between them and the Soviet-funded government. The CIA and Pakistan’s spy agency pushed the rebels to shell Afghan cities still under government control, including a major assault on the eastern city of Jalalabad that flattened whole neighborhoods. As long as Soviet patronage continued though, the government withstood the onslaught. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, however, Moscow and Washington agreed to cease all aid to their respective proxies. Within months, the Afghan government crumbled. The question of who would fill the vacuum, who would build a new state, has not been fully resolved to this day.

Closer to home, the 1999 film Office Space, which deadpanned the meaningless rituals and bureaucracy of a fictional technology company, became a cult hit because it was instantly recognizable. In the movie, programmer Peter Gibbons describes his job to a hypnotherapist: Peter: So I was sitting in my cubicle today, and I realized, ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every single day that you see me, that’s on the worst day of my life. Dr. Swanson: What about today? Is today the worst day of your life? Peter: Yeah. Dr. Swanson: Wow, that’s messed up.14

Fredric Jameson and others have detailed the operation of a cultural prohibition, at the structural level, on even the imaging of alternatives to the desolate insularity of individual experience within the competitive workings of capitalist society. possibilities of non-monadic or communal life are rendered unthinkable. In 1965, a typical negative image of collective living was, for example, that of the Bolsheviks moving sullen working-class families into Doctor Zhivago's spacious and pristine home in the David Lean movie. For the past quarter-century, the communal has been presented as a farm more nightmarish option. For example, in recent neoconservative portrayals of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, measures taken against private property and class privilege on behalf of collective social formations are equated to the most monstrous crimes in world history. On a smaller scale, there are the countless narratives of cult-like communes of obedient converts ruled by homicidal madmen and cynical manipulators. Echoing bourgeois fears in the late nineteenth century following 1871, the idea of a commune derived from any form of socialism remains systemically intolerable. The cooperative, as a lived set of relations, cannot actually be made visible -- it can only be represented as a parodic replication of existing relations of domination. In many different ways, the attack on values of collective and cooperation is articulated through the notion that freedom is to be free of any dependency on others, while in fact we are experience a more comprehensive subjection to the 'free' workings of markets. As Harold Bloom has shown, the real American religion is 'to be free of other selves.' In academic circles, the right-wing attach on the cooperative is abetted by the current intellectual fashion of denouncing the idea or possibility of community for its alleged exclusions and latent fascisms. One of the main forms of control over the last thirty years has been to ensure there are no visible alternatives to privatized patterns of living.

If you hold fast to what's true and right and just, things work out.

Writing is a holy chore.

The answer, of course, was that the stories had been written as well as could be expected given the tools I had when I wrote them. Every writer starts with the same toolbox, which at most might contain a screwdriver and a pair of rusty pliers, and there’s not much you can make with that. Each finished story adds a new tool to the box that assists in the construction of better stories going forward, and reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the prior work.

But the shelf life of that status quo was expiring fast.

if you start to talk about you do I buy you a mirror for your birthday? Robert Sherriff-Australian - Actor-Model-Poet- Author-Singer- Historian - Photographer Robert Sherriff Author of NOBODY'S HOME Robert Sherriff Author of Dirkbell – CHILDREN'S BOOK Part of Wolf Creek TV series 2015 Part of Movie 'Maurice’s Symphony’ 2015 Motivation Speaker Movie - Snuff 2016 Movie - CULT 2016 Australian Copyright Act 1968 0466246021