Topeka School Quotes

The opposite of a truth," Klaus quoted, "is a falsehood; but the opposite of a profound truth...may be another profound truth." [Niels Bohr]

Nothing is a cliche when you’re living it.

Objecting to the diagnosis of penis envy was a sure sign of penis envy.

the real men—who are themselves in fact perpetual boys, since America is adolescence without end—had to differentiate themselves with violence,

How much easier it would be if when you played them slowly in reverse the lyrics really did, as some hysterical parents feared, reveal satanic messages; if there were a backmasked secret order, however dark, instead of rage at emptiness.

a face you know intimately is most disturbingly altered when it’s altered only slightly;

we thought that if we had a language for our feelings we might transcend them.

The Kochs were also directing millions of dollars into online education, and into teaching high school students, through a nonprofit that Charles devised called the Young Entrepreneurs Academy. The financially pressed Topeka school system, for instance, signed an agreement with the organization which taught students that, among other things, Franklin Roosevelt didn’t alleviate the Depression, minimum wage laws and public assistance hurt the poor, lower pay for women was not discriminatory, and the government, rather than business, caused the 2008 recession. The program, which was aimed at low-income areas, also paid students to take additional courses online.

But there are no grown-ups; that’s what you must grow up to know fully.

Think about how often—before cell phones, before any kind of caller ID—you answered the landline as a child and had to have an exchange, however brief, with aunts or uncles or family friends. Even if it was that five-second check-in, How are you doing, how is school, is your mom around—it meant periodic real-time vocal contact with an extended community, which, through repetition, it reinforced.

could come to terms with aspects of my past without those terms being set by the Foundation’s unexamined Freudian tradition, which pathologized women’s experience when it didn’t fit the great man’s theory.

The opposite of a truth," Klaus quoted, "is a falsehood; but the opposite of a profound truth...may be another profound truth." It either is or is not August...if I assert it's August when it isn't--simply false; but if I say that life is pain, that is true, profoundly so; so, too, that life is joy; the more profound the statement, the more reversible the deep truths are sedimented in syntax, the terms can be reversed... [Niels Bohr]

On the one hand, Klaus, surely the only man in Topeka outfitted in white linen, could not take these kids—with their refrigerators full of food, their air-conditioning and television, their freedom from stigma or state violence—seriously; what could be more obvious than the fact that they did not know what suffering was, that if they suffered from anything it was precisely this lack of suffering, a kind of neuropathy that came from too much ease, too much sugar, a kind of existential gout?

But there are no grown-ups, that’s what you must grow up to know fully; your parents were just two more bodies experiencing landscape and weather, trying to make sense by vibrating columns of air, redescribing contingency as necessity with religion or World Ice Theory or the Jewish science, cutting profound truths with their opposites as the regimes of meaning collapse into the spread.

I think I’d felt that as long as I avoided looking for the tickets, they would be there; it was only if I searched the archive that they’d disappear, as if the past were up until that point indeterminate, that I might outrun it. Do you know what I mean? We had to pay a lot of money to get the tickets for the next day; luckily they still had seats, although I suppose there are usually seats to and from Kansas City. It was kind of like that, recovering the memory of what my father had done. The knowledge was always there, I carried it in my body, but I didn’t know what I knew, although I knew I knew something and that I dreaded knowing it fully, dreaded it as if only coming into the knowledge, into the memory, would make the event that I was repressing real.

The problem for him in high school was that debate made you a nerd and poetry made you a pussy – even if both could help you get to the vaguely imagines East Coast city from which your experiences in Topeka would be recounted with great irony. The key was to narrate participation in debate as a form of linguistic combat; the key was to be a bully, quick and vicious and ready to spread an interlocutor with insults at the at the smallest provocation. Poetry could be excused if it upped your game, became cipher and flow, if it was part of why Amber was fucking you and not Reynolds et al. If linguistic prowess could do damage and get you laid, then it could be integrated into the adolescent social realm without entirely departing from the household values of intellect and expression. It was not a reconciliation, but a workable tension. His disastrous tonsorial compromise. The migraines. Fortunately for Adam, this shifting of aggression to the domain of language was sanctioned by one of the practices the types had appropriated: after several hours of drinking, if no fight or noise complain had broken up the party, you were likely to encounter freestyling. In many ways, this was the most shameful of all the poses, the clearest manifestation of a crisis in white masculinity and its representational regimes, a small group of privileged crackers often arrhythmically recycling the genre’s dominant and to them totally inapplicable clichés. But it was socially essential for him: the rap battle transmuted his prowess as a public speaker and aspiring poet into something cool. His luck was dizzying: that there was a rapid, ritualized poetic insult exchange bridging the gap between his Saturday afternoons in abandoned high schools and his Saturday nights in unsupervised houses, allowing him to transition from one contest to the other.

a 1960 self-published broadside, A Business Man Looks at Communism, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat [sic] and Republican Parties.” Protestant churches, public schools, universities, labor unions, the armed services, the State Department, the World Bank, the United Nations, and modern art, in his view, were all Communist tools. He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy and disparagingly of the American civil rights movement. The Birchers agitated to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren after the Supreme Court voted to desegregate the public schools in the case Brown v. Board of Education, which had originated in Topeka, in the Kochs’ home state of Kansas. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” Fred Koch claimed in his pamphlet. Welfare in his view was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where he predicted that they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech, Koch claimed that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.

The most common criticism of the spread was that it detached policy debate from the real world, that nobody used language the way that these debaters did, save perhaps for auctioneers. But even adolescents knew this wasn't true, that corporate persons deployed a version of the spread all the time: for they heard the spoken warnings at the end of the increasingly common television commercials for prescription drugs, when risk information was disclosed at a speed designed to make it difficult to comprehend; they heard the list of rules and caveats read rapid-fire at the end of promotions on the radio; they were at least vaguely familiar with the 'fine print' one received from financial institutions and health-insurance companies; the last thing one was supposed to do with these thousands of words was comprehend them. These types of disclosure were designed to conceal; they exposed you to information that, should you challenge the institution in question, would be treated like a 'dropped argument' in a fast round of debate - you have already conceded the validity of the point by failing to address it when it was presented. It's no excuse that you didn't have the time. Even before the twenty-four hour news cycle, Twitter storms, algorithmic trading, spreadsheets, the DDoS attack, Americans were getting 'spread' in their daily lives; meanwhile, their politicians went on speaking slowly, slowly about values utterly disconnected from their policies.

There are forces that have always attempted, and ultimately failed, to make America static and rigid. But America has proven to be elastic. Our ancestors have always had to push and stretch America to accommodate its many residents and communities. We now have to do our part. If any of you have been active students of US history, you know that with every two steps we march forward toward progress, we always get pushed one step back. The racially anxious men and women with hoods, tiki torches, and business suits will do everything in their power to violently chokehold and drag America back to 1953. This is the year before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. I'm convinced that 1953 is also the year that many enemies of diversity and progress believe America was allegedly "great.

The Kochs were also directing millions of dollars into online education, and into teaching high school students, through a nonprofit that Charles devised called the Young Entrepreneurs Academy. The financially pressed Topeka school system, for instance, signed an agreement with the organization which taught students that, among other things, Franklin Roosevelt didn’t alleviate the Depression, minimum wage laws and public assistance hurt the poor, lower pay for women was not discriminatory, and the government, rather than business, caused the 2008 recession.

America is adolescence without end.

(The psychiatrists—Eric was among the youngest—often put these kids on Haldol; more than one came to me exhibiting, as a result of the mysterious pill, “tardive dyskinesia”—involuntarily sticking out their tongues, clenching and unclenching their jaws, smacking their lips.)

What I knew as much by instinct as by training was that when a boy like Jacob shows up in your cramped but light-filled office, you should not under any circumstances ask him to account for his behavior[...] Jacob would be the last person capable of such an account; if he had the language he wouldn’t express himself with symptoms.

How many of his small gestures and postures in the present were embodied echoes of the past, repetitions just beneath the threshold of his consciousness? What would happen to the past if you brought those involuntary muscle memories under your control and edited them, edited them out?

What could be lonelier than a child in space?

part of me was trying not to react to my mom’s palpable concern about how much the meal would cost.

I imagined this scene taking place simultaneously in kitchens all across suburbia, a vast performance of which the actors are unaware, directed by a mysterious force that goes by the name or misnomer of "culture

easier to imagine starting a family where we were known only as a couple—no memory of Rachel, no complicated preexisting social networks, no potentially difficult relations nearby. I wanted children badly, maybe in part to mark how different my second marriage was from the first.

Like any two men or man-children meeting in the playground or the marketplace they quickly, almost instantly, calculated who could take the other.

Sima made a space for me to hear that there were depths beneath what I was saying that I hadn't sounded yet.

Others began soliciting speech from him, where did you buy those awesome boots, is that a hickey or a bruise, do you still practice martial arts?

Famous in Topeka” would be a great name for a band),

what could be more obvious than the fact that they did not know what suffering was, that if they suffered from anything it was precisely this lack of suffering, a kind of neuropathy that came from too much ease, too much sugar, a kind of existential gout?

familiar with the “fine print” one received from financial institutions and health-insurance companies; the last thing one was supposed to do with those thousands of words was comprehend them.

It’s like there is a video game inside his head except what happens there will happen here.

they did not know what suffering was, that if they suffered from anything it was precisely this lack of suffering,

The electorate, Adam had read in The Economist, would grow increasingly diverse and the Republicans would die off as a national party even if something remained the matter with Kansas;

And finally, an intern pushing the metal show box: see the cow, the purple of the hide barely perceptible, blood seeping from the small holes punched by a .22, ears tagged with plastic. Shitting itself, despite the tranquilizers, out of terror at being nearly real.

It was like how, when he read a poem to himself, the rhymes were neither sound nor silence. Unheard melodies in the mind’s ear. The muted music of consciousness.

that they are individuals, rugged even, but in fact they are emptied out, isolate, mass men without a mass, although they’re not men, obviously, but boys, perpetual boys, Peter Pans, man-children, since America is adolescence without end, boys without religion on the one hand or a charismatic leader on the other; they don’t even have a father—President Carter!—to kill or a father to tell them to kill the Jew; they have no Jew; they are libidinally driven to mass surrender without anything to surrender to; they don’t even believe in money or in science, or those beliefs are insufficient; their country has fought and lost its last real war; in a word, they are overfed; in a word, they are starving. These kids, Klaus said, just need a good whipping and some physical labor; these kids, Klaus also said, are undergoing a profound archaic regression.

But we were also Jewish, one of two Jewish families in our neighborhood, our complex, our compound, and the ovens had been active only fifteen years before.

this vacuum at the heart of privilege,

but these guys were also so pitiful—I pictured them sitting in their La-Z-Boys, working up the courage to make their obscene call, maybe jacking off after from all the excitement, if not during—I couldn’t really take them seriously, or only took them seriously as specimens of the ugly fragility of masculinity.

(Of course, if we’ve learned anything, it’s how dangerous that fragile masculinity can be.)

The Jim Crow laws did not see any serious challenge or risk of cessation until 1954, when the case of segregation in schools reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The case was Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas

But the burns were like the fingerprints of an older time—before Ziegler and his brethren decided that traditional sources of value were merely superstition. “Those thousands of generations of technical progress” obliterated ritual, emptied out all meaning, glossolalia without divinity. I decided that’s what the painted mother foresaw, that she was saying farewell to candlelight, that she knew she was trapped inside a painting addressed to the future, where it could only be, however great, an instance of technique.

the abyss of non-belief, the vacuum, cannot be filled with stuff

The feeling of a fiction collapsing inside you. A fiction you’d forgotten was there. Frame, crossbeams, slats, braces, joins. Revealing the softer sapwood, which is marked by candle burns. ...Jonathan holding both of my hands under the table, one of the first times we’d really touched. You must think I’m a lunatic. No, I think it’s a beautiful story. About family and art and memory and meaning, how it’s made and unmade.

I think I’d felt that as long as I avoided looking for the tickets, they would be there; it was only if I searched the archive that they’d disappear, as if the past were up until that point indeterminate, that I might outrun it.

the more profound the statement, the more reversible; the deep truths are sedimented in syntax, the terms can be reversed, just as there is no principle of noncontradiction, no law of excluded middle, governing the unconscious. Then, briefly serious, Klaus would touch my shoulder: A quote like that can save your life.

Kensi Gounden writing the biography of famous American lawyer Thurgood Marshall, originally Thorough good Marshall, (born July 2, 1908, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.—died January 24, 1993, Bethesda), lawyer, civil rights activist, and associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court’s first African American member. As an attorney, he successfully argued before the Court the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which declared unconstitutional racial segregation in American public schools.

They felt at once profoundly numb and profoundly ecstatic to be young and inflicting optional damage on each other;

one I had— The feeling of a fiction collapsing inside you. A fiction you’d forgotten was there.

The trauma was perpetual when you were left in it alone.

It was kind of like that, recovering the memory of what my father had done. The knowledge was always there, I carried it in my body, but I didn’t know what I knew, although I knew I knew something and that I dreaded knowing it fully, dreaded it as if only coming into the knowledge, into the memory, would make the event that I was repressing real. And I think Sima was the first person to intuit the contours of this unknown knowledge that I carried; she helped me see that what was missing had a shape, was a piece of the puzzle of my personality, and she made the edges visible—how what I wouldn’t let myself know jutted out into other domains of my experience. And once its edges came into view, I could—in fact I could not not—confront the knowledge I’d both always and never had.

The opposite of a truth,” Klaus quoted, “is a falsehood; but the opposite of a profound truth”—pause for emphasis, sound of sprinklers, insects, push mowers, felt absence of city noise, Kenny Rogers from a passing car—“may be another profound truth.

And while he’d never had more than one in a six-week period, he thought he felt one coming on a hundred times a day: whenever he looked away from a light source to find his vision mottled, whenever part of his body fell asleep or felt slightly numb from an awkward posture, on the very rare occasions when he stuttered or grew briefly confused in his speech—terror arose within him. Each false alarm, because it caused anxiety, brought him closer to the real thing.

he passed, as he often passed, a mysterious threshold. He began to feel less like he was delivering a speech and more like a speech was delivering him, that the rhythm and intonation of his presentation were beginning to dictate its content, that he no longer had to organize his arguments so much as let them flow through him.

he was nevertheless more in the realm of poetry than of prose, his speech stretched by speed and intensity until he felt its referential meaning dissolve into pure form.

Klaus’s charm, at least for me, was that his voice already sounded like an imitation of itself; Klaus was an actor bemused to be playing Klaus. And yet the effect of this doubling was generous, self-deprecating;

Then something happened in that space her silence made: my speech started to break down, fragmenting under the emotional pressure, became a litany of non-sequiturs, like how some of the poets you admire sound to me, or I guess what Palin or Trump sound like, delivering nonsense as if it made sense, were argument or information, although I was speaking much faster than politicians speak; my speech was accelerating as if I were chasing after meaning as it receded; it was like I was having a stroke.

was in 1954 that the Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, declaring segregated schools inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional. In a subsequent ruling in 1955, the Court ordered school boards to eliminate segregation “with all deliberate speed.” Much of the South translated that phrase loosely to mean whenever they got around to it, which meant a time frame closer to a decade than a semester. One county in Virginia—Prince Edward County—closed its entire school system for five years, from 1959 to 1964, rather than integrate. The state funneled money to private academies for white students. But black students were left on their own. They went to live with relatives elsewhere, studied in church basements, or forwent school altogether. County supervisors relented only after losing their case in the U.S. Supreme Court, choosing finally to reopen the schools rather than face imprisonment. It would take more than fifteen years before most of the South conceded to the Brown ruling and then only under additional court orders. “This was passionately opposed,” wrote the Chickasaw Historical Society, “not only by most of the whites—but by some of the blacks as well.” That sentiment, if true, would have been explained away by the blacks who left as an indication that the blacks who stayed may have been more conciliatory than many of the people in the Great Migration. It wasn’t until the 1970–71 school year that integration finally came to Chickasaw County, and then only after a 1969 court order, Alexander v. Holmes, that gave county and municipal schools in Mississippi until February 1970 to desegregate. But even that deadline would be extended for years for particularly recalcitrant counties. All

How many of his small gestures and postures in the present were embodied echoes of the past, repetitions just beneath the threshold of his consciousness? What would happen to the past if you brought those involuntary muscle memories under your control and edited them, edited them out?

There was some kind of special power involved in repurposing language, redistributing the voices, changing the principle of patterning, faint sparks of alternative meaning in the shadow of the original sense, the narrative.

...my goal was to make the kid feel heard. I didn’t mind the cliché; in fact, I admired the phrase, its rightness of fit, a mixture of the somatic and semantic; maybe it explained the desire for heavy metal that registered as touch as much as sound.

The collective effort of repression was tremendous, made the alcohol indispensable. An intense but contentless optimism about the future was the only protection against the recent past, in which all the regimes of value had collapsed, irradiated or gassed.

At some difficult-to-determine point, among middle-class white boys in the Middle West, fights, instead of ending when a combatant hit the ground, took on new life there, the “boys will be boys” chivalry of boxing giving way to the archaic regression of overkill, a term that dates from 1946; every opponent must be spread; every offense, however minor, leads to holocaust.

The banner between sleep and waking had torn and now people and things were passing through it.

If he had the language, he wouldn’t express himself with symptoms.