Trash Corruption Quotes

When God takes out the trash, don't go digging back through it. Trust Him.

The words consent of the governed have become an empty phrase. Our textbooks on political science and economics are obsolete. Our nation has been hijacked by oligarchs, corporations, and a narrow, selfish, political, and economic elite, a small and privileged group that governs, and often steals, on behalf of moneyed interests. This elite, in the name of patriotism and democracy, in the name of all the values that were once part of the American system and defined the Protestant work ethic, has systematically destroyed our manufacturing sector, looted the treasury, corrupted our democracy, and trashed the financial system. During this plundering we remained passive, mesmerized by the enticing shadows on the wall, assured our tickets to success, prosperity, and happiness were waiting around the corner.

WHO AM I? I have seven heavenly panels Leading up to a pointed sphere I’m multidimensional like a crystal And my center is never clear. I’m an inventor and pioneer. A mentor to my peers. But I'm not as sound as my shell reveals, Because I’m tormented by my fears - That may appear to be grounded But my insides are filled with tears. And the sadness is well-founded, From years and years Of traumatic experiences Compounded In the most demented Atmospheres. I talk but feel like nobody hears. Has reason disappeared? And, God, are you near? This is Giza’s 7th light force And I'm asking you to interfere. I can no longer walk amongst the blind and dead With open eyes and ears. I’m trying to maintain my sanity And to straighten up my veneer As I roll amongst the growing calamities Flowing on Earth’s severely trashed Frontier. Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun (2010)

It was an article of faith in eighteenth-century British thought that civilized societies usually formed out of the fundamental human need for security to ensure survival, but the same societies were gradually corrupted by a preoccupation with luxuries, which resulted in decadence.

Like most modern art, they interested her no more than did the wind-tangled rain-compacted sun-bleached trash that time accumulated in vomitous-looking masses along California’s cracked and potholed highways, as the once-golden state stewed in government corruption on its way to bankruptcy.

Each woman was valued at 150 pounds of tobacco, which was the same price exacted from Jane Dickenson when she eventually purchased her freedom. Not surprisingly, then, with their value calculated in tobacco, women in Virginia were treated as fertile commodities. They came with testimonials to their moral character, impressing on “industrious Planters” that they were not being sold a bad bill of goods. One particular planter wrote that an earlier shipment of females was “corrupt,” and he expected a new crop that was guaranteed healthy and favorably disposed for breeding. Accompanying the female cargo were some two hundred head of cattle, a reminder that the Virginia husbandman needed both species of breeding stock to recover his English roots.37 Despite

When Winthrop defended the colony, he wanted to create a religious community that would be saved from the “corrupted” bastions of learning, Oxford and Cambridge.

It is understood that when we speak of history we do not allude to the unspeakable trash contained in public school text-books (which in general resemble a cellar junk-shop of chronologies, epaulettes, bad drawings, and silly tales, and are a striking instance of the corrupting influence of State management of education, by which the mediocre, nay the absolutely empty, is made to survive)….

Literary scholar Hamid Dabashi notes the curious case of the English language novel The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, written by a traveler named James Morier, who pretended he had merely translated a Persian original. Morier used a ridiculous diction in his novel to lampoon Persian speech and depicted Iranians as dishonest scoundrels and buffoons. Then, in the 1880s, an astounding thing happened. Iranian grammarian Mirza Habib translated Hajji Baba into Persian. Remarkably, what in English was offensive racist trash became, in translation, a literary masterpiece that laid the groundwork for a modernist Persian literary voice and “a seminal text in the course of the constitutional movement.” The ridicule that Morier directed against Iranians in an Orientalist manner, the translator redirected against clerical and courtly corruption in Iranian society, thereby transforming Hajji Baba into an incendiary political critique.2

The jellycrusts, scorning the protection of travelling within armoured trucks, walked in the dry lands in ragged groups, pushing or dragging their belongings in carts or sledges. Their skins were concealed by thick, insulating gel once manufactured for military use. Since then, the jellycrusts had bought up all the remaining stocks of the stuff, slapping it on their own integrement, where it accumulated the dust and debris of the desert lands; hence their nickname. It reminded Leila of certain larval creatures who once lived in freshwater streams, and which perhaps still did somewhere, who attached stones and water rubbish to their skins, making a shell to live in. The jellycrusts could look like that: frightening, peeling, gaunt creatures. She used to wonder whether they ever washed it all off and started again from a clear skin. Did they make love? It was not a pleasant image. The gel had a strange smell, rather like a room that had been locked up too long; a wooden room beaten by sunheat, rotted by rain, stale and with the promise of hidden corruption. Jellycrusts always wore bulky, colourless clothes, quasi-military in appearance, heavily adorned with totemic ornaments, constructed from the desert trash.

With her final poem, “Bless This Land,” she declared: “Luminous forests, oceans, and rock cliff sold for the trash glut of gold, uranium, or oil bust rush yet there are new stories to be made, little ones coming up over the horizon.” Harjo did this revolutionary thing under the great greened dome of the Library of Congress,

When asked about the difficulties of sculpture, Michelangelo said, “It is easy. You just chip away all the stone that isn’t David.” It’s simple to cut things out of a life. You break up with a shitty partner, quit eating bread, delete the Twitter app. You cut it out, and the shape of what’s actually killing you clarifies a little. The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t fuck or steal or kill, and you’ll be a good person. Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands. A rich man goes a whole day without killing a single homeless person and so goes to sleep content in his goodness. In another world, he’s buying crates of socks and Clif bars and tents, distributing them in city centers. But for him, abstinence reigns. I want to be the chisel, not the David. What can I make of being here? And what can I make of not? Normal people think of recovery as a kind of abstinence: they imagine us sitting around white-knuckled, sweating as we count our hours trying desperately to distract ourselves enough to not relapse. This is because for normal people, drinking is an activity, like brushing their teeth or watching TV. They can reasonably imagine excising drinking, like any other activity, without collapsing their entire person. For a drunk, there’s nothing but drink. There was nothing in my life that wasn’t predicated on getting drunk—either getting fucked up itself or getting money to get fucked up by working or slinging this drug for that drug or that drug for cash. Getting sober means having to figure out how to spend twenty-four hours a day. It means building an entirely new personality, learning how to move your face, your fingers. It meant learning how to eat, how to speak among people and walk and fuck and worse than any of that, learning how to just sit still. You’re moving into a house the last tenants trashed. You spend all your time ripping up the piss-carpet, filling in the holes in the wall, and you also somehow have to remember to feed yourself and make rent and not punch every person who talks to you in the face. There’s no abstinence in it. There’s no self-will. It’s a chisel. It’s surrender to the chisel. Of course you don’t hope to come out a David. It’s miracle enough to emerge still standing on two feet. —from BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx by Cyrus Shams

If you hurl outside?” From his far-off hidey-hole, Dave was directing, not asking. “Shovel it up and put it in the trash. I don’t want my dogs to get to it because it’s whatever you ate plus the shrooms and they’ll gobble it all up and freak the fuck out.” “I promise you. I won’t throw up,” Flynn heard Allison groan before her vomit hit the kitchen sink. “Outside.” “It’s cold out there, honey,” LA Tina said with a deep, soothing voice. “Someone grab up all that pretty blonde hair so it don’t get puked on.” As Flynn fully immersed himself in the music, the merry-go-round in the song was spinning sound and vision around him. Mushrooms were coming on quickly, powerfully, puckering his saliva glands and twisting his stomach into knots. Unsure if he’d actually made it to the bathroom, he was relieved when he saw his emesis kaleidoscopically stewing in the sink. Opening the spigot to wash the corruption down the drain, he splashed cold water on his face as he watched his eyes lit like fires from faraway camps, lips pushing the folds of his cheeks into reiterative grins. A timeless face reminded him of who he was and what resided within him as water drizzled down his chin and swirled into the drain. Emerging back into the rest of the world, a melodic hum hung just above his head. He found his way back to where the notes fully unfurled the song’s motif. Throwing himself into an air-guitar stance, he grimaced as he acted bending out the first, bluesy guitar note. Sparking and glowing like a welding rod, the room around him blazed with his light. Emma leered and licked her lips after glugging down a huge swig of Flynn pretending to be Pink Floyd. Tall, thin, somewhat handsome and exotic in his urbanity, Flynn was poised in a way Pogoner boys could never be. Something about him prickled wildly on her skin and excited her. Gliding from the kitchen to where he rocked, arms raised to reveal her Venus form, she sashayed with dabs of riffing blues, synthesizers scaling the air while guitars and bass vibrated through shabby carpet. As she joined him to take the music within, two objects in space edged closer and closer, gravity pulling both to an inevitable collision. In the gentle light of Christmas bulbs and uncountable candles, they circled round in time to the music, watching each other as neon Nazca-line insects scrambled across the walls. “Remember when you were young?” Emma crooned deep and soft. “You shone like the sun…” Flynn picked up before they both continued with the chorus. “Now there’s a look in your eyes,” she watched him draw closer. “Like black holes in the sky…” “Shine! On! You! Crazy… DIAMOND!” they both shouted, him with uncertainty, her full-throated and stepping into her own, reminding the house why no band playing in town turned down her offer to stand on stage and belt one out. Continuing to spin toward one another, trading lyrics and leers, the two ground their desire like peppercorns, seasoning the diminishing space between them. Whisper came out of the kitchen after a few verses, singing loudly and a bit off-key, Ra-Ra and LA Tina in tow. “You wore out your welcome, with random precision…” “Blown on the steel… breeze…” the followers continued as a chorus. Emma and Flynn unraveled from one another and gave the group a look of, Really? Now? “Come on you raver,” all a chorus, “you seer of visions. Come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner and shine….” Everyone then fell out, shaking to various degrees as though they’d just been brought to tongues by some tent-preacher’s sermon.