Ellen Willis
Ellen Willis
Ellen Jane Williswas an American left-wing political essayist, journalist, activist, feminist, and pop music critic...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth14 December 1941
CountryUnited States of America
illustration rope levels
On one level the sixties revolt was an impressive illustration of Lenin's remark that the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with.
self anxiety despair
The will to power is the will to ecstasy is the will to surrender is the will to submit and, in extremis, to die. Or to put it another way, the rage to attain a freedom and happiness one's psyche cannot accept creates enormous anxiety and ends in self-punishing despair.
self expression erotic
To say that historical conditions made personal life possible, and with it the self-consciousness that allowed psychoanalysis to emerge, is to tell half the story: one also has to consider that the erotic impulse, ever pressing for satisfaction, had something to do with making the history that encouraged its expression.
turn-me turns
What turns me on is erotica; what turns you on is pornographic.
religious self giving
If believers feel that their faith is trivialized and their true selves compromised by a society that will not give religious imperatives special weight, their problem is not that secularists are antidemocratic but that democracy is antiabsolutist.
government ideas lines
A triumphalist corporate capitalism, free at last of the specter of Communism, has mobilized its economic power to relentlessly marginalize all nonmarket values; to subordinate every aspect of American life to corporate "efficiency" and the bottom line; to demonize not only government but the very idea of public service and public goods.
anger appeal class islamic oppressed partly population populist
As with fascism, the rise of Islamic totalitarianism has partly to do with its populist appeal to the class resentments of an economically oppressed population and to anger at political subordination and humiliation.
contained easily encouraged expansive pushing
By continually pushing the message that we have the right to gratification now, consumerism at its most expansive encouraged a demand for fulfillment that could not so easily be contained by products.
artists awful corrupt courage dominated education face imperative modernist optimism religious romantics scorn secular supreme taught thinkers truth
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.
politics separate
For the most part, Americans speak of culture and politics as if they were two separate realms.
cared technical
I was a 'Big Brother' fan. I thought they were better musicians than their detractors claimed, but more to the point, technical accomplishment was not something I cared about.
diversion playing
I can't keep myself from playing roles. The emotionless decadent, looking for diversion from boredom, is a favorite.
artificial discourse foreign nowhere politics separation
The artificial separation of politics and culture is nowhere more pronounced than in the discourse of foreign policy and international affairs.
casts imagine trauma
To imagine that trauma casts out fantasy is a dangerous mistake.