Morpheme
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Asked by Jerome Klinkowitz in a '71-'72 interview about "the death of the novel" and fear that TV was killing off the novel's readers (sound familiar?), Donald Barthelme responds:
- "I think fewer people are reading. This has something to do with television and much to do, I think, with the fact that publishers are flooding the market with junk novels by what's-his-name and you-know-who and likewise -- never mind. These odd productions make a lot of money, take up space both in the bookstores and in the minds of the readers, and effectively obscure the literary work. Gresham's Law. The situation does not, by the way, obtain in Europe, although the Europeans are learning. The question is, who is exhausted? Or what is exhausted? I invite you to notice that the new opium of the people is opium, or at least morphine. In a situation in which morphine contends with morpheme, the latter loses every time. There is also the problem of the allocation of the reader's time. To borrow a feather from Jules Renard -- no matter how much care the writer has taken to write as few books as possible, there will still be people who don't know some of them."
24 years ago today, towards the end of the cold war, someone smuggled a recording of a voice test by then president Ronald Reagan to the outside world.
The soundbite is now commonly referred to as Reagan's "We begin bombing in five minutes" joke[1] and ran like this:
- "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes."
On hearing the news, a leading Parisian newspaper expressed its dismay, and stated that only trained psychologists could know whether Reagan's remarks were "a statement of repressed desire or the exorcism of a dreaded phantom."
Reagan's gaffe was sampled soon afterwards, most notably in 1984 on the appropriately titled "World Destruction"[2] by Time Zone (Laswell, Bambaataa and Lydon) and by Bonzo Goes to Washington, a one-off studio project that released "5 Minutes"[3] ("chopped and channeled by Arthur Russel) in the same year. I have no audio for the latter.
For the vinyl vultures, "World Destruction" is on Celluloid Records, "5 minutes" on Sleeping Bag Records, both cult labels.
"World Destruction" is WMC # 63. Enjoy.
For the record: Reagan was a funny president[4].
