“What bothered me was that I preferred the depth and ambiguity, however unintentional, of the Sharia-revised versions of the films: I liked familiar cultural products through a filter of strict religious values.”
“even now a kind of Grand Inquisitor exists in the form of the market, which acts as a self-censoring apparatus, rewarding middlebrow kitsch while keeping anything too challenging or subversive or upsetting from seeing the light of wide-scale distribution. A focus group is arguably an even more efficient way to remove thoughts from the consciousness of a population than the out-and-out censorship of a politburo or church.”
“F. L. Lucas writes in Tragedy in Relation to Aristotle’s Poetics, “men are sometimes too much addicted to pity or fear, sometimes too little; tragedy brings them back to a virtuous and happy mean.””
“I’d joined the army in the first place was to escape submersion in the strip-mall cheapness of American culture for a few years. Of course, I’d come to learn that military culture is more Spartan, but not always less vacuous, than Jock Jams and power lunches. It is, after all, an American subculture.”