We needed a manual because the manual that came with our computer
is a true document of the eighties--written in a language similar
to English but with other words substituted for the ones the writer
must have meant. Like this: "The header function of the CONRAD
command defines the glyph component (plus or minus value) of all
data fonts and also the parameters of the bit map. For the validity
of the command, see Test Bites 6-13." This does not become clearer
the harder you think about it, so everything we know about the computer
we learned by calling up a friend who bought one, too, and doesn't
understand it, either...
-- New Yorker "Talk of the Town" Notes and Comments pg37. (10/16/89)
...while Nat Hentoff was presenting a brief history of book-banning
in America... He told us that the first book suppressed in this
country was "the Meritorious Price of Our Redemption," by William
Pynchon, which was burned in Boston in 1650...
-- New Yorker 4/26/82
When Congress created the CIA, in 1947, it conferred upon the agency
the power to collect intelligence and also to "perform such other
functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national
security as the National Security Council may from time to time
direct." "Affecting the national security" was intended as an
"important limiting phrase," according to Clark Clifford, one of
the authors of the law. Over the years, however, that phrase,
instead of serving to sift out all activities except those deemed
critical to the nation's survival, came to encompass matters that
were simply too controversial or too inconvenient to disclose.
Secrecy gradually turned into a convenience, and "national security"
came to serve the executive branch as an immense loophole....
Eventually, this manuipulation of the notion of national
security helped promote a profoundly anti-democratic notion of
truth: truth became something dangerous to the country -- something
to be stamped "Top Secret" and handled only by a small number of
privileged officials who enjoy the highest security clearances....
Covert actions, which were originally understood to be operations
that secretly lent spport to America's official foreign policy --
a policy formulated and developed in public debate -- became a
means of escaping the constraints of the Constitution....secrecy
didn't conceal the Administrations' invovlement but merely prevented
public debate that might have succeeded in putting an end to it.
-- New Yorker, Notes and Comment. July 29, 1991.