why would you record it when you can go up there any day and see the same thing?
what kind of permanence does that imply?
…
and the feeling persists with the slogans written on street signs that to be careful is here an act of political complicity … EVERYBODY is being careful … not so much that the insistence on so being belongs to an ideologically immanent Political Correctness, but more that the insistent inducements to being careful consist in an induction into the Democratic Habits of a Small Nation, is, in other words, consistent with good citizenship.
and the sense of paradox rising like a mist that along with abiding by this common sense notion of care, however reified, of individual self-determination, meaning over-self-determination of the individual, a competitiveness on the street, in the city, on the road, in the country, of people on their sections, of people in houses, of people in cars driving: get behind me and I will slow down. … A sort of socially assembled superego !!!
…
Contrast: collective carefulness with individual competitiveness; and a sort of superego arising as the sense of it, of a matriarchal order, tied to apron strings, adolescent, intent on proving independence through negation … which negation is always the aiming at a higher position, a transcendent position; through which negation of Mother Care the little pricks kick kick against the stifling, raising themselves like poppy heads.
Get behind me, I will go slower and be careful once I am in front.
…
again the feeling that to be here I have to be there.
…
as the girl at the Wellsford Service Station said on New Year’s day, Happy Boxing Day Eve, or whatever.
