Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2005-12-11:

"Let me move closer to our own time, because you are the Class of September 11, and we do not lack for examples. Never in my experience has frank mendacity so dominated our public life. This has to do less with ideology itself, I think, than the fact that our country was attacked and that -- from the Palmer Raids after World War I, to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, to the McCarthyite witch-hunts during the Fifties -- America tends to respond to such attacks, or the threat of them, in predictably paranoid ways. Notably, by "rounding up the usual suspects" and by dividing the world, dramatically and hysterically, into a good part and an evil part. September 11 was no exception to this: indeed, in its wake -- coterminous with your time here -- we have seen this American tendency in its purest form." -- Mark Danner, a longtime New Yorker Staff writer, from the commencement address given to the graduating students of the Department of English of the University of California at Berkeley, May 15, 2005.