George W. S. Trow - My pilgrim's progress (1999)

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George W. S. Trow
Maybe that's why everyone died young. Some of the questions you didn't dare ask about Earth People's Park were: Where is it? Who will run it? Will anyone want to do the real work? Like the global economy now, it was just something assumed, and the people in the room were there to embody the zeitgeist of it and kill the people who didn't belong (or seem to belong) in the body of the zeitgeist.

George W. S. Trow
Don't let me get grand with you; I'm not someone who was, from day one, turning himself into a philosophical academic or anything; I was, from day one, someone who was determined to survive, and to pay attention to what was going on around him, period, and when Elvis Presley came along, my heart stood still, to borrow the Larry Hart lyric. The first note I heard from him, I said, Well, this is it, this is a sufferer like me, this is something new, this is what I want, this is who I am, in a way, and Elvis had that gift. That's why there are so many Elvis imitators.

George W. S. Trow
Our third American Tragedy is Martin Luther King. King was Mario Cuomo and Stevenson another way. Oh, he had some Roosevelt will to power, but Cuomo has a will to power, and Stevenson had a little, maybe more than I'm giving him credit for. He was who you wanted it to be, in a way. Old America. We're singing spirituals again. We're having dreams again. Well, that left mechanization entirely out of the question. There was no Hollywood there. There were no gangsters there. There was no World War II victory there. I hope everyone understands I'm being completely nonracist when I say he was Adlai Stevenson another way.

George W. S. Trow
One loss in our era has been any interest in stories told from the top down.

George W. S. Trow
... my friend Dr. Arno Gruen, author of The Insanity of Normality, has said an interesting thing. He said that culture, in recent decades, has taken on a life of its own, without reference to the people it is supposed to protect.

George W. S. Trow
[Ike] was presiding over a situation in which history was turning into demography, in which judgment—and Ike possessed judgment with a capital J—was being drained out of every powerful situation, and marketing considerations were being pumped in.

George W. S. Trow
By 1956, out of all the Cultural Avatars and Vectors available in 1950, THE GIRL had won. Authority. (And they had it, those girls; no one today has it.) They'd won the war, in a way.

George W. S. Trow
…the film [Elvis '56] is moving to me because it shows his vital uniqueness walking—a new kind of old American, innocent, with old American experience, and that's always been our formula, our innocence, plus a unique kind of experience that other people haven't had in other lands—walking with all of that, plus physical beauty, into Rear Window—down-the-drain-land.

George W. S. Trow
With Eisenhower, we're dealing with something after the fact, a kind of Diocletian grace of God to rule over us, for a time, while we figure out who we are, as rulers.

George W. S. Trow
I don't just like Ike; I love him. I think he's the guy of guys, I think he's uniquely American, and I'm sorry we're not going to have him anymore.

George W. S. Trow
The fact is that fifty percent of our national mind is a giant, explosive blowup of a Xerox of a 1970s rock-and-roll press list.

George W. S. Trow