Lately I'm thinking... about how bad the Emmy's are on television. I know I shouldn't be surprised but I was last night astonished - shocked, even - by the extent of the self-congratulation. These people actually believe that television is currently our most effective medium. (One TV exec said this explicitly in a speech - TV is "the most important medium for bringing people together," he announced - that was perhaps the most uninteresting thing I've ever seen on the tube, and that's saying something.) Gee, in this view the television people are at least five or six years out of date in their thinking. Yet haven't these been the medium-changing years? Their ignorance is their only willful quality.Tim Carmody adds: "It was also bizarre to watch the Academy on the one hand honor Tommy Smothers for political insouciance and to watch everyone, EVERYONE, not just presenters, skirt anything resembling a direct political comment. We had bizarre claims about how The West Wing "was a nonpartisan exploration of politics," purely formal invocations to vote or speak truth to power, joking denunications of ugliness in political advertising, and oblique references to John Adams as a time when politicians could express complex ideas in full sentences. It was as though if anyone spoke the words Obama or McCain or Bush, the TV shock troops would have descended on the stage and the screen would go black."
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
