Author

Mark Ames

Mark Ames

b. 1965 · journalist · United States

21 quotes

No! No, she's fif-teen. Fif-teen.' Right then my pervometer needle hit the red. I had to have her, even if she was homely.

Mark Ames

★ 4,8 ♥ 258

It was hard to imagine that Natasha had squatted out a baby. Her cunt was as tight as a cat's ass...

Mark Ames

★ 4,6 ♥ 193

As the Economic Policy Institute reported, "What income growth there was over the 1979-1989 period was driven primarily by more work at lower wages".

Mark Ames

★ 4,5 ♥ 126

If a rebellion is small and just starting, it looks crazy; but if it begins to succeed, lasts, and builds up momentum, it inevitably legitimizes itself.

Mark Ames

★ 4,9 ♥ 231

Another journalist, Joanne Jacobs, summed it up even more simply: "Evil, not rage" inspired the Columbine killers, she wrote. Well, that settles that!

Mark Ames

★ 4,9 ♥ 86

Anything, no matter how bizarre, was cited as the cause for slave rebellions except for the most obvious source: slavery.

Mark Ames

★ 4,6 ♥ 172

Zero tolerance policies, heavy police responses to what would have once been considered empty boy boasting, and the increased fear and suspicion that they inspire only fuel more rage. The toxic school culture is only reinforced by repressive measures.

Mark Ames

★ 4,9 ♥ 186

It is hard to imagine that the kid became a better person after this. More scared, more cautious, and more alienated from his peers, sure. Which perhaps is all we want.

Mark Ames

★ 4,6 ♥ 157

I was a student at Berkeley in the late Reagan years. We had a lot of ideas back then, big dreams about getting famous and destroying the "Beigeocracy" that we thought stifled and controlled American Letters. Everything seemed possible then: world war, literary fame ... Anyway, something Really Big, with us at the center of it all.

Mark Ames

★ 4,5 ♥ 232

The whole country is infested with this meanness and coldness, and no one is allowed to admit it. Only the crazy ones sense that it is wrong- that what is "normal" is not at all normal- and some of them, adults and kids alike, fight back with everything they have.

Mark Ames

★ 4,6 ♥ 201

It's widely accepted today that high schools are miserable, nerve-pinching stress machines. They are governed by dim hypocrites; the climate favors the cruelest and shallowest students, and many, if not most students, are constantly suppressing a burning sense of injustice, shame, and powerlessness.

Mark Ames

★ 4,9 ♥ 226

The shootings are a direct assault on the American Dream- which is why they are so disturbing. The fear reflects how unsettling and piercing the crime is. And the fear reflects a still-censored recognition that the shootings have widespread sympathy among students, and that any student, at any school, could be next.

Mark Ames

★ 4,9 ♥ 124

Like blaming evil, the copycat rationale is so empty that it doesn't even qualify as a convenient explanation... dismissing this rash of murder and sympathy- across the country, across a wide variety of students- as simply copycat shooters assumes that kids operate at about the same intelligence level as sardines.

Mark Ames

★ 4,9 ♥ 170

Anyone could snap anywhere; anyone's a suspect. And that means that employees go out of their way to make sure they're not perceived as being potentially dangerous, no matter how cruelly they are treated... even the slightest hint of disgruntlement could be grounds for a visit from police, a forced psychological examination, and a destroyed career.

Mark Ames

★ 4,8 ♥ 91

Cruel and callous when on top, afraid and smiling all the way to the grave when not- that pretty much sums up the post-Reagan zeitgeist. And if you're not just as cheerful as the rest, "you've got some personal problems." You're a weirdo if you complain. It's your own fault if you're traumatized by a massacre. It's your own fault if you're poor. It's your own fault if you get downsized, overworked, bullied, and fail. Get over it.

Mark Ames

★ 5,0 ♥ 128

Petty malice is now the major premise of American life. This meanness has become so common that it even dominates our leisure time, with Americans worshipping mega-millionaire assholes like Bill O'Reilly and Donald Trump. It's an utterly masochistic addiction- and no wonder, since Middle America has taken so much shit over the past 30 years, we've grown not only used to the meanness, but we can even get a rush off it. America is now Zed Nation: addicted to the pain that our masters so lovingly deliver to us, rewarding them not only with greater incomes, but with our admiration, our leisure time, and our souls.

Mark Ames

★ 5,0 ♥ 245

Americans wanted to blame everything but Columbine High for the massacre- they blamed a violent media, Marilyn Manson, Goth culture, the Internet, the Trench Coat Mafia, video games, lax gun control laws, and liberal values. And still skipping over the school, they peered into the opposite direction, blaming the moral and/or mental sickness, or alleged homosexuality, of these two boys, as if they were exceptional freaks in a school of otherwise happy kids. They searched all over the world for a motive, except for one place: the scene of the crime.

Mark Ames

★ 4,7 ♥ 94

Under Reagan, corporations transformed from provider's of stability for employees and their families to fear-juiced stress engines. Reagan's legacy to America and modern man is not victory in the Cold War, where he simply got lucky; it is instead one of the most shocking wealth transfers in the history of the world, all under the propaganda diversion of "making America competitive" and "unleashing the creative energies of the American worker".

Mark Ames

★ 4,7 ♥ 186

Yet what's missing from Cullen's explanation is a context for Harris' rage attack on Columbine High School. Even Hitler is given a context by serious historians- the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles and the failure of Weimar Germany- whereas rampage murderers, like slaves once before them, are portrayed as having killed without reason. Their murder sprees were and are explained as symptoms of the perpetrators' innate evil, or of foreign forces, rather than as reactions to unbearable circumstances.

Mark Ames

★ 4,6 ♥ 219

Stress: the word comes up often in the study of rage murders. The problem is that even in spite of the awful effects of stress- from mental and physical health ailments to provoking massacres- we, the ones who suffer stress, are ourselves loath to describe our own stressed condition with language that might match the suffering it produces, for fear of sounding melodramatic, whiny- of not being able to tough it out. A little light goes on in most "normal" people's heads warning them not to complain about cracking under stress and risk being marked as a loser.

Mark Ames

★ 4,7 ♥ 82

Just as the American colonials' consciousness expanded from rebelling against unfair taxation in the 1760s to wide noble revolutionary goals touching on the inherent rights of mankind, so the Whiskey Rebellion guerrillas took on broader themes as injustice increasingly framed their consciousness. Once you start seeing injustice in one place, it's like taking off blinders- you start to see injustice everywhere, and how it is all connected.

Mark Ames Injustice

★ 4,8 ♥ 61

Portrait: Wikimedia Commons

Works

Injustice 1