“Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment. Beethoven’s Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland.”
“Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment. Beethoven’s Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
“Quoting Nguyen Du - Talent and destiny are apt to feud.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer“Not to own the means of production can lead to premature death, but not to own the means of representation is also a kind of death. For if we are represented by others, might they not, one day, hose our deaths off memory's laminated floor?”
Viet Thanh Nguyen“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen“Every full bottle of alcohol has a message in it, a surprise that one will not discover until one drinks it”
Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer“Priests always had much attention lavished on them by their starstruck fans,those devout housewives and wealthy congregants who treated them as if they were guardians of the velvet rope blocking entrance into that ever so exclusive nightclub, Heaven.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer“I had the vertiginous feeling one gets standing at the precipice of an unresolved plan, for I had brought Bon and myself to the brink of disaster without knowing how to save us. But was not this how all plans developed, unknown to their maker until he wove for himself a parachute, or else melted into air?”
Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer“If God did not exist, then neither did divine punishment, but this meant nothing to ghosts who did not need God.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer“We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer“Remember, you're not half of anything, you're twice of everything.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer“That is what revolutionaries do. We sacrifice ourselves to save others.”
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