Chuck Palahniuk Quotes
For sure, they don't teach you this in history class, but in colonial times, the person who got left in the stocks overnight was nothing less than fair game for everybody to nail. Men or women, anybody bent over had no way of knowing who was doing the ram job, and this was the real reason you never wanted to end up here unless you had a family member or a friend who'd stand with you the whole time. To protect you. To watch your ass, for real.
Palahniuk, Chuck. Choke. Doubleday, 2001.
In the wake of the Tonkin Gulf incident, the United States bombed and destroyed North Vietnam naval installations:
At the beginning of World War II the President called business and union leaders to the White House for a conference on labor management relations for the war effort. There was agreement on some issues but acrimony on others—especially the concept of a union shop. President Roosevelt congratulated the conferees on their agreements, ignored their disagreements, and told the press things had been settled:
This statement was made long after slavery had been abolished and Jim Crow was on the rise in the South.
Nixon was a very aggressive campaigner, with a great flair for smearing opponents. Kennedy had been an intellectual, Ivy League gentlemen type and his brother, his campaign manager, wanted JFK to get down in the mud with Nixon. He was more assertive than usual and didn’t back down, but he did not go for the low blows that had been readied for him.
Queen Boudicca of the Iceni tribe had revolted in Roman Britain. The Romans where particularly harsh in putting down revolts but under Emperor Nero and Caligula after him, they sunk to the deepest of barbarities,
Note that the fact that she had suffered sposal abuse. She poisoned her husband who repeadedly beat her and her children. Althoughh the evidence was heard, there was nothing that could in the then German legal system used to justify the killing of a husband. Germany was not then the only country which would not allow violent spousal abuse as a defense or a mitigating factor in the sentence. The German punishment for a woman murdering her husband was then beheading. Even as late as the mid 19th century, they were still decapitating trangressors of their laws. The Germans actually developed a special kind of sword with no point just for beheadings.
He was explaining one of the reasons for the development of Jewish humor--namely the amelioration of anti-Semitism.
Charles Michael Palahniuk is an American freelance journalist and novelist who describes his work as transgressional fiction. He is the author of the award-winning novel Fight Club, which also was made into a film of the same name, starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton.
