Wallace Shawn on The Quest for Superiority

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9/3/2009 Wallace Shawn on The Quest for Superiority

Best known as co-author and player in My Dinner with Andre and his performance in several Woody Allen films, playwright and actor Wallace Shawn has just published his first book of nonfiction titled Essays. Catch him reading from “The Quest for Superiority” on DemocracyNow!:

“My feeling of superiority, and the sense of well-being that comes from that, increases with the number of poor people on the planet whose lives are dominated by me or my proxies and whom I nonetheless can completely ignore. I like to be reminded of those poor people, those unobtrusives, and then I like to be reminded of my lack of interest in them. For example, while I eat my breakfast each morning, I absolutely love to read my morning newspaper, because in the first few pages the newspaper tells me how my country treated all the unobtrusives on the day before—deaths, beatings, torture, what have you—and then, as I keep turning the pages, the newspaper reminds me how unimportant the unobtrusives are to me, and it tries to tempt me in its articles on shirts to consider different shirts that I might want to wear, and then it goes on, as I turn the pages, to try to coax me into sampling different forms of cooking, and then to experience different plays or films, different types of vacations…”

In other words, the stories in the newspaper about Afghanistan are partly true and partly false, but they’re presented in a context that basically makes me feel alright about treating the people there as non-equals, which obviously we do if we send an unmanned drone and we are thinking of killing some person who we think is an enemy and we kill fifteen members of his family. We wouldn’t do that to people who we thought were our equals. For example, friends. Even if there was someone that we despised or who wanted to kill us in the middle of their family, we wouldn’t kill the whole family. We just wouldn’t. And the New York Times helps me to take that as totally normal. - Wallace Shawn on DemocracyNow!

Essays
Wallace Shawn
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The Fever
Wallace Shawn
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My Dinner with Andre
Wallace Shawn
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