History is about to crack wide open.

Harper & Prior; Angels in America

  • Harper: don't understand this. If I didn't ever see you before, and I don't think I did, then I don't think you should be here in this hallucination because in my experience the mind which is where hallucinations come from shouldn't be able to make anything up that wasn't there to start with that didn't enter it from experience from the real world. Imagination can't create anything new can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions. Am I making sense right now?
  • Prior: Given the circumstances, yes.
  • Harper: So when we think we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives it's really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable.

Watching Angels in America #2

  • Prior: I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.
  • Hannah Pitt: Well, that's a stupid thing to do.
Mmmm. Big city. Overgrown with weeds, but flowering weeds. On every corner a wrecking crew and something new and crooked going up catty corner to that. Windows missing in every edifice like broken teeth, gritty wind, and a gray high sky full of ravens. Prophet birds, Roy. Piles of trash, but lapidary like rubies and obsidian, and diamond-colored cowspit streamers in the wind. And voting booths. And everyone in Balenciaga gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion. And all the deities are creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers. Race, taste and history finally overcome. And you ain’t there.

- Belize (Angels in America)

(Source: lavenadita)

Why has democracy succeeded in America? Of course by succeeded I mean comparatively, not literally, not in the present, but what makes for the prospect of some sort of radical democracy spreading outward and growing up? Why does the power that was once so carefully preserved at the top of the pyramid by the original framers of the Constitution seem drawn inexorably downward and outward in spite of the best effort of the Right to stop this? I mean it’s the really hard thing about being Left in this country, the American Left can’t help but trip over all these petrified little fetishes; freedom, that’s the worst; you know, Jeane Kirkpatrick for God’s sake will go on and on about freedom and so what does that mean, the word freedom, when she talks about it, or human rights; you have Bush talking about they might as well be talking about the mating habits of Venusians, these people don’t begin to know what, ontologically, freedom is or human rights like they see these bourgeois property-based Rights-of-Mans-type rights but that’s not enfranchisement, not democracy, not what’s implicit, what’s potential within the idea, not the idea with blood in it. That’s just liberalism, the worst kind of liberalism, really bourgeois tolerance, and what I think is that what AIDS shows us is the limits of tolerance, that it’s not enough to be tolerated, because when the shit hits the fan you find out how much tolerance is worth. Nothing. And underneath all the tolerance is intense, passionate, hatred.

- Tony Kushner, Angels in America (via hannahgraceful)

  • Harper: When we have sex. Why do you keep your eyes closed?
  • Joe: I don't.
  • Harper: You always do. You can say why, I already know the answer.
  • Joe: Then why do I have to...
  • Harper: You imagine things. Imagine men.
  • Joe: Yes.
  • Harper: Imagining, just like me, except the only time I wasn't imagining was when I was with you. You, the one part of the real world I wasn't allergic to.