George W. S. Trow quotes

The work of television is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts; finally, to establish the context of no-context and to chronicle it. (George W. S. Trow)
The idea of choice is easily debased if one forgets that the aim is to have chosen successfully, not to be endlessly choosing. View quote
George W. S. Trow
The Turkish Embassy in Washington is an ornate, eclectic building on the corner of Twenty-third Street and Massachusetts Avenue which was built originally for Edward Hamlin Everett, the man who put the crimp in bottle caps. View quote
George W. S. Trow
Irony has seeped into the felt of any fedora hat I have ever owned - not out of any wish of mine, but out of necessity. A fedora hat worn by me without the necessary protective irony would eat through my head and kill me. View quote
George W. S. Trow
For members of a traditional society where many traditions have been discredited, an interest in modernity can result in a restless sophistication. Mehmet Ertegun seems not to have been a restless man. View quote
George W. S. Trow
The most powerful men were those who most effectively used the power of adult competence to enforce childish agreements. View quote
George W. S. Trow
I have made sense of my life by developing an ability to analyze Mainstream American Cultural Artifacts. View quote
George W. S. Trow
It is in many circumstances a troubling thing to belong to the advanced class of a backward nation. One surrenders coherence and begins a difficult process of choice which ends, often, in an eclectic idiosyncrasy. View quote
George W. S. Trow
Don't let me get grand with you; I'm not someone who was, from day one, turning himself into a philosophical academic or anything; I was, from day one, someone who was determined to survive, and to pay attention to what was going on around him, period, and when Elvis Presley came along, my heart stood still, to borrow the Larry Hart lyric. The first note I heard from him, I said, "Well, this is it, this is a sufferer like me, this is something new, this is what I want, this is who I am, in a way,” and Elvis had that gift. That's why there are so many Elvis imitators. View quote
George W. S. Trow
Each one of these social generations-from the ‘50s, from the ‘60s, from the ‘70s, from the Reagan era, from now-thinks of its social aesthetic as definitive. In fact, they are all in a process: encouraged toward, and beyond, hubris, by demography. View quote
George W. S. Trow
The fact is that fifty percent of our national mind is a giant, explosive blowup of a Xerox of a 1970s rock-and-roll press list. (George W. S. Trow)
Celebrities have an intimate life and a life in the grid of two hundred million. For them, there is no distance between the two grids of American life. Of all Americans, only they are complete. View quote
George W. S. Trow
Wonder was the grace of the country. View quote
George W. S. Trow
Soon it will be achieved. The lie of television has been that there are contexts to which television will grant an access. Since lies last, usually, no more than one generation, television will re-form around the idea that television itself is a context to which television will grant an access. View quote
George W. S. Trow
By 1956, out of all the Cultural Avatars and Vectors available in 1950, THE GIRL had won. Authority. (And they had it, those girls; no one today has it.) They'd won the war, in a way. View quote
George W. S. Trow
Your parents had a third parent-television. If you went back to 1950, you would be surprised. Many people-of all kinds and conditions-had just two parents. In the time since then, the referee has won all the championship matches-and the referee is a value-free ritual. View quote
George W. S. Trow
I don't just like Ike; I love him. I think he's the guy of guys, I think he's uniquely American, and I'm sorry we're not going to have him anymore. View quote
George W. S. Trow
USA Today is back-formed from the Assumed Dominant Mind of television. View quote
George W. S. Trow
Our third American Tragedy is Martin Luther King. King was Mario Cuomo and Stevenson another way. Oh, he had some Roosevelt will to power, but Cuomo has a will to power, and Stevenson had a little, maybe more than I'm giving him credit for. He was who you wanted it to be, in a way. Old America. We're singing spirituals again. We're having dreams again. Well, that left mechanization entirely out of the question. There was no Hollywood there. There were no gangsters there. There was no World War II victory there. I hope everyone understands I'm being completely nonracist when I say he was Adlai Stevenson another way. View quote
George W. S. Trow
With Eisenhower, we're dealing with something after the fact, a kind of Diocletian grace of God to rule over us, for a time, while we figure out who we are, as rulers. View quote
George W. S. Trow
Maybe that's why everyone died young. Some of the questions you didn't dare ask about Earth People's Park were: Where is it? Who will run it? Will anyone want to do the real work? Like the global economy now, it was just something assumed, and the people in the room were there to embody the zeitgeist of it and kill the people who didn't belong (or seem to belong) in the body of the zeitgeist. (George W. S. Trow)
[O]ne loss in our era has been any interest in stories told from the top down. View quote
George W. S. Trow
The 1960s weren't the 1920s again; they were the Liberal Arts expressed in the negative. The 1970s, despite the hedonism, weren't the 1920s; they were the Negative out to get all the rewards formerly held by the Positive. The Goat and Adding Machine Ritual is now. View quote
George W. S. Trow
...the film [Elvis '56] is moving to me because it shows his vital uniqueness walking-a new kind of old American, innocent, with old American experience, and that's always been our formula, our innocence, plus a unique kind of experience that other people haven't had in other lands-walking with all of that, plus physical beauty, into Rear Window-down-the-drain-land. View quote
George W. S. Trow
World War II changed the demography. For a while, high seriousness was a part (only a part) of the mix. No one likes to think that the vector that has carried him into the demography could get lost in the demography, but that is what happens. Rock and roll-or the generating spirit of rock and roll-could get lost there, easily. And just think of all the ideas-and changes-there were implicit in the hegemony of rock and roll. We could be left with... just some of the music. View quote
George W. S. Trow