William T. Vollmann Quote

A less negative carbon ideologue then I might interpret the lonely wariness of Mr. Winkler and of Sharon Carlisle as proof of wrongheaded irrelevance. Socrates was equally irrelevant once the Athenians had served him his hemlock. The insipidities of the hollowed out Greeley Tribune, the no comment of most people to whom I reached out, and the typical anomie of an American metropolis, whose citizens I rarely saw except in their cars, in retail establishments or at the Fourth of July parade, operated synergistically to create the usual hot wide silence—about fracking, climate change, democracy and every other thing. A certain form of economic development held sway, and that was that.