(flashback, in situ)

In case you may have missed this selection of eminently quotable profundities, bon mots, maxims, aphorisms, and engaging witticisms by the sage rhetoricist Marshall McLuhan when first posted here—well, here we go again…

+  +  +  +  +

Whereas convictions depend on speed-ups, justice requires delay.

Money is the poor man’s credit card.

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror.

We march backwards into the future.

Invention is the mother of necessities.

You mean my whole fallacy’s wrong?

Mud sometimes gives the illusion of depth.

The trouble with a cheap, specialized education
is that you never stop paying for it.

People don’t actually read newspapers.

They step into them every morning like a hot bath.

Today each of us lives several hundred years in a decade.

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

News, far more than art, is artifact.

When you are on the phone or on the air, you have no body.

Tomorrow is our permanent address.

All advertising advertises advertising.

The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.

Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions.

The missing link created far more interest
than all the chains and explanations of being.

When a thing is current, it creates currency.

Food for the mind is like food for the body:
the inputs are never the same as the outputs.

The future of the book is the blurb.

The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially.

A road is a flattened-out wheel, rolled up in the belly of an airplane.

I may be wrong, but I’m never in doubt.

This information is top security.
When you have read it, destroy yourself.

(Image: detail of rear-view McLuhan photograph taken by the late great Canadian photographer Yousuf Karsh on 21 January, 1967)

 

 

The moon (the one we see from earth on virtually every other night than tonight, a new moon, go figure…)

I remember vividly the wee hours of Monday, 40 years ago today, when I saw Neil Armstrong take his first steps on the moon (at 02:56 GMT in the early hours of 21 July—I was living in Germany at the time, so it was already Monday there, while North Americans enjoyed a Sunday night special). Our family did not have a TV and I was quite sick with the flu at the time… but I got up in a fevered haze and walked six blocks to the nearest Radio & TV shop which had TV sets tuned to the moon landing in their display window, with loudspeakers of the English reportage playing into the street. (I ended up translating the action and the English announcer’s coverage into German for an assembled group of Italian and Turkish foreign workers from the nearby barracks, disoriented drunks, and assorted street-people and others too poor to own a TV set—all of whom had gathered outside the shop to take in the spectacle in real time).

That unique moment offered a fresh view of our wee blue-green planet for all of humankind, and triggered Marshall McLuhan’s phrase “Global Village” as well as Buckminster Fuller’s “Spaceship Earth.” Trivia factoid: it also marked the first time in history that the New York Times used a 96-point headline: “Men Walk On Moon.”

(Thanks to GDC-Listserv friend Marilyn Matty, from New York (fittingly), for pointing out the latter re: the NYT a few minutes ago).