Peter Coyote

We spend all this energy keeping our lives normal and safe and predictable, and the result is that our approved cultural safety valve is the movies. So in films, anyway, the hero is obliged to represent the continuance of social values and institutions, and his permission to act is much more seriously limited than the villain's.

When Verlaine and Rimbaud were young,_ [Snyder] said, they were protesting the iron-grip bourgeois rationality had on all aspects of nineteenth-century French culture_ the manners, the view of reality, and the exclusion of __he wild_ from public life. Rationality in business and society were dominant values. __eranging the senses_ was one strategy artists like Verlaine and Rimbaud employed to break free of that.__oday,_ he continued, __he bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become the responsibility of the artist to model health and sanity.