Charles Bukowski

(As we run up toward the November 4 election, perhaps the most important election in American politics in recent memory, Carver’s Dog introduces a limited-run series called Charles Bukowski’s America, pearls of wisdom to keep in your mind when you step into the voting booth. All selections are taken from the new Bukowski anthology published by City Lights Books, Portions From a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays.)

“To lead the dead mass our so-called leaders have had to speak dead words and preach dead ways (and war is one of their ways) in order to be heard by dead minds. History, because it is built in this beehive fashion, has left us nothing but blood and torture and waste — even now, after 2,000 years of semi-Christian culture the streets are full of drunks and poor and starving, the murderers and police and the crippled lonely, and the newly-born shoved right into the center of the remaining shit … Society.”

Charles Bukowski

1966