Who said this, and when?
“..time has passed, and in that time the Christian world has revealed itself as morally bankrupt and politically unstable. The Tunisians were quite right in 1956 – and it was a very significant moment in Western (and African) history – when they countered the French justification for remaining in North Africa with the question “Are the French ready for self-government?” Again, the terms “civilized” and “Christian” begin to have a very strange ring, particularly in the ears of those who have been judged to be neither civilized nor Christian, when a Christian nation surrenders to a foul and violent orgy, as Germany did during the Third Reich.”
That’s right. James Baldwin, 1963, in The Fire Next Time (pp51-52) where he also penned this fine observation (p43), which is tremendously germane to my interests at the moment, being as I am in the US, and researching as I am, food:
To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become.
Incidentally, the best places to eat bread again in the Bay Area are to be found here, at this range of worker owned cooperatives, where the bread’s not bitter, and the workforce as un-alienated as it’s possible to be in these parts.