LIFE IMITATES WOODY ALLEN: In

LIFE IMITATES WOODY ALLEN: In Sleeper, there’s a hilarious scene when Woody’s Miles Monroe character, defrosted 200 years into the future, is shown a clip of an endlessly droning Howard Cosell:

Historian: We weren’t sure at first what to make of this, but we developed a theory: we feel that when people committed great crimes against the state, they were forced to watch this.

Miles Monroe: Yes. That’s exactly what it was.

In the future, when people commit great crimes against the state, they’ll be forced to read passages by Jacques Derrida.

By the way, there’s a great comment to Matt Welch’s post, about 14 comments down, which has a bit of fun with one of Derrida’s typically portentous statements:

Only in retrospect will we be able to understand if the symbolically suffused collapse of the capitalistic citadels in lower Manhattan…

Would it ruin his day to know they were socialistic citadels?

Heh.