“When I am feeling like a fiction, I realize something strange has happened. I am not a cartoon. If I have been reduced to Gandalf, and think this an honor or privilege — if a child (or adult) has been reduced to fictional character and thinks this promotion — something is horribly wrong.

Any living being is more than all possible fictions. This is the sense we must live and know. To play a role as a way of exploring this is wonderful, but to actually believe that cartoons of function and identity are richer or more amazing than living beings is … one of the strangest and most deadly symptoms of our culture.

Apparently, our lives, as defined to us, can easily become so artless, dead, and insipid that even cartoons seem more habitable. And thus, to our great dismay, we become them. This grim fact is not limited to persons, but to cultures of every order, from the family, to the state, to the nation. There are even planetary versions — such as those that masquerade as ‘justice’ or ‘learning’ when in fact they are largely comprised of hateful or greed-driven ignorance wearing the hastily-sketched cartoon uniform of a god.”

— an anonymous informant