Daily Inspiration Quote by Alex Cox

Cox is aiming at the clean-room illusion of modern power: we can vote, pay taxes, binge the news, and still experience war as something that happens “over there,” at a hygienic distance. The jab lands because it indicts two institutions at once. First, the state, which can “provoke these wars abroad” through policy, proxy funding, or geopolitical swagger while keeping domestic life frictionless. Second, the media ecosystem, which often treats graphic death as indecent content rather than essential evidence. The result is a moral doublethink: violence is permissible as strategy but unacceptable as imagery.

The word “disassociation” does the heavy lifting. It’s not just ignorance; it’s a psychological coping mechanism turned civic norm. Cox frames the public not as innocent bystanders but as participants insulated from consequence. “Not allowed” is slippery on purpose: censorship can be formal (broadcast standards, platform rules) or informal (editorial choices, audience comfort, advertiser pressure). Either way, the prohibition protects viewers from discomfort more than it protects victims from harm.

Coming from a director, the line also reads as a defense of showing what institutions prefer to sanitize. Cinema and television are the battleground here: who gets to see suffering, and in what form? Cox suggests that when death is kept off-screen, accountability becomes abstract, and wars become endlessly renewable - like background noise you can mute.