Life & Wisdom Quote by David Antin

Antin’s line lands like a mock-prayer offered with a smirk and a wince. “From this entertainment industry” casts the whole cultural machine as a single, looming force - not just Hollywood, but the broader apparatus that turns speech into product and attention into currency. Then comes the deliciously barbed pivot: “may the gods of language protect us.” It’s reverent syntax pressed into skeptical service, as if the only adequate response to media saturation is to invoke a higher power - while quietly implying that higher power has been insulted for decades.

The intent isn’t prudish anti-pop scolding; it’s a poet’s defensive maneuver. Antin is warning that the industry doesn’t merely distribute stories, it pressures language itself: toward slogans, toward frictionless sentiment, toward phrases engineered to scan quickly and vanish faster. “Protect us” is communal and urgent, suggesting the damage isn’t private taste but shared discourse. If words get thinned out, the public’s ability to think, argue, and imagine gets thinned out with them.

Context matters: Antin’s work often blurred poetry, lecture, and talk-performance, invested in living speech and thought-in-motion. Against that, “entertainment industry” reads as the opposite of talk: a pipeline of prepackaged voice. The “gods” are a sly nod to tradition - muse, rhetoric, craft - but also a challenge: if language is sacred, why do we keep handing it over to people paid to make it effortlessly consumable?