Politics & Power Quote by Terry Southern

Southern is at his most surgical when he names the dirty engine behind polite geopolitics: commerce dressed up as “policy,” with a punchline made of casualties. “Grossing Out” is a wickedly compact phrase because it fuses two meanings that usually stay separate. “Gross” is the visceral disgust the subject deserves; “grossing” is the ledger-book verb of profit. In one beat, he turns moral revulsion into an accounting term, suggesting that the outrage is inseparable from the revenue stream.

The intent is less to argue a position than to expose a structure: Western states and their corporate satellites offload weapons into poorer nations, then treat the resulting instability as either unfortunate background noise or a fresh market opportunity. Southern’s subtext is that exploitation isn’t a bug in the system; it’s the system. “Dealt with” sounds almost bureaucratic, a deliberately flat verb that mimics the language of memos and briefings, as if this were just another manageable “issue” rather than a pipeline of blood and cash.

Context matters: Southern comes out of a Cold War media ecology where propaganda, advertising, and policy share the same persuasive toolkit. His satire doesn’t need to invent villains; it just needs to point at the transactional banality of the real ones. The Third World, in his framing, isn’t a distant stage for Western morality plays. It’s the place where Western affluence quietly balances its books.