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i dont really understand this busby berkley notion of nation you have going there, pan (hey kids, let's put on a musical...now the only way we can do this is to pull as a team....no moping......now let's go put on a show.......imagine all this being said by richard simmons.
see it?
shudder....)
even the troopers who put on these musicals you see in movies have scripts that enable them to account for something of the past in order to structure their view of the present in order to orient themselves coherently toward a future.
what is at issue is not your attitude toward anything--what is at stake is what view of the past you have--which shapes something of how you understand the present--which in turn shapes what you might understand a desirable to be like and how you might coherently move toward it. a polity able to extend a self-critical awareness of itself into the past might be one in a position to exercize real power over its collective affairs--if this awareness results in the smashing of idols, so be it....but a collective that prefers as a question of attitude adjustment to see only a pollyanna version of the past in effect refuses coherence at the same time--one the basis of that, no coherent mode of action is easily or directly possible in the present---such a collective is fleeing from the possibility of exercizing power itself, of participating in anything like a democratic present.
this is why plato--no champion of democracy by any means---hated rhetoric. rhetoric appealed to the emotions--it made you feel good, feel sad--it manipulated its audience on this basis--but you could not tell if the content of the messages were true or not--this is why he hated the sophists---both are antithetical to debate filtered through agreed-upon conventions that you might call reason.
so in principle at least, you choose alot more than emphasizing the positive when you try to argue that critical views of the past are undesirable because they are, like, a bummer, man.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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