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i am not sure whether to continue with this or not.
one result of my academic training is that i do not think it possible to refer in any coherent way to what entire populations think of anything. when ipost in here, i ususally stay within the constraints this assumption sets in that i only go after arguments and/or what particular posters specifically say--if i go beyond that, it is more often than not a function of either what previous posts that ihappen to remember have been like, or into kind of narrow generalities about a given poster that are rooted in what the posts actually say.
to my mind, the political is what lets people link phenomena together into models of the world and/or of experience that reduce dissonance or provide explanations of simply maintain a sense of coherence. so my starting point for thinking about the political is wholly other than yours, cyn, to the point where i am not sure that we could do much beyond talking past each other were we to continue this conversation, particularly if i continue to not quite present my point clearly enough for you to see that to address what i am saying you would have to shift how you think about what you are saying, and not simply repeat or expland slightly the same points.
suffice it to say for the moment that i do not believe your characterization of the "average joe" and his putative concerns or indifferences. nor do i think that your claims, most of which are rooted in the conception we have been not quite talking about, settle much of anything.
but i do have a fair idea of how you think on the matter and maybe thats all there is to be gotten here.
btw: the opening of mail would be an annoyance--it has been to me each time it has happened over the past 3 months or so.
but i know that there are many possible explanations for it and so my response stops there. and because it is just as likely that i have some shitheead neighbor as it is that xmas cards i get are a matter or national security interest, i dont really bother with the question too much directly.
with respect to the bushpeople and the various abrogations of civil liberties, including the right to privacy, as a function of their inane "war on terror", the opening of mail is simply one more signal of how far these folk think they can go in using this rationale to alter or ignore basic principles that have shaped (legally at least) life here for many many years.
what you make of the opening of mail is a direct function of whether you link it to other such actions or not, what you think of this "war on terror"charade, how you understand this charade's impact upon yourself and your sense of personal safety and so forth. the politics of the question is in these links or their absence or in the fashioning of alternative links, not in questions of what the average joe might or might not think---which is, if you think about it, nothing more than another version of the same process of making phenomena meaningful by linking them to others.
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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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