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gee whiz, folks, such snippiness about the wholly mythologized history of the american revolution...such inability to countenance the possibility that not everything that happened then was wholly ethical....but i suppose it's easy to separate the revolution proper from what was happening across the period on the "frontier"--but hey, who really cares about that kind of thing anyway? what matters is that the mythology stay intact.
you might read crevecoeur's letters from an american famer, particularly the last one, to get a more nuanced understanding of what happened during the revolution, how vertiginous it was for folk at the time, etc etc etc. bad things undoubtedly happened. the Heroic Nationalist Mythos required that they be erased.
but hey, why wonder about complex real-time situations do when knee-jerk reactions in defense of some santized mythology are so much fun?
following from this snippiness, there appears to be some kind of argument that the americans occupy a kind of moral high ground that would enable them to pass judgements on the public-relations construction of hezbollah--well, folks, we dont. not in a context shaped by the bush administration's decision to allow an ongoing massacre of civilians in lebanon via its delusional pronouncements concerning a "new middle east"--one that would apparently be simpler for the simple folk in power to interact with. not in a context shaped by the debacle in iraq and the debacle in afghanistan---a rehearsal of american follies and their impact on the lives of other people seems superfluous, really, because in this thread what is at issue is mythology and not history, and the affection people hold for certain mythologies.
these demonstrations of affection for mythologies of american righteousness are tedious beyond measure. they say nothing about the past, nothing about the present, nothing about the future. they help nothing. they do nothing. they are kinda creepy to read through. but soon enough that too becomes tedious as the type of creepiness seems standardized....
nothing left to be said here. have a nice thread.
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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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