roachboy

huh--i would have thought that the idea of kingship--that the person of the king WAS the unity of the people WAS the unity of the state, such as it was before (say, for simplicity's sake) the french revolution...and the notion of political legitimacy that operates now, in the context of the modern nation-state (procedural legitimacy)...would be understood as different, so that the nice story about dismemberment and cremation and a cannon shot toward poland would be a kind of non-sequitor.

but it is a cool story, and i am glad i know it now, and so i guess the question of relevance at one level (this thread, this or any conversation about the execution of saddam hussein no matter what you think of it) is supplanted by another notion of relevance (because it is not every day you get a cool story like that....)


but then, if you start thinking about it more, things begin to get creepy.
and then, a little later, they stop making sense.
so the_jazz: what are you actually saying with that post?

are you saying that the iraqi people in 2007 are like the heroic europeans of the 17th century, like there is a single Objective History, the furthest end of which is occupied by White People and relative to which everyone else can be understood---you simply ascribe to them one or another position along that objective History----as if all humanity simply repeats that one Objective History as they develop toward the Amazing 2007 occupied by those Terrifically Sophisticated White People?

or not?

i am confused.
please help.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite