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art's posts were clear to the extent that the sentences were correct formally. but logically, they seemed arbitrary.
there are several ways to go about dismantling them, which i think you have to do in order to work out what is going on.
superbelt outlined one route----which i agree with---that addresses the contents of art's post itself.
there is a curious second level of problems, which would in the end simply bend art's statement back onto his own position: it is conventional wisdom---or was once--amongst a segment of conservativeland that there was some phantom called "PC" abroad in the land, the face of which was a kind of "anti-americanism" and basis of which was little more than fashion.
this relied entirely on a fantasy construct built around the notion "PC" never comes up--not here, not there--it doesn't matter that there is no referent--it is a nice little conservative meme the sole functions of which are (a) to set out a Them against which and Us can constitute itself and from there (b) it provides an opportunity for conflating a reversion to conservative political positions with an act of Heroic Individualism. it doesn't matter that the positions being adopted via this act of Heroic Individualism are the same as those inculcated through the pseudo-history encountered in primary and secondary school and little more than that--that is not the point--the point is to valorize the Action of Standing Up (to a Phantom). it's easy peasy and if anything is a pure example of exactly what art claims it stands against--except that this particular ideological proposition address "individuals" and so on that basis it is possible to imagine that it stands over against "groupthink"--but its basis is just a logical inversion of how this Phantom PC was defined.
i dont have a particular stake in this thread: for myself, i found no particular linkage between falwell's politics and the fact of his death welling up inside me--i felt no sense of either hostility or its inverse coming together around it. i found the relation of his politics to his religious committments to be problematic, but they never surprised me given the position he came from. he invented nothing, was responsible for nothing insofar as that variant of protestant fundamentalism is concerned. he was an adequate spokesmodel for a politics i found and find repellent---but that did not lead me to find anything to gloat about in the fact that he died. they are separate from each other: what falwell accomplished as a public figure, as a signifier i oppose--but as a human being, i assume that he had a family, that he loved and was loved and as such no doubt his death effects a community---and as i did not know him, i had nothing to say about it.
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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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