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if you like, seymour, you can look through this thread even and you'll see a pretty wide range of objections to the wright-tempest, very few of which could be understood as obama supporters rallying round their candidate.
there are alot of ways in which this "issue" is problematic--it's reliance on 30 second decontextualized video clips repeated ad nauseum on 24/7 infotainment channels demonstrates the extent to which anything, repeated enough times, can acquire a certain traction no matter how stupid, now matter how superficial. repetition is its own reward: repetition is power.
the way in which this decontextualized video clips repeated ad infinitum on 24/7 "news" television--the illusion that if you see the same 30 second clip enough times you understand fuck all about where that clip comes from, so repetition not only replaces context, but substitutes for context---this is of a piece with the shallower-than-shallow framing of wright as "racist"...the frames within which this claim even begin to make sense are deeply problematic: conservatives of the limbaugh stripe working the dynamics of the meme to the wholesale exclusion of social reality and its history, and the dynamics produced by the repetition of the meme itself.
so this idiotic affair acquired a sense of momentum through its being-packaged in easily repeatable form along with a steaming brown torrent of pseudo-analyses commensurate with that: 30 second arguments for 30 second attention spans.
these 30-second arguments resonate with a number of other problematic aspects of the populist conservative culture of victimization---conservatives are of course the victims, much in the way that early christians were--misunderstood, threatened, persecuted--"terrorists" or ILLEGALS or any number of other phantom enemies in the 30-second attention span substitute world of the televisual right---the righteous petit bourgeois is always beset with persecuting Others and now here is another.
if only all the persecuting others could be made to go away, everything would be right and ritgheous in the land. i know this because i hear it repeated again and again and again in tiny little arguments fit with arbitrary video clips repeated over and over in little pockets of infotainment that dot the 500 channel wasteland of television.
racism in the united states has a history and that history is central to the history of the united states and that history is in many many ways ugly and destructive and problematic and that history continues to shape and reshape the present and not all of this produces the Universal Assent reflected in the YAY AMERICA statements that the limbaugh-right would have you believe are the only acceptable forms of statements that can be made about this the best of all possible countries in the best of all possible economic orders in the best of all possible worlds. structural problems? what they fuck are they? cant talk about structure in a 30-second video clip repeated ad infinitum on the 24/7 infotainment channel of your choice.
it is easy to go on in this way--but personally i think the fact that huckabee---HUCKABEE--effectively called bullshit on this one should give even the most faithful television-oriented limbaugh-style conservative pause.
this line of objection to this "issue" has nothing to do with obama per se, and has been running throughout the 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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