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personally, i was more angry than depressed by the article when i read it--angry and amazed at the organized smear campaign directed both at the school and its principal, angry at the shabby jingoist character of the attacks, at the manipulation of parental animosity directed at the nyc department of education over its non-responsiveness to community needs for adqequate schooling into de facto endorsement of this jingoist nonsense, the ability of vacant, bankrupt rightwing nonsense to get not only press space but a lot of it simply because the money and networks exist--no checking, no compunction, just repetition.
i was amazed that this happened, that it went down as it did.
at this point, you'd think that the fearmongering, the xenophobia-tipping-into-racism (if you accept the american right's conflation of islam and arab-speaking folk, except when it is extended to include iran, but no matter the level of ignorance appears to be such that no difference registers) particular to the post 9/11/2001 populist right would be so transparent and so empty for that that no mobilizations on its basis would be possible.
but you'd be wrong, apparently.
i was wrong about that.
and that, comrades, is pretty grim.
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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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