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for what it's worth, cimmaron, there is no mosque being built at or next to the giant hole in the ground. and if you want tacky, you should check out the "Ground Zero" souvenir industry. nothing leads americans in general to explosions of bad taste quite the way memorials do, particularly when they get a bit of that jingo powder mixed in like kool aid. but i digress.
if we were collectively to start banning stuff on the grounds of tackiness tho...we might get along better because it'd be fun, but there'd be a whole lot of stuff that'd disappear.
i don't think anyone's confusing the mounting racist climate directed against muslims that's building of this fake ground zero meme with the more actively racist stuff that's playing out in aridzona and, more recently, florida (at the level of draconian law at least).
for myself, i react more strongly to the islamophobia because of the network of folk i'm close to personally in meat-space. it concerns me that it's nauseating and freaking out people i love. what's happening in arizona is to me more objectively foul, if you know what i mean.
they seem to me of a piece, almost connected: the same kind of ultra-rightwing political sensibility.
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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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