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first off i apologize for going that far in the post you responded to here, ace.
i do in fact take this particular line of conversation quite personally and sometimes the fact that parallel attitudes have had and continue to have unsettling consequences for people i am personally close to gets the better of me.
plus there's a degree of transferred frustration--i'd like to be able to wave a wand and vaporize what i see as a residual racism that derives from the hysteria that surrounded the "hostage crisis" in iran, so is really an element of the neo-conservative origin mythology, given that it was that hostage crisis and its packaging that i think explains why ronald reagan was elected more than any other single thing. but there seems to be no way of doing that, and sometimes that becomes frustrating and sometimes that frustration gets the better of me. that's what happened here.
when the thread started, it was about juan williams getting fired and the way the paliny ultra-right was trying to frame it as yet another instance of conservative victimization by setting williams up as someone who Stood Up to Political Correctness and Spoke About Reality. which i found funny, really. are you serious? was my initial reaction.
then it got a degree of traction and the positions shifted in the direction of people who support fox news--say---or who support the positions outlined by o-reilly et al, and so who are amenable to the ongoing creation of us/them stuff and the routine verbal abuse of muslims that are of a piece with it now try to defend not what williams said but the worldview that may have allowed for that to be said.
and that's where we are now. i don't see this getting anywhere, either. i think on this the differences in assumptions/viewpoints are simply too basic to allow for any motion.
but (again) this isn't a conversation about juan williams any more. it's about whether it's ok to hold what amount to racist views/bigoted views---or (another way) it's about one's relation to the abstraction "the war on terror" and of that abstraction to the construction of the Enemy that comes with it. folk who are suspicious of it vs. those who aren't. and it seems that once again this lands us back in the strange little world of identity politics.
yes is no up is down slavery is freedom war is peace.
sometimes discussions are like a chess game. you can play them out to the bitter end and end up with a king and a pawn chasing around another king and a pawn. or you can suss out the strategic situation and see from that what's likely to happen. better players will opt out of a game well before the bitter end if the strategic situation makes the outcome uninteresting by making it inevitable. sometimes i think we collectively play threads like 6th graders at chess. i think we'd be well served by working out a better way to end games.
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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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