roachboy

i dont think there is a "problem of violent discourse" in general except for folk on the right who are looking to shirk responsibility for their particular gun-toting cross-hair training real-american-defending homespun backwater neo-fascist speak.

in part because the gun-waving cross-hair-training thinking about mowing down your adversary language of the right has spilled into the space of continuous repetition---so it's not a matter of simple sentences taken in isolation, but rather of a dominant discourse in the american political landscape---for better or worse (to my mind, its entirely for the worse) that is repeated and repeated and so operates at the level of conditioning mechanism. not pavlovian style--something lighter, more in the range of cognitive parameter shaping when thinking about intermediate or experience-distant phenomena (an old poli-sci definition of politics is thinking about the experience-distant; conservo-rhetoric is at its more obviously narcissistic when you think about politics that way spreading questions of individual identity and gun pointing all over the world...)

that difference if discursive register is something the right collectively has to avoid addressing, so rather than take it on, they are trying lately to pretend that this is some metaphysical question about whether you like sentence a which involves some battle metaphor spoken by someone the right likes better than sentence b with very similar langauge pulled from a paperback autogiography published in 1969 written by someone the right treats as a ritualized signifier for red-baiting purposes.(*)



(*) as an extreme instance....this conservo-position would be like saying that the role of discourse in shaping the genocide in rwanda in 1994 had nothing to do with saturation radio repetition of statements about the evil tutsi and suggestions that the real rwandais were the hutu and that removing the tutsi contaminant was a good idea....instead conservative "thinking" would have to think that all statements in all registers involving anything like that structure are equivalent (crackhead thinking) and their implications a matter of how they are said by individuals (a notion that follows in principle from the refusal of the post-thatcherite right to admit that there is a society) and recieved by individuals, as if all situations are the same. this position is obviously worthless when it comes to trying to understand rwanda because it excludes the fundamental role of radio in triggering and directing the genocide. period.

i mention this example in order to talk about a situation in which similar language in a parallel media environment had very very bad outcomes indeed in order to force the recognition that access to/control of a dominant repetition-based media environment is fundamental as a communicative situation and that attempting to erase that by resorting to fake metaphysical equivalences is a fools game.

i am not comparing the poisonous political context of aridzona to rwanda. i am merely talking about an extreme example, a situation in which this kind of language in this kind of context resulted in very very very bad outcomes.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite