Quoth Rev. Tom W, in part:
> Hands up all those who think it's "the state"?
>
> Here's my speculation about why the right has such success. It's not that
> they "appropriate" any language. It's that they share and identify with a
> mythic version of the state that is deeply engrained in the culture. Deeply.
> They don't appropriate the language, they SPEAK it. The left may criticize
> the myth of state, but criticism isn't unified and doesn't tell it's own
> story. So, what is to be done?
>
> Just criticizing or denouncing the myth is not enough. Making up a new myth
> (or two or three) won't work. My own preference is for getting inside the
> poetics of the myth and producing emancipatory versions -- stretching the
> myth. By the way, this is what I would claim Herman Melville did and what
> Thomas Paine did, to cite just two examples.
Tom, you're getting smarter all the time; send me some of that BC air.
Two years ago, just before the great non-holiday that some piddling
minority is observing today, Phil Agre favored us with a visit,
URGING in the most strenuous manner that we READ THE BIBLE in order
to really understand the right and why the right feels quite sincerely
that it has our number and isn't interested -- and he was talking about
the simple virtue of comprehending our fellow creatures as well as
the improvement of our political skills.
As someone who's probably done 3000 miles of hitching around the South
such counsel was hardly strange to me, by the way.
This must have been an oracular utterance on Phil's part, incidentally,
because when I posted him about it a few months later he couldn't recall.
While you're at it, Rev. Tom, what's your take on Jacob and Esau?
You get a CD of Mein Kampf for a quick answer.
valis
