>This is fairly patronizing stuff, particularly the part which
>suggests that the
>people on the streets couldn't figure out why they wanted to be there on their
>own, without having digested the blizzard of pre-WTO prose poured
>out by the elite
>commentators.
By the way, this relates to the conversation we've never had about the virtues of the "grassroots." There's a tendency among validators of the grassroots to turn conventional discourse on its head - instead of the elite commentators being the subjects presumed to know, the rank and file becomes that. Life isn't so simple. Fear of being patronizing shouldn't stop one from admitting that the folks on the street don't always know as much as we'd like them too. Otherwise, why be a journalist/writer at all? Presumably we have something to contribute from all that time we spend researching and thinking about things. That isn't to say we should deliver pronunciamenti from on high, but we shouldn't get carried away with false modesty either.
Doug