oh gimme a fuckin' break carrol. i'm talking about a person who is obviously supposed to be a member of a...what is the appropriate phrase these days?...western nation.
moreover, marx would NEVER have envisioned a worldwide struggle against capitalism if he hadn't presumed the ability to fricking read. try a read of eggs benedict anderson.
kelley
>kelley wrote:
> >
> > how can we possibly have any sort of
> > meaningful dialogue if people can't read?
> >
>
>How can huge masses of people enter into meaningful
>dialogue (a necessary precondition of socialist
>revolution) if those few who can read will not grant
>the legitimacy of inability to read and subordinate
>their peculiar skill to making possible meaningful
>dialogue among the billions who neither have nor ever
>will have have that peculiar skill?
>
>The Athenian peasantry, none of whom could read,
>carried out for well over a century one of the
>most meaningful dialogues in human history. The
>peasantry of Longbow, almost none of whom could
>read, carried out a dialogue which far surpassed
>in its beauty and power anything I have witnessed
>on this or any other maillist. So great was that
>beauty that an intellectual on the County Committee,
>committed to serving it (the peasant dialogue)
>but disabled by his fastidious inheritance from
>tolerating, among other things, the physical stench
>of peasant bodies, killed himself rather than
>renounce or betray that commitment.
>
>Depending on how snobbish one is about being human,
>our species has been around for between 100,000 and
>2 million years. Reading as anything like a mass
>endeavor is only 300 or some years old. For me,
>and doubtless for many on this list, it is hard to
>imagine a life in which reading -- and attempting
>at least to read well -- does not play a central
>role. But to rather roughly paraphrase the
>silver tongued Boy Wonder from the Platte, it
>wouldn't be a good idea to crucify man (or woman)
>kind upon this cross of print.
>
>Carrol
>
>
>But to have done instead of not doing
> this is not vanity
>........................................
> Here error is all in the not done,
>all in the diffidence that faltered . . .
> (Canto LXXXI)
>
>I was right there in Boston the night that they died
> (W. Guthrie)