>Rob, is a smell a surface too?
Look, I know I'm not there and that I run the risk of sounding insensitive about the 6000 horrific deaths of 6000 mums, dads and loved ones. I certainly don't want to. But, yes, the smell is the surface in the sense that it wouldn't be there without the hidden constituents beneath. So the 'surface' analogy is meant to stress the profundity of the slaughter, not lessen it. Not a few ungrateful foreigners gone berzerk, but an unambiguous warning that the institutions which run us running us into the ground.
The language's ugliest word may well be 'structuration', but at least it reminds us that, just as our institutions reproduce and condition us, so do we reproduce and condition them. Our discourse has nothing particular to offer on the matter of symptomology, and we'd look as disingenuous as Rumsfeld or Bush if we allowed ourselves to be dragged onto that turf (as the last week on LBO evinces, I think). We gotta talk pathology, I reckon.
That and radical surgery.
This'd give us something coherent to say when we're asked and allow us to contribute where we might be of most use.
It'd also serve to make the bloodletting and starving in Afghanistan look like a continuation of S11 rather than a response to it. Which would not offend anyone with any genuine anti-war sentiments, I'm sure.
Cheers, Rob.