After they win...

[Carl Remick]

>From: "Mina Kumar" <wejazzjune at hotmail.com>
>
>>From: Michael Perelman <michael at ecst.csuchico.edu>
>>
>>One difficulty with the chickens come home to roost is that it often
>>sounds as if the audience was largely responsible when in fact most people
>>have no idea that all of what American policy actually is.
>
>They are responsible for their ignorance.  No one in Jamaica or Afghanistan
>or Iran is ignorant in the same way because it is not a privilege that
>accrues to those outside the imperium.

This is certainly true.  Americans' ignorance is much connected with the 
nation's fabulous, self-renewing, much-proclaimed sense of "innocence" -- 
perhaps better defined as clinical narcissism.  Americans' will to ignorance 
reminds me of the degree of stupidity that Samuel Johnson once ascribed to 
one of his nemeses:  "Why, Sir, Sherry is dull, naturally dull; but it must 
have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him. Such an 
excess of stupidity, Sir, is not in Nature."

Carl

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