>There's a lot of excess arm waving in Zizek's remarks, but his main point is
>clear and unexceptionable: "America's 'holiday from history' was a fake:
>America's peace was bought by the catastrophes going on elsewhere. Therein
>resides the true lesson of the bombings: the only way to ensure that it will
>not happen HERE again is to prevent it going on ANYWHERE ELSE."
Exactly my point about Zizek being European. As a native Californian I have to confess literally to Zizek's "ultimate American paranoiac fantasy." The year was 1966 and the "small idyllic Californian city" was Davis. Sure, I was doing recreational drugs but the suspicion dawned on me neveretheless that everything was fake and had been neatly arranged to conceal that fact from me.
And what was the partial truth underlying that fantasy? I was attending university exclusively so that I could maintain a student exemption from having to go into the military and being sent to kill and/or die in Vietnam. Everything had been neatly arranged.
Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213