[lbo-talk] Churchill's complaint

[snit snat]

At 10:33 AM 2/15/2005, Doug Henwood wrote:
>Max B. Sawicky wrote:
>
>>In politics, it not only what you mean, it's
>>what you say, and even what you almost say.
>>By Churchill's classification, if some members
>>of this list happened to work in the WTC, they
>>would fall into the category of "little Eichmanns."
>>In the Spring before 9-11, I did a talk in the
>>WTC in front of a class taught by the very Marxist
>>Tom Dickins.  We could have been LEs too.
>
>Yup. I talked to Tom's class several times in the WTC. My mother worked 
>there (though she retired long ago). My upstairs neighbor was killed there.
>
>I almost said I'm surprised, then I thought again and realized I shouldn't 
>be, that it's rarely noted in political discourse that those of us who 
>were most directly affected by 9/11 - New Yorkers - are among the least 
>bellicose in the U.S. From the first, there really wasn't much bellowing 
>for revenge coming from the city that was hit. Most of it comes from a 
>heartland that's never going to be hit by anything other than a tornado. 
>The whole anti-terror thing is more about xenophobia and paranoia than 
>self-defense.
>
>Doug

I've seen the numbers on this, so it's not that I don't believe the general 
trend. However, my experience right after 911 was that people in upstate 
NY--former colleagues at my alma mater, family and friends, and colleagues 
in New Jersey--were _very_ much in favor of invading Afghanistan. When we 
got in arguments on the list for friends of the department, people claimed 
that I just didn't understand because I was safe far away in LimpDick. 
Which was really funny: LimpDick is home to MacDill Airforce base!

I wonder if you were to do a map you'd find the strongest sentiments closer 
to the targets, yet not close enough to experience the horror directly. The 
other issues, which we've discussed before, is the blue/state red state 
phenom -- where antiwar sentiments are historically much higher in urban 
centers in general.

Anyway, another thing is that I'm wondering how a Freudian might explain 
this phenom. You call it paranoia -- but it seems something else to me. Or, 
maybe I'm just not well-versed enough in the psychodynamics that underpin 
paranoia from a Freudian perspective. Is Christopher Rhoades Dykema still 
on the list?

"We live under the Confederacy.
We're a podunk bunch of swaggering
pious hicks."

                --Bruce Sterling