It is scary but worth pondering the fact that our attention is always poignantly drawn to that which we are about to lose or have already lost.
Here's the beginning of an 8,000-word piece I wrote for the Socialist Register 2006 (Panitch & Leys, eds). I just got my author's copy of the Brit edition, so I guess it'll be out there soon. Dunno about here.
Doug
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The U.S. may be populated by nearly 300 million isolated monads, but do we ever love the word "community." On the left, it's never "blacks" or "Jews," it's "the black community" and "the Jewish community." Presumably there's something abrupt and almost impolite about simple monosyllabic nouns, so the addition of a few Latinate syllables softens the blow. But there's a way in which the use of the word reads like a wish fulfillment, a hope that a community that doesn't really exist in any for-itself sense can be created in the act of naming it.
But, beyond the left, it's also a popular formulation in mainstream American speech. Examples I've collected over the years include the reality TV community, the military community, the air-hijacking community, the mortgage community, the Alzheimer's community, the cybernerd community, the Phish community, and the copyright community. Of particular interest to readers of this volume might be one of the more ubiquitous examples: "the business community."
Just what is the business community? [...]