Joanna
Doug Henwood wrote:
> joanna wrote:
>
> 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
>
> ----
>
> 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? [...]
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