On Oct 2, 2006, at 10:58 AM, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
> the US is a deeply petit bourgeois society – where the nauseous
> mixture of small town insularity, distrust of outsiders, public
> displays of piety and sanctimonious self-righteousness and
> jingoistic populism rule the day and dominate public discourse.
Yes, it has been - which, by the way, is one of the reasons I think it's unfair to denounce Hofstadter as a "consensus" historian, because a lot of what he wrote is true, whiie the left historians were busy exaggerating popular resistance - but a lot of that is a holdover that survives as fantasy, while the underlying reality has changed a lot. And a lot of us live in metropolitan areas, are secular and/or gay (or have a gay cousin), have an open and cosmopolitan attitude towards the outside world. This cartoon doesn't describe all of us, but those of us whom it doesn't describe still cut the xenophobes slack as representing The Real America. Fuck 'em. They don't.
Doug