Good thing someone mentioned the atom bomb because I think this topic whatever it has decayed to has probably outlived its halflife. One list I am on tends to decay to multi-dialect puns about sex; another to over-the-counter mind-altering substances and geek chic, and this one to cynicism and nearly pointless interpersonal vituperation. At this point we have a subject line that does not correspond to the straw man we have all been chasing with the best of the thundering mainstream media herd, a topic which as shown by the LA gay community piece does not even comport with actual exit polls or electoral dynamics, and a whole stew of anecdotes about people's relatives and cultural roots.
Honestly, if I keep reading this thread uncritically, I am going to have a giant holy war in my head just based on the various anecdotal suppositions: the Irish wing of the family who probably were not Catholic would have to have a holy war with the Protestant branches and both of those would chase down the Mormon wing and they would all be horrified that I even mention them in this forum. Never mind that I myself in this generation am as likely to opine about the multitudinous ethno-religious twitches among Russians and denizens of the former Soviet Union that I know or the cauldron of racial self-examination to be discovered--if one looks--on an average Ivy-league campus in the '80's. That was definitely Lawrence O Graham's VERY preppy phase, and he tried WAY harder at that than it ever occurred to me to do. Dunno if that was white privilege on my part or just that for once I figured out really fast that I would be so incompetent at "preppy" that it was pointless to try. I was also too busy majoring in political activism, which I suppose might be its own form of extreme effort to forge an identity, but that is a different problem. Sometimes if I do modest intellectual exercise, I try to imagine whether Graham's life on campus was actually much different from the way people talked when he worked at the country club, the work he wrote about in one of his books. But can we maybe lay off the personal vituperation and save some energy for all the points of the new regime that demand alternate measures of extreme scorn and really deep creativity?
And what I really want to know: are there any guys on this list who can muster the slightest bit of jealousy for the joy Michelle Obama's butt appears to provoke on the pages of Salon.com?
DC
On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 1:35 PM, Dwayne Monroe <dwayne.monroe at gmail.com>wrote:
> Chris wrote:
>
> The rather obvious close correspondence between common black cultural
> attitudes and common Southern cultural attitudes, for instance.
> Somebody less ideologically inclined might rather suspect that there
> might be a link, such as there just may possibly be a link between
> being of Irish ancestry and being Catholic.
>
> ...........
>
>
> Of course there's a link.
>
>
> But once you've said that, your work has only (barely) started. This
> is where actual research comes into play.
>
>
> Between saying 'all is made of atoms' and the hydrogen bomb there
> falls a long shadow.
>
>
>
>
>
> .d.
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>