This is also what he did with the purportedly widespread (if not essentialist cowboy) penchant for Americans to fetishize guns and violence that he saw as a means of explaining the Black Panthers' almost exclusive and highly strategic symbolic bearing of arms. Wojtek likes to wield idealist pop psychological explanations and then defend them with slective and partial comparative historical juxtapostions rather than start with the material of history necessary to situate rationalities, interpret possible and diverse motivations and explore change.
Furthermore, it has to be rooted in forgetting the Obama won while explicitly eschewing fearmongering AND that fearmongering (against immigrants) has worked very nicely in the context of the re-rise of nationalisms around the world and the new right in Europe, no? It really is staggering how a left sociologist who, on the one hand challenges any interpretation he disagrees with to provide empirical justification can, on the other hand, so regularly use essentialist terms, ahistorical appeals and variously pop psychological and utterly out of date anthropological archetypes in his posts to paint the citizenry of the US as mendacious and irresponsible. Mendacious and irresponsible they/we may be, its just idealism holds no analytic water when it comes to explaining why.
On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 8:21 AM, Marv Gandall <marvgand at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 2010-11-08, at 7:08 AM, Wojtek S wrote:
>
> > Fearmongering is a
> > quintessentially American phenomenon - practiced with vengeance by the
> > right, the middle, the center, and every salesman. Fear is what keeps
> > America moving. Outside this country, fearmongering is far less
> prevalent.
> > So please do not project warped American mind-set as a universal human
> > feature. As a traveled man I can assure you that most people outside the
> US
> > do not live in constant fear that something bad will happen to them if
> they
> > do not act now. And most non-American religiosity is far more soporific
> > than the brimstone and fire variety popular on this side of the pond.
>
>
> It was not ever thus. In the postwar years, when America was booming, when
> incomes were rising, when the government was introducing new social
> programs, American optimism was legendary.
>
> The popular mood has darkened over the past three decades of stagnating
> incomes, job insecurity, talk of benefit rollbacks, failed wars and
> declining US power and prestige abroad, culminating in the sudden financial
> collapse of 2007-08. Many turned during this period to revivalist religion
> and spiritualism to compensate for the loss of purpose and community which
> politics once provided.
>
> Mass psychology is not something fixed in place or time. It has a material
> basis. Optimism is widely reported to be accompanying the prospect of rising
> living standards in China and other developing nations, the obverse of what
> is happening in the West.
>
>
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>
-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319