Assuming George Bush has two rear-view mirrors, it must be tough to see Iraq
coming at him through one, and New Orleans/Gulf Coast coming through the
other. I suspect he would want to say "blinding" and move on to kinder
subjects. The Heritage and other right wing think tanks are going to have to
spend a lot of money over the next decades to keep his story right and true.
But that's their business.
The underwater gods of New Orleans and the Gulf are going to be using their
messengers to tell (sing, poem, novel, movie) quite another. The Bush and
companion stories will,it appears - with their "armies of compassion" -
always be a counterfoil to the imaginative harsh beauty and truth of
whatever emerges.
Stephen V
Blog: http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
New blog site / same archives!
> It's going to be a long time, I guess, before any kind of settled
> sense comes to the swirl of rumour and reportage, official and
> unofficial truths and falsehoods, coming out of that disaster. I read
> a good piece the other day (which I now can't find, unfortunately) on
> the repetition and amplification of the rape gang stories, the way
> they seem to have converged on old racist scripts about feral black
> sexuality, unleashed and menacing.
>
> Very little is "confirmed", but a lot of what is out there plays to
> what the audience's prejudices (of one sort or another) will willingly
> confirm as plausible, as sounding like a suppressed or unacknowledged
> truth rather than - as it often later on turns out to have been - a
> partial and embroidered one, or an unadulterated falsehood.
>
> Since the "official version" is pretty much guaranteed to be horseshit
> - given who the officials in question happen to be - I can see why
> some people would prefer what looks like unvarnished popular
> testimony; but the problem is, that also tends to be horseshit, albeit
> for rather different reasons.
>
> Dominic
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