<nettime> Re: If People is a concept: might it be populist? Re: <nettime> Mesopotamia's burning

[Keith Hart <HART_KEITH@compuserve.com>]

Are Flagan wrote:

>I understand why Louise then asks loudly WHO ARE YOU? in distressed
capitals.<

So do I. I will spare nettimers yet more personal revelations, having
provided a target for some of the anguish around at this time, by refusing
to condemn American society in general for this war. But I would like to
recall the orginal context for this thread

I posted a piece about looting in Iraq together with an unpublished op-ed
essay by a Chicago academic. I reacted to the moral certainty of the
latter by writing a satire in the original sense of the word -- a sort of
sausage or goulash, in any case a mixture laced with irony. There may have
been times when I knew my political position, but they do not include now
when I am spending time in the belly of the beast as a seasonal migrant
worker (a mobility that Louise Desrenards seems to find distasteful in
itself). The form of the post reflected this unfinished struggle for
perspective. But I also included an aside suggesting, along with the
Indian novelist Arundhati Roy, that American "civil society" was a power
to be reckoned with if we would oppose the designs of this Bush
government, implying that simple anti-Americanism, from the inside or the
outside, just won't do. Are jumped all over that, I replied and Louise
jumped all over that (twice).

It seems to me that lengthy ad hominem critiques addressing marginal
unsupported statements, while ignoring the central drift of the original
essay, are unfair. But I would say that, wouldn't I?


Keith Hart 



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