At 11:06 PM 8/23/01 -0700, Lee wrote:
[and I hope it's obvious to everyone that there's no element of personal
animosity in this exchange]
[and some of my best friends are Americans...]
< lots & lots of stuff, here elided >
>But are we discussing the difference, again, between large and small
>nations?
Possibly. But you might imagine that it would work the other way around:
the more vulnerable you are, the more you'd need to pump and puff up your
amour propre.
>> But the idea of Americans as driven only by some crisp pragmatic
>> hunger for the next greenback is *so incredibly* ideological--
>> Oh, never mind.
>
>:-) Oh please, do mind. I need to be enlightened about this
>very point. I've grown up here a little bit annoyed that most
>people seemed to be such materialists (in the bad sense) here.
>Whereas I thought that Germans or English were, on the whole,
>less so. I never would have guessed that this was an ideological
>position.
I know. That's what I was saying.
I can't argue this appropriately here, because it's such a massive task;
all I can do is gesture toward the corpora of, say, Noam Chomsky and
Fredric Jameson (especially the latter's THE POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS, which
relentlessly explores the masked ideologemes in literary formations). Of
course Chomsky is a left anarchist, and Jameson is a [post?]marxist, so
perhaps their elaborate analyses can be dismissed unread. (That would
certainly be easier; they are difficult writers.)
Damien Broderick
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