Activity

[...] Why do these crowds from Detroit to Charleston cheer so wildly at a simple promise not to lie?

Well, it’s obvious why. When McCain says it, the people are cheering not for him so much as for how good it feels to believe him. They’re cheering the loosening of a weird sort of knot in the ele…

[...] take a second or two to do some creative visualization and imagine the moment between John McCain’s first getting offered early release and his turning it down. Try to imagine it was you. Imagine how loudly your most basic, primal self-interest would cry out to you in that moment, and all the…

that sits better with the theoretical impulses worked through here from cultural studies and Habermasian ideas

These are tendentious stabs at critique, designed to back up Short’s notion of a drip-drip-drip effect of colonial inculcation, and they are weak ones.

This is popular colonialism and it developed, he states, independently of the ‘organized enthusiasm of the upper classes’. It had to: a central claim of the book is that the official agencies of colonial knowledge and the organized colonial movement had no interest in including the lower classes in…