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This is a personal project by @dellsystem. I built this to help me retain information from the books I'm reading.

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17

What It Means When a Crowd in a Faraway Nation Takes a Soldier Representing Your Own Nation, Shoots Him, Drags Him from His Vehicle and Then Mutilates Him in the Dust

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a short but actually pretty cool vignette that (imo) depicts how entrenched American patriotism is, by elucidating a random American man's feelings about the mutilation of his nation's soldiers (referring to Somalia perhaps? lots of possibilities really)

Eggers, D. (2005). What It Means When a Crowd in a Faraway Nation Takes a Soldier Representing Your Own Nation, Shoots Him, Drags Him from His Vehicle and Then Mutilates Him in the Dust. In Eggers, D. How We Are Hungry. Vintage, pp. 17-18

18

[...] Why did he feel violated? He felt punched, robbed, raped. If a soldier was killed and mutilated in his own country, this man would not feel this kind of revulsion. He doesn't feel this way when he hears about trains colliding, or a family, in Missouri, drowning in their minivan in a December lake But this, in another part of the world, this soldier dragged from his car, this soldier alone, this dead unbloody body in the dust under the trck--why does it set the man on edge, why does it feel so personal? [...]

relevant to my thoughts about terrorism I guess (also DFW's 9/11 essay). also on national pride and identity, "othering" based on nationality

—p.18 by Dave Eggers 6 years, 11 months ago

[...] Why did he feel violated? He felt punched, robbed, raped. If a soldier was killed and mutilated in his own country, this man would not feel this kind of revulsion. He doesn't feel this way when he hears about trains colliding, or a family, in Missouri, drowning in their minivan in a December lake But this, in another part of the world, this soldier dragged from his car, this soldier alone, this dead unbloody body in the dust under the trck--why does it set the man on edge, why does it feel so personal? [...]

relevant to my thoughts about terrorism I guess (also DFW's 9/11 essay). also on national pride and identity, "othering" based on nationality

—p.18 by Dave Eggers 6 years, 11 months ago