This one felt dense to me, Stew, probably because I've never been the best student of either American history or geography. I didn’t know the history of the Chinook recognition at all, and reading about how casually it was granted and then revoked left me with that familiar, sinking ‘oh right, this is how power works’ feeling.
What really struck me was how much of this history runs on language that feels engineered to be remembered. “Fifty-four forty or fight.” “Manifest Destiny.” Short, rhythmic, confident, doing the work of persuasion before we ever get to the substance, something a certain someone is masterful at, though it pains me to use that adjective. The assumption that desire plus strength equals legitimacy, that inevitability can be asserted rather than argued, treated as justification in itself. Ugh!
And it’s hard not to notice how keep repackaging the same ideology.
I wrote the piece with a smirk, and was more pleased with my style than appalled by what I was writing about. That’s the danger of being Wiki-Wise, a term I just made up for what happens when I go down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. It’s a kind of Seeming, writing from recently acquired know knowledge, rather than from the well of the heart. Thanks for sticking with it. I meant to write about my favorite bumper stickers, fortune cookies and parody motivational posters. Next time! Maybe!
Ah, perhaps I was too caught up in the heaviness of the week to notice the smirk. Please do bring us your favorites in those categories when you're ready. (Were we connected here when I wrote a long, rabbit-hole-forward, piece on fortune cookies?) One had a cameo in your most recent CS comment, as I recall.
This one felt dense to me, Stew, probably because I've never been the best student of either American history or geography. I didn’t know the history of the Chinook recognition at all, and reading about how casually it was granted and then revoked left me with that familiar, sinking ‘oh right, this is how power works’ feeling.
What really struck me was how much of this history runs on language that feels engineered to be remembered. “Fifty-four forty or fight.” “Manifest Destiny.” Short, rhythmic, confident, doing the work of persuasion before we ever get to the substance, something a certain someone is masterful at, though it pains me to use that adjective. The assumption that desire plus strength equals legitimacy, that inevitability can be asserted rather than argued, treated as justification in itself. Ugh!
And it’s hard not to notice how keep repackaging the same ideology.
I wrote the piece with a smirk, and was more pleased with my style than appalled by what I was writing about. That’s the danger of being Wiki-Wise, a term I just made up for what happens when I go down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. It’s a kind of Seeming, writing from recently acquired know knowledge, rather than from the well of the heart. Thanks for sticking with it. I meant to write about my favorite bumper stickers, fortune cookies and parody motivational posters. Next time! Maybe!
Ah, perhaps I was too caught up in the heaviness of the week to notice the smirk. Please do bring us your favorites in those categories when you're ready. (Were we connected here when I wrote a long, rabbit-hole-forward, piece on fortune cookies?) One had a cameo in your most recent CS comment, as I recall.
Always enlightening! Thanks Stew for another great read!
I can always count on learning something I never knew before.
I love the surprise factor too!