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| Tuesday, November 22, 2005 08:15 PM |
| Pissing off liberals |
| by poppy |
I really need to stop goading myself. I have gotten better in recent years at avoiding situations where I am made to feel uncomfortable for no good reason. If, by being uncomfortable, I learn something, cool. If the material making me uncomfortable is not challenging but, rather, drivel, I do not engage with it. A pat example of this: I do not read Ann Coulter. And I should not have, this morning, clicked on an amazon customer-suggestion-list entitled "How to Infuriate Liberals." I should not have done that. My current annoyance, helped along no doubt by a hormone headache and a stuffy nose, is really no one's fault but my own. Since I identify roughly half of the time as a liberal, I should have put all my years of formal education to work in assessing that reading that list would probably infuriate me. I mean, it told me upfront. There was no ambush. There was no false-sense-of-security offered. Although I do not have the time, I briefly considered making a list of books to piss conservatives off, but it really doesn't have the same flair. First off, I'm a bit too thoughtful to reduce such a wide descriptor to the narrow definition needed to yield a workable/readable list. Second off, that would be pretty much anything wouldn't it? Which, I suppose, is just further evidence of the first point.
Anyway, I would just like to say this: Knowing, yay acknowledging, that slavery was(/is?) a worldwide institution since the beginning of time and, quite often, involved (gasp!) white people (the horror!) in no way negates the right and the necessity to analyze the unique experience of African slaves in North America as it pertains not just to historical record but to current race relations in North America.
There. I don't feel totally better, but it helps. I feel like I did when I got into a drag out with a first year in a seminar that ended when, after I mentioned that George Washington and the cherry tree didn't really go down as noted and, I swear to god, the kid screamed "Liar!", the professor mentioned that, well, I was right, and the kid sulked and missed the next two meetings. History gets written by the winners people. If the losers are now writing things and, the horror, infusing their viewpoints with personal biases, you should absolutely subject them to the same scathing critique you gave the original, winner history... oh, wait...
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