It is that wars are always wars, good for destroying things that must be destroyed, as in 1864 or 1944, but useless for doing anything more, and no good at all for doing cultural work: saving the national honor, proving that we're not a second-rate power, avenging old humiliations, demonstrating resolve, or any of the rest of the empty vocabulary of self-improvement through mutual slaughter.
Can we not agree that it's an editorial choice that is marrying the beautiful and the traumatic in ways that are doing cultural work?
If the purpose of affirmative action is to redress past wrongs, then it requires both the minority and the majority to do the cultural work necessary to create what Martin Luther King Jr. called the "beloved community" of an integrated nation.
This is not to say that they are the same for they are not, but to say that because popular culture texts develop characters differently, structure their narratives differently, and appeal to their audiences differently than novels and poems does not mean popular culture texts are by definition shallow, dismissible, or incapable of doing serious cultural work.
"We've done tremendous cultural work". LaRouche's security men, whispering into walkie-talkies, then hustled him out the front door and down an alley to a waiting car.
He was the reason I did cultural studies and went to work at Marxism Today in the 80s.
When does cultural borrowing turn into cultural appropriation?
"There are not too many events doing this kind of cultural work," he said.
As a man who has had his loyalties, cultural literacy, political alliances, family background, religious affiliation and even birth circumstances questioned at every turn, I can imagine the space created in this ritualized performance did some important emotional and cultural work for Obama, just as it did for the grieving families and the larger audience.
