I use the word “subtext” a lot because it is the only word I know that covers the concept. Normally, subtext is used to describe the reason an Old West movie is not supposed to get a helicopter within camera or sound range.
But what about all the sermons we hear about “The poor we have with us always,” that go on and on about the poor. The poor were the SUBtext. What Christ SAID was that the crowd should realize that the poor they have with always, but HE was right there in front of them for a very limited time.
Preachers didn’t preach about THAT, even in the old days. Today they use that quote to concentrate on their REAL religion of Political Correctness. Before it ended up being about the poor or about tithing.
To Jesus, speaking to the people and knowing that His death was near, was not thinking about contributions to SPLC or money to make fat bishops fatter. It is even a bit much to say that ALL the sermons preached on the subject with that title were not even subtext to Jesus when He said “The poor we have always with us.”
And what He MEANT is not even up the level of subtext in any sermon I have ever heard on the subject.
But the only accurate word I know is subtext. As I say, it usually means what is taken for granted, as in “The Old West had a distinct shortage of helicopters.” But when someone says so and so saw him, the subtext is that He saw that somebody.
When Derbyshire and Buchanan were fired, the columns they had written about blacks were unquestionably true. The important subtext is that The Truth is No Defense. That has a deep history in the United States. The Truth is no Defense was rejected by Americans by means of jury nullification in a famous New York case as early as 1735 in the trial of John Peter Zenger, and the Alien and Sedition Acts were thrown out, not by courts, but by the electorate.
In fact, the issue of the truth is no excuse a major basis of the 1800 election, and it was the ELECTORATE, not the courts, who got rid of them.
In fact, rejection of the Alien and Sedition Acts threw out the last Federalist House, Senate, President. The last Federalist official to hold national office was Chief Justice John Marshall, who stated that the Supreme Court IS the Constitution.
With the SUBTEXT, it is odd to look to the Supreme Court to DEFEND the Bill of Rights.
Voters in 1800 would have recognized the reason the right fired Derbyshire and MSNBC fired Buchanan. Raoul Williams kept insisting that the words he got fired from PBS for saying were perfectly correct.
But you can only deal with subtext by SILENCE.
The minute the difference between the US freedom of speech attitude and the British, The Truth is No Defense, is put into its historical context, a breach between us that never healed and makes us non-Britons, it is LOST.
So all the left, the center, the tame conservatives, AND the “extreme right” either join in silencing that question or have never heard of it and wouldn’t use it if they had.
When you’ve got a TAME opposition, you don’t need a Conspiracy.
#1 by Dave on 06/06/2012 - 9:37 am
The jungle takes the law into its own hands. And here’s the jungle’s law: A state of ruin can last permanently.
And to the cynical, silence about the truth is the natural course of events. Cynicism pretty much sums up the British Isles and Europe which is why those places are so silent (about the truth).
And their wars were transplanted to the Americas, which is the political violence Americans are taught as constituting, “American History”. It is Mommy Professor’s job to make sure we are very impressed with this, preferring to ignore that political violence is merely the reduction of politics to the singularity of the violence that naturally follows a state of ruin, and there is nothing remarkable about political violence at all. But that is basics and fundamentals and Mommy Professor doesn’t do “basics” or “fundamentals”.
Furthermore, you don’t have “Founding Fathers” without betrayal, something the very dumb Americans have never understood. So a Committee (“Founding Fathers”) took pen and paper and switched the (implied dedication) regarding the Articles of Confederation from “Our Covenants with God” to a (explicit dedication) of “We the People and Our Posterity” and Chief Justice John Marshall and Mommy Professor followed with an Established Religion nevertheless under the pretense it was no such thing. It was the Committee that was the problem and it should have been annihilated where it sat and any Committee that tried to replace it should have been annihilated also:
Like Robert Whitaker said, “When you’ve got a TAME opposition, you don’t need a Conspiracy”.
#2 by BGLass on 06/06/2012 - 12:40 pm
was curious about origins the term— cynics were hellenistic and early roman, it turned out when I looked it up. The abnegation of things of the world, to live in “harmony with nature” and meaning ‘dog like.’ Wiki says the ideas of cynics were subsumed possibly into strains of early christianity. Again, the theme of self-abnegation.
#3 by six gun on 06/07/2012 - 6:36 am
I asked a White Nationalist on SF a question. I’d spoken to him about the Mantra. He’s written about it.
His last message included a line “The internet will be censored soon and the mantra will become impotent.”
I know that the British government was instructing all ISP’s to install equipment that will monitor all internet activity. They’d hold it for a year I think. As far as I’m aware all electronic messages and phone calls are capable of being monitored and probably they are. This is allegedly in the name of the war on terrorism. The police were going mad about the Blackberry phones as their texting is encrypted and they can’t get into it.
You have to be careful about what you say due to “hate laws” – people are sent to jail for posting on the internet. We saw How the White took over America was pulled by YT for “hate speech.”
This is all very disturbing – not only silence on subtext but silencing the text.