BTW: y’all get how the common usage of “shelter in place” is yet another example of militaristic neologisms/euphemisms leaking into the American vernacular?
I feel weird about it because I released an album named Shelter In Place in April 2018. The theme was the climate crisis, the sociopolitical environment, and my own anxiety which both of those things contributed to.
There was a Nora Roberts novel released two months later with the same name, apparently about gun violence.
It’s a collective thing, not an individual thing. Culture shapes us all, whether we like it or not. And the language is moved much more by state & corporate media action than by individual artists.
It did remind me of this, though:
By the end of my first year abroad, I read US newspapers differently. I could see how alienating they were to foreigners, the way articles spoke always from a position of American power, treating foreign countries as if they were America’s misbehaving children. I listened to my compatriots with critical ears: the way our discussion of foreign policy had become infused since September 11 with these officious, official words, bureaucratic corporate military language: collateral damage, imminent threat, freedom, freedom, freedom.
Even so, I was conscious that if I had long ago succumbed to the pathology of American nationalism, I wouldn’t know it – even if I understood the history of injustice in America, even if I was furious about the invasion of Iraq. I was a white American. I still had this fundamental faith in my country in a way that suddenly, in comparison to the Turks, made me feel immature and naive.
I came to notice that a community of activists and intellectuals in Turkey – the liberal ones – were indeed questioning what “Turkishness” meant in new ways. Many of them had been brainwashed in their schools about their own history; about Atatürk, Turkey’s first president; about the supposed evil of the Armenians and the Kurds and the Arabs; about the fragility of their borders and the rapaciousness of all outsiders; and about the historic and eternal goodness of the Turkish republic.
“It is different in the United States,” I once said, not entirely realising what I was saying until the words came out. I had never been called upon to explain this. “We are told it is the greatest country on earth. The thing is, we will never reconsider that narrative the way you are doing just now, because to us, that isn’t propaganda, that is truth. And to us, that isn’t nationalism, it’s patriotism. And the thing is, we will never question any of it because at the same time, all we are being told is how free-thinking we are, that we are free. So we don’t know there is anything wrong in believing our country is the greatest on earth. The whole thing sort of convinces you that a collective consciousness in the world came to that very conclusion.”
“Wow,” a friend once replied. “How strange. That is a very quiet kind of fascism, isn’t it?”
Excerpt from this .
It’s a sick tragic joke. Listening to Barr announce it, every thing he accused Maduro of we’ve done or are doing.
The GOP does that to the Dems, the Dems do it to the left, the USA does it to the world.
Politics is fractal.