Total Normality

To the right is the front page of Argentine daily newspaper Clarín, from March 25th 1976, thirty years ago, the day after the coup d'état that ushered in the so-called "Process of National Reconstruction." A "Process" in which some 30,000 would be killed.

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Geertz and interpretation

I first read Clifford Geertz's "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," itself published in 1973, in an interpretation seminar in the 90s. I benefitted a lot from this rereading, and here are a few points from it that struck me.

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Ka-Blamo!

Dick "Geriatric" Cheney "mistakes" a 78 year old millionaire lawyer for a "quail" and shoots him in the head with a shot-gun.  Says a spokeswoman, “Fortunately, the vice-president has got a lot of medical people around him and so they were right there and probably more cautious than we would have been.  The vice-president has got an ambulance on call, so the ambulance came.”

Readers will certainly recall the chapter, "Q is for Quail", from George W. Bush's Amazing Alphabet Book of the Contemporary World, or Al-Qaedas All Around (illustrated by Paul Wolfowitz).  The chapter, like the chapter on democracy in Spinoza's Political Treatise, strangely trails off: "See Dick shoot the Quail, all 400 of them! Quail are tiny, chicken-y birds with lots and lots of little bones and no meat, but Dick loves to…"

In any case, firedoglake is all over this one.  And seriously, too.