Rachel, please don't sign off this list just yet.
If you do, I'll feel personally responsible, because I ratcheted the
discourse up past the level where it was proceeding quite nicely . . .
I'll admit it; I was looking for an entre' . . .
And let me just say, because I should have realized that my .sig file
doesn't automatically give it away, that I'm an *American*. I belong to
a number of international lists; this week, my response on all of them has
been to write in with some version of, "Hey! Dubya doesn't speak for all
of us!" This seems like a moral imperative to me: If those of us who
disagree don't make our disagreements known, then it will be even easier
for our enemies to demonize the US.
As for whether there's an "in group" on this list, that's another matter,
and interesting, too, in light of recent events. I suppose that with all
email discussion lists there are "in groups" just simply by virtue of the
fact that some folks post and others don't -- and the nature of
e-communication is such that the people who *do* post can't "see" the
people who don't, so one gets the impression that one is really only
talking to half-a-dozen known associates, and constructs *them* as the
audience.
As to the degree to which the list can be described in terms of
nationality, that's an even more interesting question in light of recent
events. Does national identity automatically include some and exclude
others? I think so . . . I can remember being at an Inkshed conference in
Canada and feeling extremely isolated and well, ostracized, I guess,
because I was American. I'd given a presentation on a particularly
heinous episode of homophobia in one of my classes, and someone responded,
"That could never happen in Canada." Until that moment, I'd
thought of myself as "just a person" -- I had no idea that my
national identity was, in any way, a filter for those hearing and
talking to me. (Wasn't until maybe a year later that I discovered that
the person making that statement was also an American . . . )
Similarly, our discourse here about the World Trade Center disaster is
clothed in nationalistic garb. While you didn't do this specifically,
others have contacted me, personally, off-list and made statements that
indicated to me that they thought I was Canadian. If you read my remarks
and think I'm Canadian, they carry a very different flavor than they do
if you know I'm American.
I think I'm rambling my way to two points here . . . The first is, please
don't leave the list because you think you have to be anti-American to
stay . . . (the irony of Americans having chased an American off a
Canadian list is too much for me -- Americans having blathered forth in
their sterotypically outspoken way and thereby misrepresented *Canadians* on
Candaians' own e-turf . . . oh, dear, I feel guilty . . . ) The second
is, there's something important going on here that ought to tell us
something about the intersection of individual identity/subject
position and wider national interests . . . if we can figure out how
to escape the "feels-like-inevitable" trap of thinking "those are an
American's thoughts" or "those are a Canadian's thoughts" in this
protected little enclave that's pretty much free from emnity, maybe we
can learn a lesson that will make it possible for us to speak
and act effectively in the wider world about the emnities that threaten to
blow us all apart, in every sense of that term . . .
Marcy
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Marcy Bauman
Media Consultant
College of Pharmacy
University of Michigan
734-647-2227
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