[Newspoetry] Dead Horse Societies

[DL Emerick]

http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue08/reviews/theyshoothorses/

 

versus

http://sss.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/20/4/664

They shoot dead horses, don't they?

 

Abstracting structuralist theses in ontology and sociology, among other academic
klaverns:

Can there be agent that is hidden in the very structure of matters?

Silly scholars - of course - it's called geometry reasoning about dynamic
systems -

A circle is organized around a center; an ellipse around a pair of centers; and
so on -

Leading me to the "conclusion" that a system is organized around some centers -

The centers act as agents, willy-nilly by the very force of interpretation -

While, in fact, the "center" so construed, must always be an abstract entity of
theory and thesis,

And never itself really identifiable, reifiable ---

Just as all the attempts of social scientists decades ago to define power elites
failed,

Despite the claim of many that such a power elite existed, it was simply too
diffuse,

At least for prosecution purposes, if not for persecution values.

The Parenti-Baratz counter thesis, that it was all in the culture of the elite,
seems truer.

 

The latter is a headline, the former a by-line.

 

The headline value of either phrase is weak, because common place.

 

We see wild horses slaughtered from the Bureau of Lands Management:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/03/0310_050310_wildhorses.html

 

But, rhetorical twists that stick in the mind are vividly odd enough to stay,

They trip on the tongue, as it were, but not like a Freudian slipping you a
tongue.

 

Ah, relevance here is reason and relatedness:

We shall find no conspiracy forces in Iraq, no matter how hard we look,

They slip away, slide into shadows, when we try to find them,

Such is the culture and such seems to be our doom to seek what is not there,

As sure as we are that, somewhere, out there is the untruth, an Islamic
revolution.

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/archive/newspoetry/attachments/20070114/c2e87a33/attachment.htm