[lit-ideas] Re: What is the Purpose of a Pay Slip?
- From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2007 15:35:42 -0500
DR:
>>I'm just wondering what liberals believe holds a nation together.<<
Duct tape would be my first guess. Second to that, I wouldn't venture anything
so noble as "shared justice" not in the South anyway. Maybe something more
along the lines of a degree of familiarity such that each understands the
behavioral cues of the others. It's when one doesn't know how to interpret a
behavior -- language or action -- that one feels alien and threatened and
vaguely Memphianic.
Just try to disagree with that.
Mike Geary
Mozambique
----- Original Message -----
From: David Ritchie
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Saturday, August 11, 2007 12:34 PM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: What is the Purpose of a Pay Slip?
On Aug 11, 2007, at 4:49 AM, Judith Evans wrote:
I don't know how the US does this, what the UK does is give people
a little book with the answers to the questions (though not, presumably, in
Q and A format), quite some while before The Test.
Yes, there's a booklet here too. The reason the Pilgrims came to America is
pure and simple, "They came for religious freedom." That's the sort of thing
the book tells you...right or wrong...no room for debate.
What interested me about the British questions was that they seem to have
abandoned story-telling as a national glue; there was nothing in the list about
how the culture's assumptions came to be, and the shared myths it was once so
important that schoolchildren learned. Instead, to begin to be British, you
have to know what a quango is.
Presumably whatever has replaced the Victorian, Empire glue stories now
develops later, when you belong to a community and learn its tales.
I'm not, as Conservatives do, making a case for a return to imagined history
as the necessary binding stuff of nations--though I am about to teach a course
about "Imaginary Scotland"--I'm just wondering what liberals believe holds a
nation together. A sense of shared justice, I suppose. Which brings us back to
quangos and how many people belong to this or that religious group?
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
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