In my separate, previous life as an historian one of the things we learned was how to scrutinize the behavior of oppressed or powerless peoples for the subtle, even covert, ways they resisted oppression when outward rebellion or resistance was impossible or prohibitively dangerous.
This is a funny, clunky way of putting it. And if you’re a professional historian reading this or, god forbid, a sociologist and you’re thinking about writing in … no, don’t, ’cause I don’t wanna hear it.
Anyway, I used to do this with the 17th century New England Indians from my dissertation and it occurred to me today that with Democrats now being a politically oppressed group in Washington we might be able to scan their rhetoric or physical gestures for subtle signs of resistance.
And it turns out you can!
I haven’t been able to do any scientific study or tabulation of this but just watching TV tonight it seems to me that every Democrat I saw couldn’t help but praise something said recently by Colin Powell.
Our president is doing great, doing everything right, and that, that COLIN POWELL, he’s got it just right! What he said today… mmmmhh, outta the park.
I think the idea here is to send a very subtle signal that Don Rumsfeld is a scary Dr. Strangelove type freak. And this is the only way they have to say something, something to say about foreign policy.
