The town of Wytheville in rural southwest Virginia looks like the mythic American ‘Main Street’ studding the discourse of American political actors and media during campaign season.
Gordon Steffey
Climate is critical terrain in the enduring polarisation of America, the roots of which lie in the mounting strife between fundamentalists and modernists at the turn of the twentieth century.
Decades ago the Prince of Wales exhorted Britons to converse in ‘proper’ English, by which he meant ‘English English’, and to resist the viral creep of American English, users of which are inclined ‘to invent all sorts of nouns and verbs, and make words that shouldn’t be’.
An obituary of the West is untimely and as deliriously naïve as prophecy. I prefer then to engage in critical play the conditions that organise our dreams and dreads of a PostWest.
In January 2008 the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published a memorandum of mark: ‘Terminology to Define the Terrorists: Recommendations from American Muslims.’
Recently I took a Muslim friend to study the buffet of print laid into the Liberty University bookstore. The university and its bookstore sit on Liberty Mountain in Lynchburg, Virginia, where an SUV trimmed with stickers reading ‘Not I, but Christ’ and ‘Socialism isn’t cool’ abridges the local temper.