“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, June 17, 2012

Rodney King RIP

I first showed up in America for a conference at CUNY that coincided with the start of the LA riots that erupted when the LAPD officers were acquitted for being Rodney King.

There was a march for Rodney King in downtown Mamhattan where I remember eating my first improbably immense (I love that word now) slice of pizza with broccoli on it.

So it's strange to wake up (20 minutes ago) to the fact that Rodney King just died 20 years later, almost exactly.

And I mean strange in that Wordsworthian sense of a spot of time--a feeling of trauma around which meanings are secreted but never quite enough.



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