Not "retracts" and or regrets, but RESTRUCTURES!?!?
This is Deconstructionism in action. The text is not the authority, it is only a referent. The text is only the beginning of the project of the construction of meaning. The text becomes the work of everyone who reads it. In other words, meaning is a construct of consensus, not of words themselves. There is no real meaning to the text, in and of itself.
There is no authority of idea. There are only opinions about the idea.
There is no meaning to a group of words. There is only spin.
In this case, the news media, and Obama's handlers and fans have decided Obama "mispoke", and thus, as a group, we are all participating in the restructuring of Obama's words.
This is RIDICULOUS pro obama spin. At the end, he says he misspoke - LIKE DICK DURBIN!
Obama Restructures a Remark on Deaths
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/13/us/politics/13obama.html?pagewanted=print
DURHAM, N.H., Feb. 12 — Senator Barack Obama of Illinois said Monday that he had misspoken when he suggested that the lives of more than 3,000 American soldiers killed in Iraq had been “wasted.”
As he arrived in New Hampshire, Mr. Obama said he would “absolutely apologize” to military families if they were offended by a remark he made in Iowa while criticizing the Bush administration’s Iraq policy.
“What I would say — and meant to say — is that their service hasn’t been honored,” Mr. Obama told reporters in Nashua, N.H., “because our civilian strategy has not honored their courage and bravery, and we have put them in a situation in which it is hard for them to succeed.”
A New Hampshire reporter asked Mr. Obama whether he regretted the remark, made at a rally on Sunday that “we ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged, and to which we now have spent $400 billion and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.”
“Even as I said it,” Mr. Obama said Monday, “I realized I had misspoken.”
1 comment:
I don't think the uninformed view of deconstructionism at the beginning segues well into the news about Obama. But I do think there is an interesting point to be made. It may be somewhat true--in some ill-defined way--that deconstuctionism under-determines the meaning of a text, but it is clearly true that some hermeneutics over-determine a text, which is a worse mistake the under-determining a text. Or, in clearer English, it's better to say you don't understand what someone said than to invent meanings to what someone said. Relative to Obama's statement, people can't speak precisely all the time--even politicians. Let's give people, even politicians, the chance to explain what they mean before being critical.
I happen to think John Howard is right about Obama.
Post a Comment