more on "ethnic cleansing"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Even this is becoming blandly propagandistic. And considering the
pretensions of the book it's in, disturbingly so:

2009 Ishmael Reed in Greil Marcus & Werner Sollors, eds. _A New Literary
History of America_ (Cambridge: Harvard U.P.) 384:
The late Rick James asked an interviewer why there was more interest in
Michael Jackson's trial for child molesting than in the war in Iraq, where
the American occupation was causing ethnic cleansing and the deaths of tens
of thousands.

Prof. Reed, of course, is a noted surrealist novelist and poet, author,
among many other works, of _Mumbo Jumbo_.

The presence of "and" makes the claim (asserted as fact, by the way) even
more absurd, since it implies a methodical campaign even beyond the "deaths
of tens of thousands."  (If Reed meant to say that various Iraqi factions
were trying to kill and "cleanse" each other, he carefully avoided saying
it.)


JL

JL
--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org