Showing posts with label Trumbull's Surrender of Lord Cornwallis (1826). Show all posts
Showing posts with label Trumbull's Surrender of Lord Cornwallis (1826). Show all posts

Friday, January 15, 2021

"Dictatorship of the Proletariat" as Muse


Of the more recent non-drinking dreams: standing still yet somehow moving amongst those gathered, catching snippets of conversation. One says to another, "Reification -- it's a thing, you know," and the other nods, "Yes, it keeps popping up on Twitter."

I have my thoughts. These include speculations: not on what will happen, but what didn't. As in, What if those freedom-seeking American colonists who formed the United States did not mount a tax revolt against the British and instead worked through an evolving parliamentary system that, for example, banned the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 -- 58 years before those former American colonists amended it to their Constitution?

Reification, according to vocabulary.com, is "a complex idea for when you treat something immaterial -- like happiness, fear or evil -- as a material thing." This in relation to metaphor: "a figure of speech in which an expression is used to refer to something that it does not literally denote in order to suggest a similarity."