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"The grisly Guantanamo manifestation of American "justice" is a suppurating sore but people want to play word-games about Existentialism"
I think you might have slightly got the wrong end of the stick here. Remember,we are amongst "The Cousins" here. Most Americans either out of ignorance or wisdom don't bother concerning themselves with such high falutin' concepts like existentialism. And more power to their elbow for not doing so.
Only people like Patti Smith, Bill Ayers or the more sober members of the MC5 would even know how to spell the bloody word let alone define it. Iggys probably never heard of it and Jim Morrison may have thought he understood what the word meant but probably has a better understanding of it now he is lying in a cemetery in Paris a few tombs away from Oscar who would no doubt have taken the piss out of existentialists had such creatures existed whilst he was alive.
The word was only mentioned in the first place because quite extraordinarily George Bush who has never even smoked a Gauloise in a Montmarte cafe used the term himself when saying al queda offered an "existential threat to our very way of life."
What the cretin didn't realise when he said that is this. Had he said that to some real existentialists they would have only to readily embraced that fact, relieved at last that the dire amorphous threat to their existence that they were all to acutely and painfully aware of now had a shape and form that could be dealt with.
In other words his words would have inspired confidence and relief instead of the terror that he intended and have helped existentialists everywhere to give up smoking those dreadful non tipped cigarettes that that will insist on puffing away furiously at every opportunity .
