Monday, October 22, 2012

Flags with Chickens & Ploughs & AK-47s on them


I've been making this point since graduating high school right before Reagan was elected.  One can't force feed people ten years out of the stone age centuries of philosophical and political development.  They don't want it, don't understand it, and can't handle it.  What drives this is basically a mixture of mental laziness and stubborn faith in liberal illusions about how we're all really exactly the same because we all love our kids and enjoy hot dogs. 

I forget the talmudic source, but there's a great saying, Nefesh r'eiva, kol mar matok. To a hungry soul, every bitter thing is sweet.  Hand a starving buddhist or muslim a nice Oscar Meyer, he'll eat it, and hate you for it.   The Jew might or might not feel the need to do teshuva for saving his/her life by eating treif, but hatred wouldn't be part of the equation.  There was a huge revolt in India under the British because of a rumor, like the one that precipitated the 1929 Hevron Massacre, that the new bullets were greased with pork fat.  Neither was true.  Didn't matter.  Never does.  These are the same cultural land pirates that gave Lawrence such fits, because once they had pillaged as much as they could carry, his army disintegrated.

This goes back a long way, and not just in America.  Shimon Peres works on the same delusions that fueled Herzl's Altneuland: that modern medicine and flush toilets will mystically, magically, mysteriously turn people whose greatest contribution to the world is the protection racket *, whose ideology tells them they are a superior form of life entitled to revenge for any assault they attempt unsuccessfully*, who make NASCAR loons and Soccer louts look cultured, into secular liberal democrats.  They burned the free clinic in Hevron, the first and only real medicine to which they'd ever had access, btw.

Parenthetically, the inability or unwillingness to name the problem in the obvious way to avoid "upsetting" the terrorists' sponsors and relatives (and sponsoring relatives) in Saudi Arabia, Quwait, Qatar, UAE is troubling, not to say stupid, and certainly not to say potentially disastrous.  Engineers and people I know in geology aren't sanguine about deriving huge amounts of hydrocarbon fuel from the Med field ("Leviathan") off Israel's coast, but it would be nice, wouldn't it?  Unfortunately, two large sources of oil are essentially off line, as far as the US is concerned: Iraq AND Iran.  One can understand why a guy in the White House with three muslim (two Arabic) names and a ring on his finger with the Shuhada on it would want to tone down the rhetoric and keep the remaining sources as happy as possible.

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