Who promised whom THAT exactly? (Omit cheap-shot joke about the "GasPain Sea" here.)
The opposite-but-unequal Levantine hyperchauvinist crew have a map to match that one, naturally, but there is no need to fuss about linking and displaying it when it is so easy to imagine the cartoon portrayal of a polar bear in a blizzard captioned "The Jewish State."
Ah, where would extremists be, were there no counterextremists? And where, for that matter, would complacent holier-than-ye Laodicaeans like you and me be either? The beginning of political wisdom is not to like anybody very much, and the beginning of that is to have lots of reservations about oneself. Upon so firm a foundational rock as that build the wise, shunning the shifty sands of narcissism and self-preferentialism.
Speaking of antinarcissism, I believe I have already recommended
M. ‘Alí al-‘Alláwí's book ? It is unquestionably the best account yet of how militant GOP extremism grabbed Mesopotamia. It's so good I'm even half tempted to wonder if anything better has been written about the grabbing of Palestine. That speculation must be wrong, I suppose, since there have been twenty or thirty times as many years of book writing. On the other hand, that's also twenty or thirty times as long to get bored and disgusted with the all the facts of the Palestine snatch and all the books about half those facts, the eternal enemy's dotty maps and all.
Neocomrade E. Luttwak has recently taken to suggesting that the faith-crazed Levant might benefit from a course of Dr. Moynihan's Benign Neglect™ therapy. Coming from a Boy-'n'-Party direction, such a suggestion must be scrutinized sharply: is the suggester merely trying to hush up how disastrously his own Party's Big Management has discredited itself since March 2003? Yet viewed from a reasonable distance -- perhaps West Neptune might do -- there is much to be said for the Luttwak proposal. In the long run, it is bound to prevail, for the chances that Princess Posterity and her court historians will consider either the Palestine Snatch or the scene of the crime the axis of all human events from 1945-20?? are just about zero. There is a world elsewhere!
E. Luttwak has to minimize the importance of the Gulf of Petroleum as well as that of the Palestine Snatch for his own purposes, and there he skates on thinner ice: Her Royal Highness's historians are far, far more likely find a global Epoch of Fossil Fuel a convenient tool to think with than any petty parochial "Age of Zionism." I flatter myself they'll agree with me that the only really remarkable thing about the Palestine Snatch was its timing: had the snatch process begun a century or so earlier, it would have gone through without a hitch and no annalist of the world would be so mad as to suppose it especially central to anything of universal importance whatsoever.
However, it happened belatedly when it happened, and so here we are, perennially tempted to centralize it. "Pan-Arabism" has been invented, or reinvented, largely to centralize the Palestine Snatch from the snatchee side, and so has "Western Civilization" on behalf of the snatcher faction. To be sure, all or most Arabophones do have certain things in common over and above the language of the angels, and there really was an intellectual history of Latin-rite Europe that might be looked into. There exist real things for these labels to be pasted on, no doubt about it, but the objects they are usually affixed to are only fantasy cartoon balloons of the IDEAL DOG blown up by Palestine Snatch people, whether snatchers or snatchees, only the dog the tail wishes it was attached to, that perfect "master" whom the tail people very dearly wish they could reliably wag -- as they relentlessly attempt to wag the really existing dog.
A stiff dose of Dr. Moynihan's salts would do all the Levantine Tail Folks no harm at all, Palestine snatchers and Palestine snatchees both alike. Doubtless if all decent political adults, "Western-civilized" or "pan-Arab" or resident on West Neptune, sternly boycott and ignore the clamorous Levantine tailmongers, they won't actually go away, -- yet perhaps they'll learn a little humility, maybe even get a glimmer of antinarcissism? It seems on balance an experiment worth trying, this of Neocomrade Luttwak's. Sixty years of continual attention to Palestine Snatch tailmongers has produced an outcome "on the ground" so lousy that it seems unlikely that any other therapy could fail worse than two generations of constant attention therapy has failed. Why not give benignly neglectful Moynihanianity a whirl instead? What's to lose?
Not a hard question. What's to lose is, rather trivially, the familiar status quo, and vastly more significantly, the flattery of our traditional flatterers, all those wannabe-dog-wagging "friends" of Western Civilization and of the denizens of "PanArabia," wherever that geography-unheard-of province may be located. [1] Flattery is delightful. One need not necessarily jump at once to the moralists' "Flattery is deceitful," but unless we have the possibility of making that jump in mind continually as we scrutinize, we do not scrutinize as decent political grown-ups properly ought to.
Any disengagement from cheapjack Levantine tale-mongering and tail-mongering (and map-mongering) about the Palestine Snatch thus requires at least a small degree of improvement of "our" moral discernment. That is no easy business, neither in Westistan nor in PanArabia. The tribunal of Princess Posterity will, as I anticipate, be not much interested in our fixation on the Palestine Snatch considered as a step in the Moral Progress of the Human Race. We shall all have lived back in the Dark Ages, from Her Royal Highness's point of view, and we shall have thought of the Palestine Snatch as Dark Agers naturally would have thought, so "Why condemn any of these quaint sweet puppies, whether Palestine snatchers or Palestine snatchees? It's not as if any of them knew or could know right from wrong in 2007 the way every schoolboy does nowadays in 3452!"
I back myself far out on a "liberal" limb, and I know it, to appeal to Princess Posterity like this, to propose that everybody now alive should pander to what the year of religionism 2917/3542 may think of "us" retrospectively and try proleptically to shape up and toe the line accordingly.
Alas, I can do no other! When one wants one's own judgments to be confirmed and endorsed by all the best judges of opinions, and one has also detected some occasional faint signs of moral progress in the human race, how should all the best judges NOT be located somewhere off in cloudy Futurity? On the other hand, the way all the partisan scribblers for Wingnut City. and for the Tel Aviv statelet, and for PanArabia write liberalism down not just as treasonous but as contemptible --"Here's McCloskey again [yawn] threatenin' us with his silly scarecrow of a 'Princess Posterity'!" -- well, perhaps we should reconsider our sightings, Mr. Bones. What were those "occasional faint signs of moral progress"? Rehearse them to me once again, sir!
To make up a theory on the fly, this dimwit antiliberalism supposes that no wicked liberal grows up wanting to be a Football Hero, a Big Management Quarterback, even if possible a Richard Bruce Cheney, just like all normal red-blooded blue-state youngsters wanna grow up to be! (And derive M. Bin Ládin parallely the same way over amongst THEM.) "The wretched liberal weed wants to grow up to be some kind of 'West Neptune' REFEREE rather than a respectable team player! How is such an incredible perversion as that to be stamped out once and for all?"
One begs pardon of God! KECEKE. Happy days.
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[1] PanArabia surely must be located somewhere in the former Blairistan, near or on the Thames, this centre that all the floods of Estuary Arabic commentary emanate from. But as to more exactly than that, why, God knows best!
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