The Only Real Question (!?)

Q. [R. Fisk] The only real question, perhaps, is whether Obama has asked himself the most important question: does the "Muslim world" actually exist? A. Easy to see what answer this guy wants! And of course he has to be given it: "NO, there is no publicly known reason to suppose that BHO disbelieves in "the Muslim world."

One must gloss and distinguish a little, though: at the moment, Barák Husáyn XLIV Obáma, Chief Executive Officer of Heimatland Gottes GMBH, mistakenly believes in "the Muslim world." But maybe he will learn the sad Fiskean wisdom of disbelief? Maybe he will even learn it reasonably quickly? After all, the Cook County pol may actually be, say, one-tenth as clever as his campaign contributors and his journalists and his publicists and all the miscellaneous groupies and bottlewashers and hangers-on and hopeful parasites make him out, so it would be foolish to write him off as invincibly ignorant and incorrigible.

But we must start from where we are, and that is, as I say, Cook County. A long, long way from salt water. And we must be moderate in our hopes for amelioration, because one would have to be a writer of trashy rightist thrillers to come up with a scenario in which foreign affairs of any sort (let alone affairs of the neo-Levant or the Palestine Puzzle specifically) become more important to this President than (1) domestic economics and (2) domestic race relations. Give or take (1a) domestic health care and (1b) global greenery. Even if the pupil should eventually get to where he can pass Prof. Fisk's examination with distinction, he would still not consider the nonexistence of "the Muslim world" anything like as important as Prof. Fisk considers it. That must remain at best a third-rank sort of wisdom forever. Or even fifth-rank.

Should Muslims and neo-Muslims and their fellow travelers and their area students become bitter that the nonexistence of IslamWorld never does become hot potato #1 for Barák Husáyn, well, what is a rational animal to do but sigh and remark that Cook County is not the only stronghold of provinciality and parochialism and selfocentricity still going strong? [1]

But I get ahead of myself, because there do exist factors that might prevent BHO from ever mastering the Fiskean curriculum at all. Above all, it would be awfully convenient for BHO if IslamWorld did exist, so convenient that it is not difficult to imagine him spending eight years refusing to see through a mistake that ought to be transparent to the perspicuity of a former editor of H*rv*rd Law Review once he has been compelled to attend to the old neo-Levantine mess and the newer Crusade-Against-Terror mess in detail.

I can even invent a (not very thrilling) leftist scenario about it: "After two and a half years of appealing to IslamWorld in vain, Obama spent five years blaming IslamWorld for the unsatisfactory state of his foreign policy maneuvers, when plainly he would have done far better to blame himself and certain other interested parties." Thus (as I conjecture) might a historian of 2094 scribble if she is uncommited as to the existential status of IslamWorld. [2] Mr. Fisk will be one hundred and fifty years old in 2094; I daresay arthritis and rheumatism and another eighty-five years of the same old same-old will have made him far more judgmental than my Dr. Undecided.

Anyhow, that's the scenario, and it will be no great loss to anybody if it remains only a scenario forever.

Happy days.

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[1] ’Tis a mystery (Mr. Moralist pretended) why anybody sane would want the holy-Homelandic CEO job. Possession of Sole Remainin’ Hyperpower™ is absolutely guaranteed to bring zillions of "Drop everything else and attend to ME this instant!" fruits and nuts and cranks and shafts running. As wasps to honey, so they to Barák Husáyn XLIV.

(( Rather a suitable coincidence that "Middle East" abbreviates to the pronoun of the first person singular in the Chicagolandese dialect. Might some superintending [P]rovidence really be in charge of the Casino of Human Events despite almost all appearances? ))


[2] I take for granted, possibly mistakenly, that it will never become flatly impossible to believe in the existence of IslamWorld. "Where there is a will, there is a way" -- a way to Santa Claus’ workshop at the North Pole, for example. And though this is no place to discuss it, the attachment of Muslims and neo-Muslims to the fable of IslamWorld is not simply a matter of ‘convenient’ as it is for BHO and the rest of us denizens of Káfirestán and Dhimmístán.

Even the briefest allusion should stress that IslamWorld is not a formal article of Islamic religionism. Certain neo-Muslims may be trying to make it one, perhaps. More certainly, a number of jihád careerists in the former Christojudaeandom are trying to make it one -- for purposes entirely their own and nothin’ to do with the real McCoy whatsoever. But God knows best about jihád careerism!