Links to an article on first line
Then presents quotation
These so called 'connections' between Hussein, al-qaida, bin Ladin, Zaqawi, etc. that are made by this administration are so spurious and ridiculous if one were familiar with their disparate ideologies, missions, and political agendas. Hussein was a secular despot, denying everything but fear to his own people. Al-quid, Taliban and other like-groups are radical fundamentalists, vowing to re-establish different kinds of decreases throughout the Muslim world. Bin laden, a long time enemy of the 'royal' Saudi regime and a fundamentalist would probably consider Hussein an infidel! So given their contrasting ideologies, separate missions and their own brand of fundamentalism, why do we even posit a connection? There is no advantage to be gained by their uniting in their efforts to change the Muslim world since the direction each wants to take is diametrically opposed to all the others!
BUT, WOULD AMERICANS KNOW THIS? Of course not, and thats what allows the administration to scare us with clearly improbable scenarios. What do most American people know about the Middle East?! Next to nothing I would suggest, and what little remains are the demonized stereotypes, the total ignorance and lack of respect for Arabs, Islam, Muslims and the entire region. And how did this happen? Probably in the same way that as a child, I thought Chinese people in the US only knew how to wash clothes and cook exotic food!! When I got to university and took courses in Chinese history and civilizations, Chinese art, technology, various Chinese philosophies, I was thoroughly delighted and impressed on the one hand, and angry at my culture for denying me this simple exposure. At least there were Chinese around when I was growing up; Arabs and Muslims were only seen on the screen in the small neighborhood theatres on Saturday mornings. For a quarter, we got to see sheiks on the screen, keeping harems of women, with multiple wives and many kids, dressed in schmatas (as we called them), you know, rags in Yiddish, severely challenged morally, not to be believed, much less trusted and always with a nefarious agenda. Wed laugh at their dress (good ole Hollywood), their fake accents, the dancing girls, the scurrilous looks on mens dark, fat, mustached faces. They really werent to be believed and in real life in the hood (late 1930s in the Bronx) they, like the Chinese, didnt even wash clothes or cook food!! No heroes there for us! Only people to laugh at and make fun of. Then, we were treated to a short, a serial short, like The Lone Ranger, a man we could identify with, strong, handsome, a Robin Hood type, with a black mask (to cover his real identity) and a beautiful white horse riding around the west making things right but who also had a little Indian side-kick called, Tonto. We never knew that in Spanish, tonto means stupid, silly, foolish, a nincompoop! We all recognized him as some kind of American Indian, with a feather sticking straight up from the back of his head, saying How with his hand up and making other funny signs because, we thought, his language didnt have enough words to say much of anything. And in the afternoon, we played Cowboys and Indians and nobody wanted to be the Indian except me once in a while (always being drawn to exotic things). Arabs, Muslims, the middle east didnt even exist for us. Even when I got to university where I could study Chinese things, I saw no courses on Islamic history, science, poetry and philosophy. Of course things have changed a bit by now.
Within this context, gestalt, against this backdrop, we can see the roots of our ignorance of the world. But given the world situation now in terms of technology, instant communication --world markets without world values, world systems without world institutions, world ideas without world culture-- we now face the terrible consequences of our ignorance; not being able to think globally, not having the knowledge, understanding and appreciation of world cultures. We are just beginning to tolerate diversity when we should be celebrating it: It makes good biological and adaptive sense and humans are fully capable of doing this now. But the train is picking up speed and Im not sure were on the same track much less in the same car on this!
Nationalism had its adaptive day. When humans were tied to their habitats by their technologies; when things changed very slowly if at all, when information about making a living could be anded down to the next generations. Today, economies and technologies and communication change so rapidly that obsolescence and innovation run around each other like electrons in an atom! Todays successful niches are tomorrows handicaps! Where change is stasis and our cognition and values have not yet embraced this and come up with social and cultural mechanisms with which to incorporate change as natural and expected, the terrain is incognita, back to learning the natural habitat, the territory, organizing to protect our selves and ownership as in the State. {double back to all this freeing us from territorial niche, a very double-edged sword.}
Margaret Mead used to say (Culture Change?) that an old man can say to a young man, I was once young too (so I know what you are talking about). But the young mans response is: Yes, but you were never young in the world Im young in! So true! [Is this the context for the generation gap?
So whats to be done? Is it too late for Americans to understand the world scene and work with the willing to at least recognize the challenges? The world is now populated by very young people, some well-educated but without opportunity, most without education and resources and no way to make a living . In the poorest parts of our globe, millions are starving, others being massacred in state-based religious battles. The grandchildren and great grandchildren of colonial and oppressed people are being captured by the rage of their elders who were conquered, colonized, kicked out of their own lands. The stones thrown by the Palestinian children have morphed into guns, grenades, land mines, Kalaskinikovs and shoulder-held rocket-launchers. With the recent demise of the superpower balances, every territory, every ethnicity wants their own. Flash-floods of ethnic power are cascading across the world driven by ideologies and practices that once had to be hidden but now become exaggerated, fundamentalzed , characechured . When oppression is in retreat, when the fighting-technologies of the oppressed render every person his own attack and defense system (the knight in the western world); when rage and lack of opportunity conspire and the old are too few, too weak and tired with no economically useful information for the young; the telescope of social structure retracts and reconfigures for new patterns. Evolution, as a quantum leap resulting in differences of order, has no direction for speciation.
{Sir Real speaks in paragraphs, not in sentences. Abstractions take the discussion to a more generalized level, thus includes things that wouldnt ordinarily be included in a linear treatus.}
