Sure they’ll do it! For anything but you know who and what. They’ll help you fight your way through trouble; they’ll come to your aid as you find yourself in a strange land and amongst stranger people; they’ll give you advice; they’ll even swear that you are the next best thing that happened to them since a birthday in 17 something. Yes, I am talking about humanity. No, I’m not generalizing.
Let me explain: There is a difference between Dostoevsky and Swift, yet the brothers are not that far from the hordes of Lilliputian prowess.
The same goes for a technology that is unprecedented in human history but operated by very “precedented” humans who are trigger-happy and lethal beyond their wildest imagination.
It is an ancient game, and a lethal one at that. Divide the spoils and you see what I mean. For its entire gargantuan and Goliath scientific prowess, it still needs something crude that is indispensable.
Emperor Manuel of the Byzantine Empire did the same to Conrad of Germany and Louis VII of France. He did not trust the Second Crusade, though they were Christians fighting for “his” cause.
The Byzantine emperor did his thing till both crusading kings were defeated: One had a head injury and the physician emperor Manuel himself nursed him to health, the other lost his lovely wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, who married Henry II and gave birth to Richard the Lionheart.
At the end of the day, Conrad, Louis (all denominations), Eleanor, Henry II, and, last but not least, Richard the Lionheart, failed. Why? They did not seek council.
I know that my pronouns are vague. I know that my references are at odds with logical continuity. I know that I am making the rest of them look haggard. I know and I know. Yet there isn’t much that I know.
Were I writing for the Wall Street Journal, I might be more forthcoming since they seem to have a monopoly on the “truth.” But my green thobe sports nothing of the sort.
I toil with the holier than thou and not the truth per se. Men and History (capitals all the way!) do not meet often.
When they do, sparks fly. When they don’t, we record our “history” with a lower-case “h”. Think what bulldog face Churchill might have been without a Hitler. What about Gandhi without a British Raj? Think of Mandela without a Botha!
If there is a lesson here, it is for enemies and not friends.I have yet to acquire an enemy, so please excuse my idiocy and read something else. May I suggest a biography of Bush senior and Saddam junior? Both should have invented a position called the “ultimate evacuator.”
— Arab News Opinion 25 September 2003
