Dichotomies: useful or worthless?
"The Arab World: Ruled by thieves and lunatics and peopled by fools."Before any well-placed lunatic (his term!) decides to issue a fatwa against me, I hasten to note that I am only reporting what someone else said, am doing it just as a cute segue to an unrelated point, and will be pulling it all together without the use of cartoons.
Now, my friend was quite willing to tell you which rulers were which. We made it into a little game, with me tossing out the names of different rulers and getting instant diagnoses. For example:
"Khadafi?"
"Lunatic."
"King Fahd?"
"Thief."
"Saddam Hussein?"
"Thief and lunatic."
And so it went. Incidentally, the idea was that the people were fools for allowing themselves to be led by the thieves and lunatics. Again, I didn't say it. Like those crazy pet things below, I'm only reporting. But now, the segue.
It's starting to look like 2006 will be the year that I abandon one the little idiosyncratic dichotomies I use to make sense of the world. It's getting harder and harder to categorize people as either serious or silly. Time was I could usually fit people into one or the other category (as idiosyncratically and shiftingly defined by me). It was always just a diverting mental game of mine, of course, but it's getting harder and harder to play. Oh well. Something tells me I'll find some other way to amuse myself.
posted at 11:30 PM
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