Disbelieving the obvious

 

I don't remember why I was watching Oprah that day; it was in the 1990's, I think, and I must have been bored out of my mind, because that's the only way I could be induced to watch her program at all. But I am still glad I did. The guest that day was the writer and poet Maya Angelou and they were having a discussion about relationships and in the course of that conversation Ms Angelou said something that I have never forgotten because it has applications in so many other fields. They were discussing why women kept returning to toxic relationships with unsuitable men and Ms Angelou said that she didn't understand it, that when someone tells you who they are, believe them. The first time. If a man tells you that he is selfish, or his actions show you that he is selfish, then believe him: he is selfish. And then, as soon as you can, get out of the relationship because nothing good can come of it. He is not going to change.

Her admonition works on so many levels that I don't understand why it isn't taught in every political science class in the country. The French aristocracy couldn't believe that the Jacobins meant to guillotine them all; Northerners could not believe that the slave-holding South would tear the United States apart in order to keep their peculiar institution; Austria-Hungary could not believe that Serbia would fight it out rather than turn their country into an Austrian protectorate; no one, except Winston Churchill, apparently, believed that Adolf Hitler actually meant the crazy stuff he wrote in Mein Kampf. No one in Washington could believe that the Japanese would launch a surprise attack on the United States Navy, despite the fact that a surprise attack on the Imperial Russian Navy is exactly how the Japanese launched the Russo-Japanese War in 1905.  And now there are the charters of Hamas and Fatah, and the decades of terrorism since the founding of Israel. So what is an Israeli to believe? Does he believe the peace crowd that concessions on settlements or the right of return or some other point will finally at long last bring lasting peace, or does he believe what the Palestinians themselves say, which is that Israel is to be destroyed and the Jews there massacred? When a man tells you that he means to kill you and destroy your country, believe him. He knows what he wants far better than you ever will.

Just my opinion, you understand, your mileage may vary

Many years ago,[1] I watched the Oprah Winfrey Show[2] and there I saw Oprah dressed in her pajamas along with the late Maya Angelou. They were discussing relationships and in the usual chit and chat that goes on about this sort of thing, Ms. Angelou said something that has stuck with me ever since.  She told Oprah that when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.  If a man tells you that he is cruel or mean or incapable of loyalty, then believe him, Ms. Angelou said; they know themselves better than you ever will. It seems to me that this is a wonderful piece of advice, not merely for dealing with interpersonal relationships, but for international relationships as well.  Today, the former junior Senator from Illinois is proposing a treaty with the Islamic Republic of Iran that will give that nation, assuming they do not cheat, the ability to construct a nuclear weapon in ten years’ time.  The former junior Senator from Illinois is throwing considerable amounts of political capital into pushing this treaty through Congress, although he himself will not call it a treaty, as doing so would require a two-thirds vote from the Senate, and he doesn’t have the votes to do this. Should it pass, however, he will act as though it were a treaty, so I suppose the difference between the two words is trifling.  We are already getting a foretaste of what will happen if it does not; not since St. John Chrysostom’s homilies in the fourth century has Jew-baiting been so eloquent.  When people who support him and his treaty think that his recent speeches on the subject sound remarkably like something one might hear at a white power rally, then the former junior Senator from Illinois has passed a red line that he should not pass.

And what is the object of all of this hubbub? A deal with a regime that predicates its existence on its hatred for the United States and Israel in particular and the West in general, that has committed numerous acts of terrorism, that seized an American embassy and held (and still holds) American citizens hostage, a regime that the State Department calls the number one sponsor of terrorism in the world today; these are the people we are dealing with.  And why?  Because the Iranians are going nuclear and this administration does not want to stop them.  They do not want to stop the Iranians because the only real way to stop them is by force or by regime change through covert action, and this administration does not want to use force or covert action. Having removed the only two real ways to prevent this disaster, the administration must pin its hopes on a piece of paper and convince as many people as possible that this piece of paper has some actual merit.  

 In reality, the only thing this agreement does is guarantee that when Iran does go nuclear, our Illinois Incitatus will no longer be in office and then can blame its failure on almost everyone except himself. I strongly suspect that our fearless leader will be as ungracious with his successors as he was with his predecessor.  Again, and why is that?  Because nothing is ever his fault, because something being his fault would disturb his self-image, and nothing and no one will ever be allowed to disturb his self-image.  Therefore, he makes deals with people who mock him even as he gets ready to do their bidding and insults those who are trying to save him from committing a massive mistake. In short, his ego is getting in the way of what Ms. Angelou pointed out back in the 1990’s.  The Iranians are showing everyone who and what they are and anyone with any sense believes them when they spew their hatred at us.  Only the former junior Senator from Illinois and his true believers do not, but then, they are not the ones who will have to deal with the consequences of this agreement, are they?

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[1] Well, maybe not that many years ago, as years go. When you get to my age, years seem to zoom by.

[2] I think I was sick that day.

With apologies to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr.

Absolute knowledge have I none,

But my aunt's washerwoman's sister's son

Heard a policeman on his beat

Say to a laborer in the street

That he had a letter just last week --

A letter which he did not seek --

From a Chinese merchant in Timbuktoo

Who said that his brother in Cuba knew

Of an Indian chief in a Texas town,

Who got the dope from a circus clown,

That a man in Klondike had it straight

From a guy in a South American state,

That a wild man over in Borneo

Was told by a woman who claimed to know,

Of a well-known society rake,

Whose mother-in-law will undertake

To prove that her husband's sister's niece

Has stated plain in a printed piece

That she has a son she never does see

Who knows what happened in Benghazi.

WAR OF WORDS: Carlin Romano wonders why many Western leaders just can't bring themselves to call an Islamic militant a filthy, loathsome terrorist thug, and then offers some reasons why they should, all of which are valid, I think. The primary reason, to my mind, though, is that using such direct language is anathema to politicians, since if they do use such language, their electorates will wonder what the politicians are doing to protect them from such miscreants. This, in turn, would require the politicians to point out that these creatures are at war with us and, almost by default, we are at war with them, and politicians dislike the word war, except when it is a big government sponsored program on some social problem without immediate access to firearms. War as such, however, means accepting unforeseen risks with unintended consequences, and most politicians shy away from both if it might mean they lose their seat in Parliament/Congress/Dail/Storting/Cortes/Bundestag/Assemblee Nationale/Camera dei Deputati/Duma etc, etc.

From the Arts and Letters Daily via Norm.

CELEBRITY NEWS: People magazine, the bible of our celebrity age, asks on its cover this week who will save Lindsey Lohan from the flaming and well-traveled arc of personal and professional self-destruction she is now on. I don’t mean to sound cynical here (there’s an obvious lie) but isn’t the point of magazines like People the snide and gleeful documentation of celebrity self-destruction for the prurient and voyeuristic titillation of its readers? Celebrities with stable home lives, assuming there are any, do not make it into the pages of People simply because the magazine’s audience is not interested in any celebrity not out making a public ass of themselves. In a related story, Paris Hilton has checked into an all-inclusive resort that is definitely not the Paris Hilton, and we all may sleep sounder in our beds, safe in the knowledge that the world is now a safer place.

UPDATE: Here’s an update to the above, although it’s not really much of an update, since it’s has nothing to do with what I’ve already written, but I thought it was interesting and maybe you will, too. Bill O’Reilly pointed out a couple of days ago that the New York Times put the story of the terrorist plot to destroy JFK International Airport on page 37 of this week’s Sunday paper, for which he has gotten a lot of grief from all the usual left-wing suspects. Now, in fairness to the Times and for those of you who may not get the city edition of the paper delivered to your doorstep, page 37 of last Sunday’s paper was the first page of the Times’ Metro section. This is the part of the paper wherein the Times, which likes to think of itself as the nation’s newspaper, pays lip service to geographic reality and reports what’s going on in New York City. The Times doesn’t like covering the city beat and frankly, it shows. If you want real coverage of what goes on in New York City, read the Post or the Daily News, the Sun or the Observer; read Newsday if you want to catch what’s going on in Queens; even read a left wing rag like the Village Voice and ignore the classified ads for the transsexual prostitutes and those Korean bordellos in the West 30’s. Read almost any other newspaper coming out of New York and you will get better news coverage of the city than the Times offers. But lousy or not, the terror plot was there, on the first page of the Metro section and above the fold, too.

But, you know, the arrest of these would-be jihadis made the actual front page of newspapers all over the United States, whereas the Times, on its actual front page, had yet another Guantanamo story, poor Indian brick makers, and a piece about the gentleman who plays the violins at the violin museum in Cremona, Italy. I should point out here that I am a tremendous admirer of the Stradivari, Amati, and Guarneri families and all of their products; no one likes listening to Itzhak Perlman swing a hot Strad more than I do; but I think we would all agree that in terms of news value a disrupted terror plot beats keeping great violins in musical trim any day of the week, especially when the target of the disrupted plot lies only a few miles from the Times’ corporate offices in Manhattan and those violins do not.