Unfortunately, sometimes essential meaning is lost not only ‘in translation’ but also during ‘interpretation’.
While reading an excellent article about Zineb el Rhazoui, a Charlie Hebdo survivor, I encountered the notion that “Islamophobia is not an opinion: it is an offense.”
Come again?!?
Is it possible that anybody might be offended by someone who’s being afraid? Regardless of that fear being reasonable or not?
Since that notion was said to have been promoted by Collective against Islamophia in France I checked their site, hoping to understand what they mean by that.
Just stumbled upon this joke:
So for a few days, the body couldn’t shit and the brain had trouble moving, the stomach digesting, the mouth eating and the blood flow going, everyone was begging the asshole to open up, The brain said, ”Please open up, you made your point, your on top, just open up.” The asshole smiled, ”So everyone agrees that I’m on top?” ”YES” everyone shouted. ”OK!” so the asshole opened up and the body could shit again. The moral of this story is, you have to be an asshole to be on top…“
Isn’t this interesting?
A bunch of guys are too thick to understand that they cannot live one without the others and to learn what mutual respect really means, one of them decides to teach the group a well deserved lesson and it is he who ends up being considered an ass-hole…
On the other hand… there are so many examples of ass-holes who end up ‘on top’ simply because they are the ones willing to do anything in order to get there – not caring at all if their actions hurt everybody else who happens to be around… AND because those who end up being hurt don’t see it coming or are too lazy, too thick or both at the same time, to do anything about it…
A sizeable number of Americans, Republicans even, have understood that Bush 43 wasn’t such a great President. When leaving office he had the lowest approval rate “of any president in modern times”.
Yet he is a man who knows to atone for his mistakes.
He knew how to apologize after blurting, ‘under influence’, “how is sex after 50?” to his female neighbor when seated at his parents dinner table in Maine and he effectively extracted himself from politics at the end of his not so glorious mandate, even though he had started it “believing he was God’s agent here on Earth to rid the world of evil.”
By the end of it, Bush “had become much more aware of the limitations of the office and his own shortcomings” and had started to take actions “contrary to his deepest beliefs“.
Actually Bush’s excesses constitute, in part, the explanation for the huge number of people who showed up to ‘landslide’ Obama into the Oval Office.
Then why are so many Americans still endorsing Trump?
After failing to offer a plausible apology for the ‘locker room banter’ that had surfaced recently.
For implying that a woman was ‘not attractive enough’ for him to ‘grab her by the pussy‘.
After accusing the press for “rigging the system” against him when all they did was to publish his own words…
The media could indeed do a better job at covering the entire spectrum – a lot of interesting things about Clinton are hardly mentioned while Gary Johnson is all but absent – only this doesn’t explain the insistence with which some of the Republicans keep obsessing about Trump.
Even after some of their own party bosses have started to ‘see the light‘.
Their hoping that ‘he will defend the Supreme Court’ resides on assuming that ‘The Donald’ would act, if elected, as a bona-fide Republican.
What in Trump’s behavior ever made them believe such a thing?
Do they really want to relieve the Bush experience, only at a different – a lot lower, that is – level?
Besides the fact that calling someone an “ignorant” is a very ‘Trump’ thing to do in the first place, what if the real problem is that we have allowed ‘it’ to become a ‘system’ in the first place?
This way, after the process of learning and teaching has become a ‘system’, the ‘open market’ for ideas has become a very well – actually very badly – controlled oligopoly.
Learning means seeing and understanding the world around us. Teaching means passing around, and forward, the above mentioned knowledge and the meaning we’ve made out of it. Which ‘passed around knowledge and meaning’ shapes the way the ‘students’ go further. Deepen the knowledge and build future meaning.
In fact the very breadth of our species future depends on how past learned knowledge and built meaning had been passed around.
And what we have today, the current ‘social unease’, is the product of the manner in which we have been taught to see the world. Of the meaning we find in it.
Trump, as a social phenomenon, is nothing but yet another symptom of the current ‘malaise’. The incapacity of the contemporary society to make room for everybody is, simply put, a consequence of information no longer flowing freely around. Of information being, tighter and tighter, controlled by the ‘system’.
The simple fact that Trump, if elected, has promised to put his stamp on the ‘system’ only proves this point…
Coming back to the ‘system’, the only way to fix it is to open it up, widely. If we continue to allow ‘it’ to divide us into ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ (read ‘properly educated’ and ‘ignorant’) we will actually perpetuate ‘the problem’.
Specially after more of his antics have came to light…
I couldn’t find any current data so I’ll have to make do with what the Atlantic had published a month ago.
So, a little over 12% of his votes come from college, or higher, educated women while the total is no less than 48%.
Now, would you care to guess which of these women will continue to disregard his being ‘automatically attracted to beautiful’ and keep rooting for him?
Would you even consider Hillary Clinton as a likely candidate?
At that time Clinton had been ordered by a judge to defend a rapist – which all practicing lawyers can expect to be asked to do.
“Once she no longer had a choice in the matter, Clinton said in a 2014 interview that she had a professional obligation to give Taylor the strongest possible defense.
“I had a professional duty to represent my client to the best of my ability, which I did,” she said.
In this sense is it possible that even a college educated woman, like Hillary Rodham Clinton, might vote for somebody like Trump, simply because she might consider other things to be more important than his bragging about ‘grabbing beautiful women, who allow him to do it because he is a “star”, by their pussies’?
OK, you’ll tell me that in the voting booth each of us should behave in a ‘personal’ rather than a ‘professional’ manner.
I’ll up the ante and ask you what kind of person is able to efface his/her personal self so efficiently, simply in order to ‘help establish his/her professional reputation’?
Or accept a gleeful ‘pussy grabber’ as the most powerful person on Earth?
From time to time certain ideologies spread far enough to produce noticeable results.
Trump: Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
After the recordings had been ‘miraculously’ unearthed the ‘divide’ has moved considerably.
“Republicans Desert Trump in Droves” but he still enjoys a lot of support:
Historical facts do suggest that a certain number of ‘powerful figures’ did have an excess of testosterone which manifested itself in a less than an ‘elegant’ manner.
From Julius Caesar (who, according to Suetonius, was described by Curio as “Every woman’s husband and every man’s wife”) to Bill Clinton we have a huge list of ‘powerful’ public figures who couldn’t ‘keep it’ in their pants.
And not all of them have been involved in politics.
Jimmy Saville, Bing Cosby and Jeffrey Epstein are just a few names that came to my mind.
Only there is a small but fundamental difference between all these and “The Donald”.
Their ‘indiscretions’ were perpetrated more or less secretively and no more than a finite number of people – women or men – were abused by each of them.
Meanwhile Trump not only has no qualms when bragging about his habits in an almost public manner – the tape was recorded in the context of a TV show – but he would also extend his ‘greetings’ (“grab ‘hem by the pussy”) to all “beautiful” women that would happen to come close to him!
He actually acts as a standard bearer for what is currently known as “rape culture“!
Effectively offering ‘theoretical background’ for future ‘transgressions’.
In this respect there is no real difference between those who maintain that Trump’s words are not so bad as Bill Clinton’s actions – simply because they want to keep Hillary Clinton from returning to the White House – and Hillary Clinton herself – who supported her husband in order to remain there.
And this is the second connection between Trump’s words and extremist positions.
“All women since Eve, the world’s first sinner, were born in sin and sinners by birth became more or less sinners by practice.” (Luke 7:36-50) but also “Somalia is in the grip of famine and chaos but officials there are inspecting bras”
You see, the first rule of extremism is to ‘herd’ people together according to one obvious characteristic and settle their fate according to that characteristic – without paying any attention to the individual circumstances of any of those involved.
Hence all Muslims must be vetted, all immigrants must be deported, all beautiful women ‘grabbed by their pussies’…
Small wonder that we are now living in a world where ‘gang rape’ has become such a common occurrence…
Democracy is the solution.” (Alaa Al Aswany, When women are sinners in the eyes of extremists, The Independent, 2009)
Bill Clinton, that is.
Trump: “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” “
PS
Listening to Trump describing his unbridled urges I couldn’t repress the memories of how we, rambunctious teenagers gathered in the local park, drinking under-aged beers and smoking unfiltered cigarettes, were bragging among ourselves about completely imaginary sexual exploits and how the older ones, those who had already experienced ‘the bliss’, were smiling when overhearing our pretenses…
It was only later in life that I learned the real difference between not being able to ‘keep it in your pants’ and not being able to keep your mouth shut about ‘it’.
After someone opened up our eyes, that is!
“-Radio DJ: If you’re sick of being broke, for $108.3, which month has 28 days?
-All of them.
-Woman: I actually know this one! Uh, February?
-Radio DJ: We have a winner!
-Idiots.”
… unless ‘offered’ with a pointed toe cap!
