He was blind and now he can see
The oddly-named Brendan Bernhard, in the usually very good LA Weeky arts section, displays Gibson-like stupidity (see today’s earlier blog) but more insidiously:
“In Dark Star Safari, his devastating account of a post-9/11 trip through Africa, the American novelist Paul Theroux has an amusing anecdote about a Sudanese tour guide. Laying eyes on Theroux for the first time, the guide skips the preliminaries (’Hello,’ ‘How are you?,’ etc.) and gets right to the point. ‘Bush is Satan,’ he tells him. When Theroux replies noncommittally, the guide says, ‘Clinton is Satan.’ And when this also fails to get a rise out of the author, he announces that he wants to live in America. Could Theroux help him get there? If America is the Great Satan, then the rest of the world is rapidly turning into the Great Schizoid, railing against the U.S. one minute, drooling over it the next, like the Judean revolutionaries grousing about Rome in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.�
Why does Brendan find it so hard to understand - leaving aside the fact that Bush and Clinton don’t equate to America anyway? Nobody disputes that the US is the freest, richest superpower ever. But doesn’t the fact that its wonderous achievements haven’t quite spread across the world suggest there is a problem? Could it be that a good deal of this richness is at the expense of others and it requires protection; the necessary retardation of “the developing nations”? Is it a coincidence that Africa’s descent, as described by Theroux, comes as the gulf between rich and poor widens every day, and that the rich depend on cheap labour, cheap resources, brutal security forces and foreign aid? Is it any wonder the inhabitants are resentful and desparate to escape to a better life - to the sociopath’s oasis in the West? Jeez, it’s so damn obvious you wonder what’s going on in this journalist’s head, and why he gets paid for this ignorant drivel. I suppose it’s the same schizoid dynamic: work hard to get a job writing for the freest press in the world, and then cultivate stupidity.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Theroux vs. Naipaul Like his eminently likeable…
- Late night
- Synchroni City
- Through Burroughs
- Chomsky on Terror Chelsea Clinton, posing as a …
