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Your Mother is an Ugly Whore

Let's talk a little about insults. People rarely discuss insults, except to complain about having been insulted. Nevertheless, this is a truly fascinating topic, well worth looking into.
This is how it works. Let us suppose, for argument's sake, that I intend to insult you. As the insulter, I have the initiative. I get to decide what to say to you. So, I say something. Now, it's your turn. Now, you have to decide how to react.
Regardless of what I might have said to you, why would you choose to react as having been insulted? Really, why?
Interestingly, some situations exclude even the theoretical possibility of an insult. A vicious dog, for instance, can frighten me, or bite me, or even kill me, but it cannot insult me, no matter how hard it tries. Of course, even the most vicious dog is not human, but the fact that this situation involves more than one species is not important. You cannot insult me in Korean or Swedish because I don't speak those languages. But even my linguistic ignorance is purely incidental here. It would be impossible to insult me in Arabic, even with the help of a translator.
Arab clerics in their sermons routinely call Jews “children of pigs and apes”. It doesn't insult me. I am a Jew, and I know whose child I am. I feel perfectly safe in my knowledge that my parents had more humanity and humaness between the two of them than the entire city of Mecca has at the height of the hajj season. Interesting, isn't it? Muslims can and do frighten us; they can destroy our buildings, bomb our trains, kill us, take our entire civilization away from us. But they cannot insult us. The opposite is not true. We can insult them without even trying. Why is that?
Let us conduct an imaginary experiment. Imagine that you get a chance to talk to Jesus Christ. Imagine that you can't think of anything better to tell Him than to call His Mother an ugly whore. Imagine, further, that everything Christians believe about Jesus is true. Do you think Jesus would get angry? I am not an expert on Jesus, but somehow I think that He would feel sorry for you. Fleetingly sorry. End of experiment.
(Incidentally, this example would remain just as valid if, instead of Jesus and the Christians, I wrote exactly the same about Mohammad and the Muslims. Nevertheless, it would be considerably less convincing. Why? Because even Christians insulted by the previous paragraph, would not begin burning flags, cars, or embassies. After all, Christianity is just another religion.)
Now, imagine yourself in Jesus' sandals. Imagine that someone tells you that your mother is an ugly whore. What would your reaction be? Without knowing you personally, I would nevertheless venture a guess. My guess is that your reaction will strongly depend on your mother. If she is beautiful and chaste, you can afford to react kind of like Jesus did in the above experiment. But if your mother is an ugly whore, odds are that your response will be ugly.
My prediction is based on two general facts. One is that the truth usually hurts, and people, when hurt, are much more likely to fly off the handle. The other is that ugly whores usually provide a very different kind of upbringing to their offspring than chaste beauties do, and it takes very little to determine who was raised by whom.
Just show them a cartoon.
 

The Uniter of the World

Some people may still remember how George W. Bush, during his first electoral campaign, modestly described one of his many exceptional qualities. “I am a uniter, not a divider,” he said. He wasn't lying. In the course of his tenure, he has managed to unite the world in loathing the United States.
On the international front, he left unpunished the worst attack the United States has ever suffered in its entire history. Instead, he began two wars that will inevitably be added to the long list of American military victories turned by American politicians into disastrous defeats. He allowed Arabs, with the enthusiastic help of Israeli politicians, to put Israel on the verge of extinction. While he was busy doing every bit of damage he could, North Korea and Iran announced their intentions to go nooqular, and he did nothing whatsoever to stop them.
On the domestic front, he borrowed so much from the Democrats' agenda that the Democrats, in order to oppose him ideologically, were forced to behave like babbling idiots — not that they looked much smarter during Clinton's 8 years in the White House. He has time and again refused to address the problem of illegal immigration. And while we are worrying about the 11 million illegal South Americans in the US, our Muslim population, according to some sources, has quietly exceeded that of Dubai.
And, speaking of Dubai, his recent decision to pay that little, infinitely friendly Arab country billions of dollars so that Arabs could provide protection of our ports from Arabs has, for the first time since he was elected, united Republicans and Democrats in opposition to that unbelievable decision.
The New York Times mentioned that the Bush family has had a long, lucrative connection to the Dubai rulers. It neglected to mention that the Dubai rulers and their subjects have had a long, lucrative connection to Al Qaeda. Bush himself didn't even try to explain anything. Instead, he promised to veto any congressional action blocking his deal with Dubai.
Everything has a simple explanation. The only simple explanation I can think of in this case is that his contract with Dubai is some kind of kick-back. Why not? It's his last term anyway. He is free to screw us up any which way his little heart desires.
What I find really amazing is that the New York Times, which uses every little excuse, no matter how ridiculous, to kick Bush in the shin, missed an opportunity to state the obvious: that his intimate connections to Arabs during the war unleashed against us by Arabs make him unfit for presidency. The absurdity of it all is so obvious that I can't think of anything to say that you haven't already heard or read many times over.
Except, maybe, for two things:
First, it's clear to me now that we should have voted for John Kerry in 2004. Yes, I know that John Kerry's lack of competence, intelligence, and honesty is absolutely spectacular. For example, he still behaves as if he is expecting to be allowed to run again in 2008. But these deficiencies do not really set him that far apart from the man we let stay in the Oval Office for a second term. What makes John Kerry more attractive in hindsight is that his family lives off ketchup, not oil, and it would be much safer for the country to have a president kissing the ass of customers at cheap hamburger joints than of Arab fuehrers of various proportions.
Second, I really don't understand why, during a war, we need to outsource the security of our ports to any foreign country. But if, for whatever reason, that was absolutely necessary, why didn't we hire the Israelis? With Israel in charge, we could really be sure that our ports are safe. This seems to be so obvious, so common sense, that if you think about it, you can't possibly miss the conclusion that our government must have something very different in mind for Israel.
What could it be? What could it be?
 

The Tale of Two Nuclear Dictatorships

Who can explain why North Korea, after years of predictably fruitless attempts to talk them out of their nuclear ambitions, was suddenly ignored, and why Iran, guilty of that very same crime, was ruthlessly, mercilessly reported to the Security Council?
The answer is, because North Korea is located in the Far East, while Iran is located in the Middle East. It's not that the North Korean East is Far enough for us to feel safe; soon enough they will have a missile capable of reaching Cleveland, OH. It's that if one Middle Eastern country is not allowed to have nuclear arms, then the same must be true for another, unless we decide to resort to discrimination and profiling. And since we have denounced any form of discrimination against all enemies, foreign and domestic, it's not that difficult to predict where IAEA will pitch its tents next.
In Israel, of course.
The campaign for the disarmament of Israel will begin within months. In a few years, Israel will be stripped of its nuclear weapons. In the meantime, Russia, Eurabia, and, quite possibly, the United States will help Iran join the nuclear club. A defenseless Israel will become the hostage of a new regional superpower we are helping create.
But do we have a reason to worry? Of course not. First, we don't talk to terrorists; second, didn't Bush promise to defend Israel?
 

Demockracy in Pallustina

The only thing I don't understand about the Hamas victory in the Phallustinian elections is that it seems to have come as a great surprise to so many people who, according to their reputations and job descriptions, should have known better.
Hamas might have lost had there been a party in Phallustina offering every Phallustinian family one healthy Jewish child a month, while the supply lasts, whom they would be free to torture to death as slowly as their heart desired. After all, we are talking about people who routinely greet each other with the words, “May you kill a Jew before you die.”
But no such party announced itself in time for the elections, and even if it had, it wouldn't want to recognize Israel's right to exist either, and, therefore, the dilemma created by the Phallustinian demockracy for the Western governments would have remained: How to continue pretending humanitarianism while financing Arab terrorism against Israel.
This is why Putin and Mubarak immediately began applying pressure on Hamas to recognize Israel's right to exist. Nobody wants Israel to exist of course, but in a polite society certain things are never announced. Don't you worry; the leaders of Hamas are not stupid. They will soon understand how counterproductive their current stance is and will eventually recognize Israel's right to exist. After all, even the Phounding Phather of Phallustina, Yasser Arafat himself, accepted Israel's right to exist, which never stopped him from murdering Israelis at every opportunity.
This terrible problem could have been avoided if only Israel had decided not to accept the right of Phallustina to exist. But the Israeli government is too busy evicting Jews from their land and organizing pogroms and new political parties composed of hopelessly compromized politicians. Defending the country and its citizens is no longer a priority.
 

Sex and the City of Baku

Here's a truly burning issue. A reader wrote Zack a letter asking what had led him to the conclusion that the sex lives of Azeri peasants were anything less than perfectly blissful. Having thoroughly discussed that breathtaking problem with me, Zack grew bored of it and decided to delegate to me the duty of responding.
Based on whatever little I know about men as sexual beasts, I don't believe that a happy human male can be stopped in his tracks by the spectacle of stray dogs mating. Most of us consider voyeurism sick even when its objects are human. What kind of life must those people have led if they switched to watching dogs and didn't feel they were missing something important? Like, for example, being ashamed of themselves?
Zack has related to me yet another episode he witnessed in Baku. There was an old man who sat, day in and day out, in the same corner of a marketplace with a stack of onion-skin paper, a pencil, and a faded photograph of a woman in underwear. For 5 rubles (which, at that time, was a small, but not negligible amount of money) he would overlay the photograph with a sheet of onion-skin paper, trace the contours of the woman, omitting the underwear, and hand the drawing to the customer. For an extra fee, he would add some small but important details that were absent in the original. There was always a line of customers patiently waiting to be served. Even knowing that pornography was strictly forbidden in the Soviet Union, you would probably agree with Zack's conclusion that it takes a very special kind of a society to create a customer base for that kind of an artistic enterprise.
I'd like to add my own theory to this discussion. If a man treats women in his family as cattle, then every night he goes to bed with a domestic animal. I don't think this can be as satisfying as going to bed with a woman he loved, had such weakness been considered forgivable in the society that made him what he is.
 

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