This is completely unrelated to anything serious at all, but… Greg, Mr. Swann… WTF?
Is it because I find insults abhorrent? Obviously not. For all of me, well-crafted satire is the essence of Western art — the primordial expression of independence by the nascent Greeks toward the hegemonic Persians. To be oriental, in the Greek and Roman sense, is to be of the East — docile, obedient, subservient — a domesticated animal in the guise of a homo sapiens. (They’re not talking about particular people, they’re talking about categories of behavior.) To be occidental — of the West — is to be wild and free, a truly human being. To deliver a scathing insult to the powerful is to defy the idea power over others. This idea I absolutely love.
To be docile, obedient, subservient, is to be of the East?
You mean, maybe like this guy?
And I didn’t realize my 10,000 year old cultural tradition — you know, the one where my ancestors were inventing the printing press some 900 years before Gutenberg — was merely the act of “animals in the guise of homo sapiens”.
I know, it’s just a flowery analogy, and Greg’s just trying to be — you know — literary and philosophical. That’s cool.
Just might want to think about the words you’re using there, lest it distract the reader from your point. And you know, maybe have the reader focus on such casual racist assumptions (the parenthetical sub-rosa defense notwithstanding) instead of your argument.
Just sayin’.
-rsh
PS: By the way, if you can point to where the Greek and Roman philosophy of the oriental and the occidental is not talking about a particular people, but categories of human behavior, I’d enjoy perusing those pages. Which of Plato’s writings would that be? Or is it Aristotelian ethics? The inquiring mind wants to know.
