----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, July 29, 2002 7:03 AM
Subject: Re: Install Oracle 8i on Windows
XP?
Absurd.
Your intention from the beginning was to be a snobby jerk.
Among the
Bourgeoisophobes
Why the Europeans and
Arabs, each in their own way, hate
America and Israel.
by David Brooks
04/15/2002, Volume 007,
Issue 30
AROUND 1830, a group of
French artists and intellectuals
looked around and
noticed that people who were their
spiritual inferiors were
running the world. Suddenly a
large crowd of
merchants, managers, and traders were
making lots of money,
living in the big houses, and
holding the key posts.
They had none of the high style
of the aristocracy, or
even the earthy integrity of the
peasants. Instead, they
were gross. They were vulgar
materialists, shallow
conformists, and self-absorbed
philistines, who half
the time failed even to
acknowledge their moral
and spiritual inferiority
to the artists and
intellectuals. What's more, it was
their very mediocrity
that accounted for their success.
Through some screw-up in
the great scheme of the
universe, their
narrow-minded greed had brought them
vast wealth, unstoppable
power, and growing social
prestige.
Naturally, the artists
and intellectuals were outraged.
Hatred of the
bourgeoisie became the official emotion of
the French
intelligentsia. Stendhal said traders and
merchants made him want
to "weep and vomit at the same
time." Flaubert thought
they were "plodding and
avaricious." Hatred of
the bourgeoisie, he wrote, "is
the beginning of all
virtue." He signed his letters
"Bourgeoisophobus" to
show how much he despised "stupid
grocers and their ilk."
Of all the great creeds
of the 19th century, pretty much
the only one still
thriving is this one,
bourgeoisophobia.
Marxism is dead. Freudianism is dead.
Social Darwinism is
dead, along with all those theories
about racial purity that
grew up around it. But the
emotions and reactions
that Flaubert, Stendhal, and all
the others articulated
in the 1830s are still with us,
bigger than ever. In
fact, bourgeoisophobia, which has
flowered variously and
spread to places as diverse as
Baghdad, Ramallah, and
Beijing, is the major reactionary
creed of our age.
This is because today,
in much of the world's eyes, two
peoples--the Americans
and the Jews--have emerged as the
great exemplars of
undeserved success. Americans and
Israelis, in this view,
are the money-mad molochs
of the earth, the
vulgarizers of morals, corrupters of
culture, and
proselytizers of idolatrous values. These
two nations, it is said,
practice conquest capitalism,
overrunning poorer
nations and exploiting weaker
neighbors in their
endless desire for more and more.
These two peoples, the
Americans and the Jews, in the
view of the
bourgeoisophobes, thrive precisely because
they are spiritually
stunted. It is their
obliviousness to the
holy things in life, their feverish
energy, their injustice,
their shallow pursuit of power
and gain, that allow
them to build fortunes, construct
weapons, and play the
role of hyperpower.
And so just as the
French intellectuals of the 1830s
rose up to despise the
traders and bankers, certain
people today rise up to
shock, humiliate, and dream of
destroying America and
Israel. Today's bourgeoisophobes
burn with the same sense
of unjust inferiority. They
experience the same
humiliation because there is nothing
they can do to thwart
the growing might of their
enemies. They rage and
rage. Only today's
bourgeoisophobes are not
just artists and intellectuals.
They are as likely to be
terrorists and suicide bombers.
They teach in madrassas,
where they are careful not to
instruct their students
in the sort of practical
knowledge that dominates
bourgeois schools. They are
Muslim clerics who
incite hatred and violence. They are
erudite Europeans who
burn with humiliation because they
know, deep down, that
both America and Israel possess a
vitality and heroism
that their nations once had but no
longer do.
...
(
originally linked from www.dynamist.com )
---
On 28
Jul 2002 at 12:53, Mladen Gogala wrote:
...
> This debate is getting increasingly personal and
that is why I am going
> to end
> it right now. I tried avoiding a personal
conflict in my first reply,
> but you
> insisted. As I have nothing to gain from the
squabble, I'm out of here.
...
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