There was a time when I worked for a newspaper in Northwestern Ontario, a vast expanse that is part of the Canadian North. Winter is extremely cold in that part of the country but Summer can also be a time of high heat and humidity. And when you have this kind of weather, you inevitably get the giant flies whose noisy flight is legendary among those who have encountered them. You realize how true the legend is when a swarm of the flies comes close enough to you and buzzes your ear. I'll come back to tell more about these flies but for now let me tell you about a singular fly whose story was told some twelve or fifteen generations ago.
The fellow who told the story of this fly is Jean de la Fontaine. He was a French poet who wrote fables including one he called “Le Coche et la Mouche” which means “The Stagecoach and the Fly”. The story is about horses pulling a stagecoach up a steep hill on a hot sunny day. The passengers in the coach have come off it to lighten the burden on the horses who are tired, panting, sweaty and thirsty. A fly comes along and decides it must help drive that coach up the hill. It does it the only way it knows how which is to buzz and to bite the horses. But this makes the task even more difficult for the horses, a fact that the fly completely ignores. Yet despite the annoyances that the fly produces, the stagecoach reaches the top of the hill at which point the fly claims credit for the achievement. It makes the claim on the ground that no one has helped; from the coachman on whose nose it has landed to the monk who prayed throughout the ordeal to the woman who kept singing to herself to any of the other passengers who remained passive all along. La Fontaine ends the fable by telling the moral of the story which is that people who poke their noses in the affairs of others sincerely believe they do important work but, in fact, annoy everyone around and do nothing that is useful. And so La Fontaine recommends that you chase away these people like you would chase away a bothersome fly.
Now, my friend, imagine what you will get if you cross the fly of La Fontaine with a giant fly from the north country. I'll tell you what you will get. You will get the Flies of the Ether. These are flies no higher in worth than the flies of the north but they have an ego that is so puffed up, it requires an ether to contain it. In fact, these are not real flies with wings to fly them but are human beings who will buzz you through the ether like a fly. In truth, they are living and breathing human beings if you believe this story. They are the journalists and the pundits who sit in front of a camera in a television studio and pretend to become instant experts on every subject that is thrown at them. Believe it or not, they become the great big experts in the time that it takes to ask a single question. But the truth is that these people go to the studio knowing about the subject they are asked to discuss as much as the northern fly knows about rocket science. And they end up knowing even less after they say what they have to say and hear themselves and all those like them buzz the rubbish that they come to buzz.
Still, they sit comfortably in the studio of the television station and throw darts at the good people who are out in the real world doing hard work in a difficult environment. Yet, despite what they think they can achieve, the Flies of the Ether are not good enough to even compare to ordinary gadflies because all that they do is create commentary that is as helpful to society as the buzzing that is done by the fly of La Fontaine; nothing more useful than that. Worse, when all the words are said and all the buzzing is done, these creatures attribute to themselves the achievements that were made; the achievements that would have been made in a more tidy fashion and a faster rate without their miserable contribution.
It can also happen that the Flies of the Ether are invited to talk on the air about far away places and the people who live in them. These are the places where the people know very little or know nothing at all about the Flies of the Ether; and they care even less about them or their useless opinions. Still, the flies with the big ego cannot help but secretly desire to influence and to control these far away places and all the people who live in them. But how do they extend their influence that far? Well, the flies believe that they have found the answer and so they use a method that has rarely worked but has produced a bad result if and when it did work. Knowing that America has some leverage over a few of those places, the flies modulate their buzzing not to spin the people in them but to spin America and the American people. The flies play this ritual to get America and its people to see the situation the way that they see it. They manage by this trick to put pressure on the country, on its people and its government. This has the effect of forcing the country, which is a superpower, to use the power and the influence it has to nudge the people in the far away places and move them in the direction that the flies have envisaged for that part of the world. And you can see why this method is at once regarded like a satanic trick and a dangerously ill advised one.
Why is that? Well, what is wrong with committing this sort of mischief is that it does very little or does nothing at all to change the world in any positive way. It only affects America in a negative way and threatens the world in an indirect way. Indeed, the effect it has on America is the same as would be that of a monkey who is asked to teach rocket science to a class of students. The primate will damage the mind of those attending and do nothing more useful than that. Like someone once said, you don't know what you don't know. And to see how true this is, imagine a pundit who is labeled an expert going on television and saying that Canada was full of snow, of igloos and nothing else. Well, those who never saw Canada will take the words at face value and believe that they are true. But guess what. Many in America already believe these falsehoods not because someone has said the words openly and without equivocation but because it is the image that is transmitted to Americans through their television networks in many subtle ways. What these Americans see about Canada is mainly snow and igloos; what they retain about Canada is that it is full of snow, of igloos and little else.
Now imagine what the people who never saw far away Egypt will believe when they are told day in and day out openly and forcefully that there is nothing in that country but the slums and the garbage whose images they see every now and then, and see nothing else that shows the rest of reality. The consequence of this fabricated falsehood is that when the American legislators and the government officials find themselves in a situation where they need to deal with the country of Egypt, they naturally want to deal in accordance with the images that were planted in their consciousness. When this happens, the Egyptian interlocutors who are at the other end of the give-and-take begin to sense that they are dealing with a jerk or dealing with someone educated by a monkey. And when this sort of exchange happens too often, the entire people of Egypt come to believe, as would anyone, that too many Americans suffer from an incurable disease called Artificial Ignorance – not to be confused with Artificial Intelligence.
Now, given the recent events in the Middle East and the revolution that took place in Egypt, it is incumbent upon us to set the record straight with regard to a few facts concerning that magnificent country. It is important to take this step lest America be maintained in the Judaic pool of Artificial Ignorance where it has been swimming for too long already. The danger inherent to leaving America in this place of dishonor is that the country will once again miss the opportunity to rectify the disastrous policies it has pursued in that part of the world for too long already. If this situation is maintained for much longer, the effect on the world will be small or will be large but will be reversible because the people of the world are a resilient lot and they will find a way out of their predicament. On the other hand, the effect on America will be a massive one and will be irreversible because it will have the same effect as if the genetic code of the nation had been forced to mutate in a direction that is absolutely the wrong one to take.
So then, what should the American legislators and the officials of the executive branch know about Egypt that they do not know now? They should know that there are similarities and also differences between America and Egypt. One similarity is that the two countries have had a glorious past. The difference is that the Egyptian past is measured in millenniums while the American past is measured in centuries. In the past of each country, babies were born, were nurtured and educated by the parents and the community till the time when they were big enough to contribute to society. Nowadays, the people of Egypt still do the same thing where school attendance has reached the rate of 98% which is one of the highest in the world. The country even produces a surplus of learned people who decide to make a contribution elsewhere in the world. They go to countries where things have gone badly and where the people can no longer afford the quarter of a million dollars that it takes to raise a child let alone send all the children of the nation to school.
Moreover, many of the children who make it to regular school end up dropping out before they reach college. This is why these countries -- America being one of them – desperately need educated children to come from abroad and fill the void that exists locally. Yet America is the only country among all these countries to refuse to call itself deficient but calls itself exceptional. It makes this claim because it says it has the ability to attract from abroad what it cannot produce locally. What the country seeks, in effect, are children from other places who can attend college, do well in their studies, graduate on time, go to work and keep America afloat even keep it competitive in the face of foreign competition. The implication here is that without the input from abroad, America could no longer exist as a superpower or even as a nation. What a glorious exception this is! Who in the world would not want to attain this level of exceptionalism?
If someone has what it takes to grasp these realities, he or she will understand the ramifications and consequences that flow from it; and there will be no reason for me to explain in detail the concepts that are involved in this matter. But if the American legislators and the officials of the executive branch don't have what it takes to grasp the thing, it will be a waste of time to try and drum it into their heads. For this reason, I shall leave it to them to work things out and come up with a posture that will make them look a little less like the jerks they have managed to look in the eyes of everyone else. If they can work this thing out and begin to impress the world, they should then turn their attention to putting together a set of policies that will pull them out of the Judaic pool of Artificial Ignorance where they have been immersed for too long already.
But if they fail to do any of this, they will have failed on something serious and there is nothing that we can do to change that. What is bound to happen will now happen and history will write itself as we all brace for the turbulent ride that is to come.