Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Sausage in the Kitchen of Ozymandias

Imagine having a bunch of friends who keep telling you about a restaurant where you can eat the best sausage ever made on this planet or any planet in the whole wide Universe out there. So you go to that restaurant the first time, eat a serving of sausage but become so constipated, you have to run to hospital where they purge you clean and send you home with the advice that you should never again eat what you ate the last time.

A few days later, you get together with your friends again, and just as you are about to tell them what happened to you not long ago, they start praising the same restaurant again, and they tell you that if you did not try it yet, you should go as soon as possible because you just don't know what you're missing. Not to sound stupid, you keep your mouth shut but resolve in the secrecy of your thought that you will never eat in that restaurant again.

Then, sitting at home one evening and having nothing prepared for dinner, you decide to go out and eat. Suddenly, the words of your friends urging you to go to that restaurant, ring in your ears and you try to fight it. But your ego gets in the way, and you decide you should be able to eat from that sausage like everyone else, and not have to run to hospital to get flushed. So you go to the restaurant where you eat from the same sausage but once again, you get constipated, run to the hospital where they flush you and send you home with the advice that you should never eat from that food again.

You repeat the cycle many times over till you discover one day that your so-called friends are no friends at all but are a bunch of advertising hacks paid to promote the restaurant in question from among the many concerns they work for and keep on their list of clients. It was business to them, you see, nothing more. In the meantime, you were duped, your belly paid the painful price and your wallet was made a little lighter in the process.

Now think of the sausage in that tale as being political sausage produced in the democratic kitchens of the world. In fact, the analogy was made sometime ago to the effect that America's democracy is fashioned the way that sausage is made: It does not look good when you make it, but tastes good when you eat it. What was not said, however, is what we now see happen inside the American Congress. The thing is seized like entrails that are so constipated, they need a good flushing before the nation can eat again. In the meantime, no resolution, no bill and no amendment can be processed or passed through. They call it gridlock.

So now is the time to ask: Who on earth could be the chef in that kitchen? The fact is that there are many chefs and many cooks in that kitchen and a few other kitchens like it. One notorious chef is named Bret Stephens, and he cooks a column in the kitchen they call the Wall Street Journal. His latest sausage was given the name: “Ozymandias Returns” and was added to the menu on July 2, 2013.

Stephens is a Jew, and like most Jews, he thinks of himself as qualified to “educate” anyone and everyone on matters concerning the production of political sausage. In his mind, he is a political “Dear Abby” for the world; one that has the specialty of making the kind of sausage that Israeli Jews consider to be kosher enough to feed on and feel comfortable with when the time comes to do you know what.

Having made it clear at the start of the article that he is discussing the current situation in Egypt, Bret Stephens does not explain why he chose in the title of his article the nickname of ancient Egypt's most powerful Pharaoh, Ramses 2 who conquered most of the Levant, including Syria and Palestine – part of which is now called Israel.

Still, the chef gives free advice to everyone in Egypt because he says that these people never knew how to govern themselves in 6000 years. He does not explain how they survived as a nation for that long, but he does not have to because he is a Jew, after all. Or maybe, he just does not know what has been cooking in the kitchen of Ozymandias during all these millenniums.

The Jewish chef also gives advice to those Americans who voted for President Obama, a man that the readers must assume has no views on anything that matters, he says. Here too, Stephens does not explain why his view should trump those of the millions of Americans who voted for Obama. Well, he is a Jew after all, and he does not have to explain anything. Dear Abby never did; she only told everyone what to do. Period.

In any case, you should eat your philosophical vegetables, Bret. And here is my explanation for that; they will help your intellectual digestion where some purging is overdue.