If the daily grind of muddling through life by organized
society can be likened to making sausage, it is possible to discern at least
two methods by which sausage is made on Planet Earth at this time. There is the
political sausage and there is the cultural sausage.
The analogy of sausage was first used to explain how
legislation is made in the Congress of the United States of America . It
basically describes how representatives that have some kind of clout use it as
currency to demand that the legislation being written, contain language to
benefit his or her district. This is done so that when election time comes
around, those members will be able to claim they brought the bacon home; an
achievement that usually improves their chances at getting reelected.
And while this system was described as being the best way to
organize a society, an American journalist whose name escapes me, compared it
with a cultural trend he claims to have encountered in the Arab world. That
trend is formulated in the saying: “Me and my brother against my cousin; me and
my cousin against the stranger.” Instantly, the revelation came to be regarded
as a big thing in America ,
and no one dared to ask how much difference there was between it and the
American saying: my friend's friend; my enemy's enemy.
And so it was etched in the mind of the American public that
their system was superior to the Arab system. This view held for several years
but then, John Kerry who is the American Secretary of State, went before the
sausage makers of the US Congress and testified to something that has the
potential to throw the apple cart up in the air; not just upset it. He
revealed, only a day or two ago, that some wealthy Arabs are prepared to pay
for a military operation that America might undertake against the Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad, one of their own – a brother or a cousin depending
on the closeness of the ties to the Syrian bloodline.
Obviously, in the eyes of those Arabs, the Syrian President
behaved badly, and they decided he must be punished despite the fact that he
was family. In fact, this is not the first time that the Arabs took such a
position; they did so when the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait ,
and the Arabs paid the American military to oust him from there.
What does all this mean? It means that the Arabs muddle
through life observing principles that depend on what they consider to be good
or bad. When someone commits an act they regard as bad, they punish him whether
he is family or not. When someone commits an act they regard as good, they
reward him whether he is family or not. And this is different from the American
system where only those who have something they can exchange for something
else, receive what they ask for.
Do you know what this boils down to, my friend? It boils
down to this: Even though the Arabs do not have a document which says everyone
is endowed with some inalienable rights, this is what they live by because it
is written into the DNA of their culture. It is something they practice at
every moment of their lives because they cannot separate from it. By contrast,
the Americans have a saying of this kind in writing, and they have it repeated
in many of their documents. But they practice the art of expediency; the art of
zero-sum exchanges, thus maintain an artificial peace among themselves at the
expense of a morality they tolerate even when it reaches depths that the rest
of the world considers intolerable.
This is why no one should be surprised when the Arabs and
the rest of the world will demand – as they surely will someday – that America explain its stance with regard to the
Jewish crimes committed in Palestine
against humanity. These are crimes that America funds, feeds with the
deadliest of weapons, protects at the Security Council of the UN and encourages
in all world forums.
The worst part is that America
depends on the views of the Israeli foreigners who perpetrate these crimes to
make sausage decisions as to how the bacon that is made in America and
belongs to Americans should be distributed among Americans.
It is a situation that boggles the mind; one that has
nothing to do with inalienable rights, and has everything to do with a culture
that is beginning to decay.