So, what's Twain's point?? I mean, his is a rather tautological platitude that applies to just every partisan issue... For instance, here's how it applies to the Middle East:
"I have seen several entirely sincere people who thought they were (permanent) hypsters of the Promised Land. They sought diligently, persistently, carefully, cautiously, profoundly, with perfect honesty and nicely adjusted judgment--until they believed that without doubt or question they had founded the Promised Land. That was the end of the wandering. The Israeli spent the rest of his life hunting up shingles wherewith to protect his Promised Land from the weather. If he was seeking after political legitimacy he found it in one or another of the hundred political gospels which govern men in the earth; if he was seeking after a religious legitimacy he found it in his worthy Torah or in the writings of one of the many Zionist rabbis that are on the market. In any case, once he settled in the Promised Land he sought no further; but from that day forth, with his soldering-iron in one hand and his Uzi gun in the other he tinkered its leaks and reasoned with objectors." (from What is Man?) |
