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Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Proton who wrote (14368)	11/15/1997 6:06:00 PM
From: William H. Ferguson	Respond to of 50167

Hi again, Tom ---- and all who continue to read the pearls strung along the continuing thread herein. Yesterday, via telephone, I discussed the market and posts on this thread with a friend in a nearby town. To my surprise, in today's snail mail, I received the following from her. "Remember in the days just antecedent to the Gulf War how the average person born and reared in the USA was angered by the threatening, sometimes gory, invective of the Iraquis when interviewed on CNN or other TV networks? Her letter continued: "I was astounded at how men such as Tariq Aziz and his colleagues would use threatening words calling up images of bloody, mutilated, limb-severed bodies of USA military personnel if the USA were to even dare to respond to Iraq's proposed invasion of Kuwait through an attack on even one tiny part of the Iraqui bastion. "My gentle life's companion, who lived a considerable part of his youth in other countries, explained to me at that time that Aziz and his brethren were products of an entirely different culture than that of the typical (whatever that may be) citizen of the USA. He called to my attention and proceeded to instruct me that it was quite the normal custom for folk of that nation state to reply to presumed external (and internal) threats with highly exaggerated, exorbitant, bloated, hyperbolical, bombastic, histrionic, melodramatic, outrageous, immoderate invective and hostile eloquence. (He recommended that I read Thomas L. Friedman's book, "From Beirut to Jerusalem" to get a better grasp of the situation.) "It's sorta parallel to this scenario: Suppose I said to a fellow American something on the order of, "You're not looking your usual self today." And he responded with something like, "Another comment like that from you, and I'll enucleate your eyes with my bear hands!" "I'm suggesting that it may be possible that remarks made to a national of another country by a person of -- I'll call it -average USA culture ---- is interpreted as only mildly critical by the speaker but provokes a verbal or other response which seems considerably out of proportion to the intended provocation in an otherwise fine intellect reared in another culture." The undersigned requests that all please try to remember, the above letter was sent to me via Snail Mail by an American Citizen who does not subscribe to the SI website. Cordially William