Just for you, I got plastered again so that I could respond in the proper spirit.

Actually, that's a lie. I got plastered BECAUSE THIS SHOW SUCKS SO HARD-

Anyway. Disquitioning again:

I first heard about Edward Said back when he died. NPR was all bent outta shape about it, while all the Rethuglicans were spitting on his grave because apparently you aren't somebody in the conservative intelligentsia until you shit on Edward Said.

Then more than ten years later, Audible was doing one of those "buy a shitload of stuff for $5 sales" and Orientalism was one of them, and I figured I ought to read it. It took me maybe six months to get around to it, and then

oh my god

it took like 3 months just to get through it.

Orientalism is byzantine enough to make Name of the Rose read like Da Vinci Code.

BUT

I'm incredibly glad I read it. It has shaped a lot of my thinking of late. And his message is pretty simple, and basically backed up by a bunch of dry facts in extremely ornate language. The central tenet - the only tenet - of Orientalism is this:

Westerners do not study the Middle East except to (A) determine how the West is superior (B) determine how the East is corrupt and (C) reinforce the dominant paradigm that the Middle East is best served by being a vassal state to the great powers of Europe.

And it was clearly pretty goddamn influential, and its influence hasn't gone far enough yet. Said points out that the way we regard "the orient" is pretty much the way white folx regarded black folx until Martin Luther King, and he's right.

At the core of it, all this confusion over ISIS comes down to "why are these darkies being such a problem." No attempt is made at discussing the fundamental tenets of Islam because we really want to just be told why we're better.

Look - fundies gonna fund. Western power structures and Eastern philosophies are gonna clash, plain and simple, but the patronizing and paternal approach we take to the "middle east" ain't helping.

At some point, goddamn Middle America is going to have to wake up and wrap their heads around the majority religion of the world. They're going to have to acknowledge that everything we know about the time before the Renaissance is largely known because of people who say "salaam aleikum" to each other. They're going to have to understand that there's a billion gajillion people whose prophet was human but whose words were godlike and that covering your head and not eating pork doesn't make you a terrorist.

I just hope we do it in time.