It's funny - at my school, all their signs said "CCC." There'd be a bunch of white kids, most of them leaning towards the redneck persuasion, holding up these signs saying "CCC" and chanting about abortion or some shit. We figured it was because they didn't have the sack to write KKK.

"Know another great book?" sober me says. "Tamim Ansary's 'Destiny Disrupted.' Ansary says he was prompted to write the book back when he used to write textbooks for 'a major American publisher' and it took all the fight he had in him to get the publisher to put in a chapter about Islam. He never got it; the best he was ever able to do was a single chapter covering the Byzantines and Islam."

God, that's a wearing literary affectation. Anyway. The book covers the history of the world as if the perspective that matters is that perspective that got one third of a chapter. I shit you not - the first 5 Caliphs make for a more engaging story than fuckin' Star Wars. You wanna see how big our blind spot is? And in that history, the Crusades don't really fucking matter.

They don't. From a "middle world" perspective the Crusaders were a bunch of barbarians that poked into the periphery three times over the course of a hundred years and left without leaving any cultural impact. The overwhelming majority of the Muslim world never saw a Crusader, never fought a Crusader, never broke bread with a Crusader, never traded spices with a Crusader. The Crusaders were slightly less important to Islam than the Visigoths were to Rome, assuming the Visigoths never made it to within 500 miles of the capital.

Islam cares about the Mongols, who basically shattered their divine hegemony and let the fundies take over the narrative. The Mongols overran real territory and killed a bunch of people, changed the power structure and rearranged history. Know what I didn't know? Before the Mongols, the Turks weren't Turkish. Muthafuckin' Turks, Huns, Cathars, Parthians - they all be Mongols.

And "Rome" was Byzantium, which didn't fucking fall, but kept right on truckin', no cultural dislocation, no tragedy, no collapse, until Fourteen Fucking Fifty Three.

How's that for perspective? "Yeah, you run the world now but that whole 'and then Nero played a fiddle and all civilization plunged into darkness until the Renaissance' line is total BS. Actually, the Empire moved east, left your ancestors behind and your clans spent a thousand years eating mice and berries until you figured out three-field rotation and horse collars. The rest of the world, meanwhile, figured out all that science that your peepz appropriated once they'd created an economy that functioned primarily on raiding."

Tell you what. It sure fucks with "manifest destiny" and the Monroe Doctrine. Why is the West so exceptionalist? Because we're dicks.