At the end of a Reuters story about the extraordinary event of a 6-foot shark being found in the Euphrates River 150 miles from the ocean, a local Iraqi fisherman was asked about it.
"This is very frightening for us. Our children always swim in the river and I believe that there are more sharks. I believe that America is behind this matter," said fisherman Hatim Karim.
4 comments:
The mind boggles. On the one hand, I suppose it simplifies the crisis of Planet Earth if "America" were behind absolutely every problem everywhere every day. How cogent to pin all evil everywhere on one cause: America. As you say, this is something of what has been accomplished in the hearts and minds of many. Sort of a public relations black hole. Let's see, was there another hand? I guess it was something about general hopelessness re the human race... Maybe that's over-reaching (with that hand). Naturally, we may well find out that it is some sort of American military adventure, sending sharks upstream. Please keep us informed.
You're probably getting this episode with the shark confused with the US Navy's experiments using marine mammals to deliver explosives to blow up enemy ships. Or Iraqi children. Or whatever.
The enemy is everywhere, we can't be too careful.
Frightening news. Before this I thought the only really dangerous sharks were in Washington.
There is a similar story in the latest Newsweek magasine, about many pious Shia people in the Basra region of Irak being convinced that the American and the British conspire into delaying the re-appearance of the Mahdi (the Shia prophet-in-hiding whose re-appearance will signal the end of the world and paradise for all Shias).
These stories show several things :
- there are on this world an incredible number of people who still really believe religious nonsense
- there are on this world an incredible amount of uneducated and /or stupid people
- the above two often overlap
- we, the intelligentsia (?) are dismally failing at educating the masses and dispelling such nonsense, even among a significant fraction of citizens of our respective supposedly advanced societies
- the USA invented marketing and advertising and is still by far the leading light in such areas; US companies are by far the most succesful at "globalisation"; the US can produce an unending stream of Oprah-like and televangelist TV shows; and it has a billions-dollars budget. Yet it seems incapable of translating all that into an effective means of winning the hearts and minds of a few million stupid and uneducated people abroad. In fact, it is achieving just the opposite, and it seems that each dollar spent is digging the hole deeper.
I personally rank the above as a more puzzling mystery than the one about whether there was something before the Big Bang singularity.
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