The caveman speaketh!

One of the many charming, charismatic, aspects of M.K. (Mahatma) Gandhi was that in both still and moving images he always had a smiling and welcoming appearance.  Something rare for the culture in which I grew up where, at least in the old days, people did not smile when photographed.  I suspect that Gandhi's pleasant demeanor was no accident--that was his real persona.

Gandhi was one heck of a force that the militant white supremacists had to reckon with, and yet he comes across in the images as a soft dude.  A dude with a wonderful sense of humor.  One of my favorites about him is this: Gandhi was asked by a reporter what he thought of the western civilization.  Always quick on the draw, Gandhi replied, "I think it would be a very good idea."

Here we are seven decades after Gandhi was shot dead, and living under a different kind of a dark threat, with white supremacists boldly out in the open, and right in the White House.  The Oval Office occupant re-enacted his awful "American carnage" theme but this time in Poland, where he presented the world as a clash of civilizations in which he worried that the West did not have the will to survive.

In that international carnage speech, he said:

We write symphonies.  We pursue innovation.  We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs, and always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers.

I suppose the "others" do not celebrate ancient heroes.  The people who are not from the West do not embrace their timeless traditions and customs.  What do people from Iraq, Iran, China, know about timelessness, right?  After all, it was only a few years ago that they barely crawled out of their caves, dragging women by their hair, and beating each other with clubs!  What does the Subcontinent know about music when all they do is clang stones together to create noise!

It is one thing for the fuhrer to engage in such awfulness.  It is another when a NY Times columnist pretty much offers similar arguments but cloaked in sophisticated language.  He seems to equate the white supremacists nationalism of this president and his voters, with the nationalism of the once colonized brown-skinned!

What a mess that 63 million voters have created!  If only the fuhrer understood his own words: "Words are easy, but actions are what matters."