at a restaurant our party told them to start the pizza so it's ready when everyone starts trickling in: they deliver it in a box; embarrassed, we follow the maitre d' to our seat; the owner comes out and starts screaming and we almost get kicked out: we gather that he thought we'd ordered to-go and were sitting down with it: he hadn't so much been "offended" as he thought we were tricking him, taking advantage: if someone's disrespected or dishonored they think you're doing something to them, that you're damaging part of the social contract
and he was Italian-American, not one of "those people" we love to psychoanalyze
but it's a broader notion at the heart of this, one that explains why even the atheist Iranian exiles I know hate Rushdie's guts
since the Conquistadors (human sacrifice and cannibalism were the main things they felt they were fighting) but especially since 1789 "the West" has had this problem where it sees itself as the default for all mankind, as the model for everyone from Tierra del Fuego to deepest Dzhungaria; today we try to pretend we've "outgrown" what we label "killing people over books and cartoons"
we in the North Atlantic/Oceania/Israel pretend to be this placid, secular bastion of freedom where everyone can speak their mind no matter how it might offend and nobody gets shot for it: but what other continents see is a bunch of countries that have erased their past, prospered on exploitation, offshored their violence, sponsored tyrants and the brutal militias fighting them alike, and unleashed quite a few wars, then acts all innocent when people don't like being insulted
from the 1910s to the 60s many, many countries defined their whole raison d'etre as fighting everything premodern: so many were slaughtered in modernization's name it's not funny--the USSR, the Barisan Nasional, the Derg, India's INC, Mao, Mexico's PRI, Kemal, and everyone in-between promised a terrestrial paradise: we'd dam every river, soak the soil in fertilizers and antibiotics and feed the world, level the rainforests, melt the icecaps, reap the ocean, and everyone would have 4-7 kids for the new schools and factories--the US could do it, and so could we! Italian "reunification" led to decades-long civil war as the Neapolitans tried to resist their crushing new oppressors: 20,000 "brigands" were killed
but what happened was bloodshed and strategic hamlets; the oil booms didn't last, the pesticides killed workers, the monocultures died, the GMOs coded for poisons, one-fifth of women sought illegal abortions as their babies starved, and all the old Wellsian promises of collective godhood through technology produce only disgust: the exhausted old technocracy could offer nothing but starvation and coup attempts, producing a surge in religious parties--political Islam, political Catholicism that could be conservative but were also distributivist
in Turkey the agronomists took out the rocks they had in their fields because straight lines was the way to industrialize agriculture and end hunger--couldn't these superstitionists see straight? next spring the soil washed away
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