The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> The Threat Of National Lipstick

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Monday, April 16 2007, 20:13:47 (CEST)
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…this business of hurling mud, mud of your own invention often, at a person as a way of distracting from or negating his intellect and integrity, is an old Communist trick. It’s also especially popular among villagers when confronted by anyone with a modicum of education who stuns them with views they hardly can reconcile to all the certainties they learned from the village priest. Lacking the means to challenge intellectually, as they make plain, forces them to fall back on name-calling. That this is eagerly taken up by their fellow villagers, almost with relief, is what you see on these forums where khon after khon expresses his almost desperate appreciation to any khon who so “disproves” a challenge.

I recall my mother telling me of the reaction of the small Nestorian community in Mosul when it was suggested that so and so from among them be chosen as their representative before the local governing body. His appointment was objected to, by one or two people, because his wife, “smooka K’makhya”….she used red lipstick. This serious objection was taken up by many more because it was the only thing they could think of to hold against a man of whom they could find nothing more serious to object to, but who had to be kept from representing them. There well may have been a resentment of the “sophistication” of a man who tolerated such wild behavior in a wife…possibly influenced too much by foreign ways and manners…and therefore not quite “right” for the job of representing a bunch of ignorant villagers.

By the way, there isn’t anything inherently wrong with being ignorant. It doesn’t mean a person is stupid, or retarded and therefore beyond all mending…it simply means one does not yet know something…as I am ignorant of the Russian language, among a host of such things. There’s no basic flaw in me that would make it impossible for me to ever learn the language….I chose, however, to remain ignorant of it. Ignorance becomes a serious flaw when one discounts his lack of knowledge and, further, alleges that it isn’t important to know or learn more, because the person already “knows”…such dubious knowledge being merely whatever prejudices were learned at an early age, to be later cherished as the very core of one’s identity and belief system. There’s something wrong with maintaining ones ignorance, deliberately…and that’s what our nationalists and experts do.

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