People ask me for directions. All the time. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I have a friendly face, maybe because I’m the most unmenacing man ever: 5-foot-9, almost, gray and balding, wearing glasses and an REI fleece that can’t go out of style because it never was in.
I’m glad they do. Because I like giving directions. Makes me feel useful. My favorite moment came when standing at the corner of Michigan and Chestnut. A couple approached, clutching a guidebook, asking, in heavily French-accented English, if I would be so kind as to direct them to zee Hancock Building. I slowly lifted my finger to point at the brownish black, crisscrossed tower looming directly in front of us, smiled and said, “Voila.”
Which, forgive me, I feel obligated to do now that the Trump administration is turning up its racism to 11 in the final sprint to Tuesday’s election. Particularly Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who said:
“There’s 500 million Arabs in the world. And yet they don’t produce science. They don’t win the Nobel Prize. They don’t win the Fields Prize. They don’t win the Wolf Prize. They don’t produce literature.”
He’s wrong in all particulars, as usual. I count three Muslims who’ve won the Fields Medal — not “prize,” doofus — the top award in mathematics. Several have won a Wolf Prize.
I understand I’m shifting populations here — Arabs and Muslims overlap, but are not the same group. “Arab” is an ethnic identity, which RFK Jr. is using as code for “Muslim,” a religious designation. There are Arab Christians, and while they don’t get much press, Arab Jews. (H.L. Mencken, in his epic “The American Language,” lists “arab” as a slur for Jews.)
Before we get completely off track, pause to savor the head-spinning hypocrisy of RFK Jr. invoking the Fields Medal and the Wolf Prize, for excellence in science. From the mouth of a man who disgraced himself through vigorous anti-science, whose unwavering devotion to nutty folk belief has literally killed children.
It’s such an uncharacteristic pivot, this sudden passion for achievement. You’ll never hear Trump lecture his torch-wielding nationalist buddies, “You know, you’re kinda hard on Jews, considering they’ve won Nobel Prizes up the wazoo.”
Consistency isn’t their strong suit.
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Only in the Dump administration could this shit for brains be Sec. of HHS.
ReplyDeleteThanks Neil. Plus, a timely reminder that Iranians are not Arabs. They're Persians. Know your enemy, an alien concept to the goblins running this country into the ground.
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