Friday, June 03, 2005
QUOTES OF THE WEEK
The first is from Iraqi-Australian water engineer Hassan Janabi, recently returned to Iraq to help rebuild his homeland, during an interview with George Negus:
GEORGE NEGUS: How bad has it been for you personally, because, for those of us observing from afar it looks worse than ever at the moment. The violence has been on the increase since the election 700 people killed in the last month alone. It looks like a hell on earth.
HASSAN JANABI: It is a little less than a hell. I think it was a hell under Saddam.
Our second quote star is Associate Professor Judith Armstrong, a fellow of the Contemporary European Research Centre at Melbourne University. In Friday’s Age, Judith was all upset about recent EU voting patterns:
After the Republican triumph in the last US election, and the feeling that democracy was tumbling downhill towards some lowest common denominator, many began looking towards Europe to provide an alternative to US cultural domination.
But things didn’t turn out as Judith had wished:
In the event, a clear majority of the supposedly civilised French and Dutch populations have put fear and self-protection ahead of global balance.
Selfish monsters! They don’t deserve democracy:
If, as the adage goes, education is wasted on the young, it is tempting to wonder whether democracy is not wasted on voters.
Judith isn’t exactly young, but her education sure has been wasted. A water engineer is smarter.
(Via Attila the Pun and J.F. Beck; Armstrong also attracts the attention of Professor Bunyip.)
UPDATE. Several readers note Armstrong’s use of the phrase “education is wasted on the young”; never heard it myself, either, but it turns up more often than you’d expect. Reader Steve endured Armstrong’s attempts at education in the ‘80s, and ForNow examines the woman’s credibility as a Russian literary expert.
Last year, U.S. author and social critic Jeremy Rifkin wrote a best-selling book called “The American Dream” in which he predicted that the EU’s vision of the future would quietly eclipse the United States’.