Of beautiful insults and of ugly praise

Oscar Wilde says that "the artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim... There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written, that is all. "
I would like to add that a  poet can be an  artist too, when poems do  follow the same rules. A poem can elevate or demean, praise or insult, but it will still either be well written, or badly written. That is forever the reflection of its creator, and never a reflection of the subject. Whether it  is charging light brigades or ancient  mariners or prisoners in Chillon or talking ravens, the subject always bends its will to the beauty in the form. If a poem insults to gain revenge, or praises to win a  love, or aspires  for historical accuracy, it ceases to be art, and the poet ceases to be an artist.
This poem is really just a bit of fun with words, it might be construed as insulting, but the insults are subject to the form, and, as such, are far away from slander.

"Hitherto Reason gone" 

Hitherto  Reason gone
Wherefore I lost my way?
what fool to think it sun,
which brings no light of day!

for when in you shall shine
a perennial fiery light
of truth, forever my sign :
The darkness of the night!

No flower but a thorn
as needles is your sway
A needle, I won't mourn :
where is my stack of hay?

By Comte Almaviva

From Mahmood Darwish's Edward Said homage, seems pertinent to many nowadays

These are excerpts from a translation I did for the poem (full poem in my translations page on the right)

...

“And what of identity?”

“Nothing but self-defense

Identity is the child of birth

Yet, in the end, is the creativity

Of our own self

There is no inheritance of a past

I am the manifold

Within, is my ever renewing without

But I still belong to the victim’s question

Had I not been from there,

I would have trained my heart to raise,

-over there

The deer of metaphor

So carry your homeland

Wherever you may go-

And be a narcissist if you must!”

....

He loves a land and leaves it behind

“Neither he, nor I

But a reader wondering

What poetry might say amidst catastrophe

Blood

and Blood

and Blood

in your Homeland

In my name, in your name,

In the almond flower, in a banana’s peel

In an enfant’s milk

In light and in shadow

In the grain of wheat, in the salt jar/

Skilled snipers who always hit their target

Blood

And Blood

And Blood

This land is too small

for the blood of its children

Who stand as offering at the doorsteps of resurrection

Is this land truly blessed or is it anointed

With Blood

And Blood

And Blood

Neither sand nor prayer can dry this blood

Justice in the pages of the holy book

Isn’t enough for the martyrs

To enjoy the liberty of walking atop the clouds.

Blood in the day,

Blood in the dark

Blood in the words

He says: The poem may play host to defeat,

A ray of light glittering in the heart of a Guitar

A messiah on a horse wounded

by the beauty of metaphor.

The beautiful is nothing but the presence

Of reality in the form!

Romeo and Juliet in popular neighborhood scene II - the balcony scene

روميو وجولييت بتوع حارة شعبية 

، المشهد الثاني 

المشهد الثاني - منظر البلكونة

(الطقس عاصف، روميو ملتحف ببطانية في زقاق مظلم وراء بناية الحاج عوض)

روميو: جولييت، جولييت! ردي علي بقى ، دة الوقت إتأخر والبرد واكل صوابعي (يلتقط تفاحة من على الأرض بقرف ويرميها على شباك البلكون، ثم يدرك أنه غير متأكد أي غرفة هي غرفة جولييت) يا دهوتي! أعمل إيه دلوقت؟ أنا مش عاوز أروح شهيد لا للحب ولا لغيره! ده أنا حتى بيغمى علي عند حكيم الأسنان! (يختبئ  وراء برميل القمامة)

جولييت (تظهر بملابس النوم على البلكونة) : مين إللي هناك!

روميو : أنا روميو يا جولييت

جولييت : سي روميو؟ ليش متأخر كدة؟

روميو : أنا؟ بقالي هنا في البرد   ساعتين، اتأخرت إنت ليه؟

جولييت : اتأخرت ليه؟ هو أنا خاتم بصباعك أروح وأجي زي ما إنت عايز؟ اشكر ربك اني جيت، وعلى كل حال ما هي الساعة نص الليل

روميو : الساعة اتنين الصبح

جولييت: آه تمام اتنين يعني نص الليل أمال  يعني إيه؟ غروب الشمس؟

روميو : جولييت، أنا استحمل الشمس والمطر والبرد علشانك، بس ما أتحملش بعدك ، انتي بتحبيني بجد يا جولييت؟

جولييت: روميو ، قبل ما رد على سؤالك يعني من غير مؤاخذة عايزاك تحلفلي انك بتحبني بجد

روميو : أحلف...

جولييت: تحلف بإيه يا سي روميو؟

روميو: أحلف... بالعيش ولملح

جولييت: يا دهوتي ! بالعيش والملح  ؟ هي دي آخرتك يا جولييت ؟ بعد ناقص كمان تحلفلي بالفسيخ وببرميل الملوحة

روميو : إنت بتعيريني يعني؟ ومالو الفسيخ؟ ده اللي علمني ورباني ووداني المدرسة والكلية

جولييت: خلي عندك شوية رومانسية يا أخي، هو انت في الجامعة ما قريتش رواية ؟

روميو : قريت...

جولييت: خلاص ، إحلفلي بحاجة من بتوع الروايات

روميو : زي إيه يعني ؟

جولييت: احلف بالقمر

روميو: بالقمر ؟

جولييت: ايوه، قل لي "أحلفلك بالقمر ، بالقمر الذي  بزين بالفضة مثمر الشجر "

روميو: خلاص أحلف بالقمر

جولييت: القمر إللي إيه؟

روميو: بالقمر الذي يزين بالفضة...  (يتعثر بالباقي )

 جولييت: مثمر الشجر

روميو: أيوه ده

جولييت : لا تحلف بالقمر يا حبيبي، ده بيتغير كل شهر ، أحسن أخاف ان حبك لي يتغير زي القمر

روميو: خلص بقى أحلف بالعيش والملح، دي حاجة مستقرة تبقى أبدية

جولييت: رجعنا للعيش والملح؟

روميو: طيب بالقمر

جولييت: لا يا روميو يا حبيبي ، ما تحلفليش بالقمر

روميو: خلاص، أحلف بأبوي الحاج سلامة

جولييت: بالحاج  سلامة؟ بعد ده اللي كان ناقص انت إنسان معندكش حس شاعري خالص

روميو : لا قمر ولا شجر ولا عيش ولا ملح ولا أبوي ولا أمي، إيه الليلة المتهببة دي؟ انتي مش حترسي على بر بقى ؟

جولييت : انت بتطول لسانك علي يا جدع إنت؟ إن ما كنتش عاوز تتكلم عدل يبقى أحسن تخرس وتتكتم. إسمع لما أقولك يا روميو يا حقير، إن كنت ناوي على التخبيص، ده أنا جولييت  بنت عوض ما ليش كبير (تلتفت إلى الداخل ) يا أما يا أما، في حد بالشارع بعاكسني

(الست  زينات تظهر وفي يدها دلو ماء كبير )

الست زينات: خشي جوا يا جولييت إنت بتعملي إيه برا وج الصبح ؟ فين الكلب ده أنا ح وريه

(روميو يقف  مذهولاً فينزل دلو الماء عليه ، ثم يعود إلى رشده بسرعة، ويحتمي وراء برميل القمامة والماء ينهمر، ثم يحمل غطاء البرميل كدرع ويهرب إلى الشارع الرئيسي

روميو (لنفسه) : هو قمر وثمر وشجر وعيش وملح، هو أنا بضرب مندل حتى أعرف هي بتفكر ازاي ؟ أنا والله مأستحقش الذل ده كله !

(نهاية المشهد الثاني )

Romeo and Juliet in a popular neighborhood Scene 1 , روميو وجولييت بتوع حارة شعبية المشهد الأول

Scene 1, (the equivalent of the ball scene)

روميو وجولييت بتوع حارة شعبية 

المشهد الأول

(عرس أحد أولاد الحي)

روميو (سايب صحابه ورايح قاعد عل كرسي جنب جولييت ) : ما شاء الله ، اسمك إيه يا قمر!

جولييت : أفندم؟ أنا جوليت وإنت اسمك إيه يا خويا يلي شكلك ما  بتختشيش؟

روميو : محسوبك روميو ، إبن الحج سلامة 

جولييت : يا خيبتي، الحج   سلامة ؟ بتاع الفسيخ؟ ابعد الله يخليك أحسن ما يشوفك أبوي يروح موديني بستين داهية . هو أنا ناقصة؟

روميو : ومالو الفسخاني يا ولية إنت؟ رجل ملو هدومه، عنده عمارتين ، غير محلات الفسيخ والسمك المجمد

جولييت : لأ والنبي مش قصدي أقلل من القيمة ، واديك شكلك متعلم وحاطط كرافتة، بس هو إنت ماتعرفش إنه في عداوة قديمة بين أبوك وأبوية؟ قديمة أوي، من وقت حادثة التسمم

روميو: التسمم ؟

جولييت : أيوه، أصله كدا ولا مؤاخذة أبوك راح بايع أبوي حتتين فسيخ شكلهم فاسد، وراح فيهم اتنين من الزباين طوارئ ، وبعده مكدبكش خبر راحو  إشتكو في  القسم اللي راح  قافل المطعم بتاع أبوي بالشمع الأحمر مدة شهرين كدا، ومن وقتها أبوي حالف يمين إنو لو حد من عيلة الحج سلامة قرب صوب حد من عيلتنا، حيضربه بالهرواه على خلقته

روميو :  طب هو في مطعم في العالم بيقدم  فسيخ؟ على العموم  ،جولييت، أنا معجب فيك خلاص، مش من النهاردة على فكرة، ولكن من الشهر إلي فات، يوم مع شفتك عل كورنيش بتقزقزي لب، وأنا قلت البنت دي عندها "جي نه سي كوا "

جولييت : جي نه إيه يا  خوي؟ طيب خلاص امشي دلوقتي ، علشان الواد إبن عمي لسه زمان جي يوصلني البيت. يلا  سيبني بلاش فضايح يا سي روميو... 

روميو: جولييت، أنا عايز اشوفك تاني، أنا لازم اشوفك تاني

جولييت: طيب خلاص غلبت معاك... انت عارف البيت بتاعنا

روميو : لأ هو حاعرف منين؟

جولييت : إن ما كنتش عارف إسأل عن عمارة الحج عوض بتاع مطاعم "الأكل السليم" ، ألف مين يدلك، جانب العمارة في شارع صغير ما يوديش على أي حاجة، وفيه  بلا مؤاخذة كده برميل زبالة كبير. إبقى تعاله هناك صوب نص ليل وأندهلي برومنطيقية كدة من ورا البرميل ونتحدث براحتنا

روميو : حتوقفيني ورا الزبالة؟ ده أنا والنبي  عندي بكالوريوس هندسة

جولييت: كدة أضمن ، علشان لو والدي درى بينا أو شفني عالبلكونه أنبهك تروح مستخبي  وسط الزبالة في البرميل لوج الصبح. يلا روح بقا ده الواد إبن عمي وصل.

(جوليت تخرج من الصالة)

روميو : دي آخرتها بقا يا سي روميو ، تروح ناطط من برميل الزبالة. أما صحيح بقولو الحب أعمى، لأ ده أعمى وأهبل درجة أولى.

(يخرج)

نهاية المشهد الأول

 By Comte Almaviva

            

Mihyar al Daylami - possibly my favorite classical poet ever

As not to end my weekend on a cynical note, before I go back to being a scientist,  this is one of my favorite poets that  we are not  taught in school, Mihyar al Daylami and possibly the best verses of praise  in  a woman 

قد قنعنا أن نرقبَ الأحلاما           لو أذنتم لمقلة ٍ أن تناما

لا أحلّ الفراقَ من رشإٍ في           كم أحلَّت نواه نفسا حراما

صار حظي من بعده عشق ذكرا    ه إلى أن عشقتُ فيه الملاما

translation (but it is so much better in arabic!)

I shall find contentment
Awaiting the passage of a dream
Should you give consent
For my eyelids to fall asleep

My separation from Rasha2 (Gazelle)
Did not create within me
As many forbidden breaths,
As the mere intent did make

The only fortune I held thereafter
Was so confined to the loving of her memory
That I even fell in love

 -- with reproach






  

 

Template poetry of love and of scorn

Poetry is the consummate mercenary,  it can adapt to anyone, and anything really (often for the right price, ask Al-Mutanabbi!). This is a template poem that can be used in addressing a woman one loves,  all it needs is a two syllable name to place where I have left a ____ !

Oh Pygmalion! Had you known
That _______   was on her way
Would have you dared shown
Galatea the light of day?

A queen who needs no throne
Her smile does hold a sway
Lovely April’s sun at dawn
Lovelier her smile in May!

Her love makes  my words  tremble
Heavens ! The will that I may say:
“In your voice I hear the choir,
of nightingales when they pray!”

 --
The principle is universal, now  in Arabic, but in the opposite context :

نسيتك وما الليالي طوال        لوجه القمر لست أبدا  مثال

وما كل صعب بجميل           وما الشوك إلا صعب المنال

ظننت أن العيش بصعب          بدونك وضرب م المحال 

فوجدت روحي عادت إل        ي والنوم صار سمة الليالي 

وما عاد الجمال فيك حصرا     وصار في كل الكون الجمال 

No trademark on the templates !

By Comte Almaviva 

The oldest profession in the world?

Paphnuce was monk in Christian Egypt, at the time of Saint Anthony. One day, while praying with his fellow monks in the desert, he remembers that in his youth he was in love with a certain belle de jour called Thais, whose beauty had him in a trance until the day he saw the light and shunned the world for a life or prayer and hardship in the desert. Paphnuce decides that as an ultimate service to God, he shall go to Alexandria and seek Thais, and lead her from her life of sin to a life of virtue and righteousness, thus saving a lost soul from eternal damnation.

Paphnuce walks the desert and endures hardship and misfortune until he reaches her house. Then, one look at her is enough for all the religious piety and zealous accumulated through his countless years away from the temptation of mankind, to give way to raging desire and lust. At the end of the story, Thais ends up dying while taking her vows in a monastery, as pure as the day she was born, while Paphnuce ends up with eternal damnation.

Morality lessons are often as thick and heavy on the soul as the complete works of Charles Dickens are on a disinterested middle school student, and, if anything, Anatole France meant for his tale to be one of the pointlessness of the moral discourse, of how rigid moralizers, even in the context best suited to their otherwise fairly unimportant skills, end up ultimately falling into the same temptations that normal humans know, not the least of them being ego, greed, and lust. Being rather unprepared to face such temptations, they end up going to the extreme depths of depravity and degradation.

Today’s moralizers are far more annoying than Paphnuce ever was, being as persistent as a fruit fly that joins your dinner party uninvited. Add a doctorate to their name and they are as irritating as a fruit fly that comes to your dinner party uninvited, then demands respect from the attendees on the grounds that it knows more about the best ways for recycling than you do (fruit flies are notoriously fussy about not mixing up recyclables with non-recyclables as plastic upsets their digestive system).

One of those purveyors of superfluous yet excruciatingly long-winded monologues on the best ways to living our lives in the most uncomfortable and most affected manner possible – and who unfortunately happens to have a doctorate – is Dr. Youssef al Qaradawi. In the days of yore, and by that I mean a few months back, this person  was rather content to tell us how best to lead our lives on his weekly program on a certain information-dispensing-medium-with-some-40-million-viewers. I once tried to watch, but then decided that I don’t need someone delving into the deepest corners of theology to tell me how far away from my neighbor’s dog I should tread (living in Paris, such information is rather superfluous and the lesson is usually learned the hard way within a week). Finally, and for sanity reasons, my conclusion was that all of the 40 million viewers had been blessed with enough desire for intellectual stimulation that they would all go on doing something more important while he is dispensing his advice, like arranging their spices in alphabetical order. You can imagine my disappointment when someone I know told me that she is an avid follower since she actually feels light coming from his eyes when he speaks. It was there and then that I decided that when it comes to certain candles, cursing the darkness is the only reasonable recourse for sensible human beings.

I was always willing to consider Dr. Qaradawi to be a social science experiment that forty million viewers untake seriously on a weekly basis. After all, if people believe what someone tells them, they tend not to put that belief into practice, for fear of earning society’s approval – at which point they wouldn’t be able to look themselves in the mirror the next day. However, in the past couple of months, he started addressing people as political masses rather than as social beings. In this, and much like the popes of medieval times who used to lead the troops into battle (oh they did), he was trying to use any religious authority he possesses for temporal political gains. Donning a façade of the utmost piety he could muster, he pulled a Pope Urban II trick by telling people that it was their religious duty to revolt against this or that ruler.

I guess many people tolerated that, for the very basic principle that if you point at a random Arab ruler and claim he is corrupt and oppressive, the chance of you missing the mark are just about as high as the chance of a three legged turtle who had just had a large meal beating a well focused rabbit in a race. However, he suddenly decided that while the first three revolutions that he had endorsed were pure and unadulterated, the one happening in Bahrain was a sectarian battle cry of one sect against another, and that people of one sect were actually engaging in systematic violence against another sect. Many people were shocked by the unabashed condemnation of what was not much different from what he had fully upheld a few days before. A few days later, though, and another protest movement in Syria received his ringing endorsement, as did that of Yemen. At the base of it, the demands of all protesters had been the same, the oppression - to varying degrees of brutality, but let’s not discuss shades of evil here - of the same spirit, and, as a matter of fact, the Bahraini movement was pretty much the most peaceful of all the movements and even had me, a rather perennial cynic, voicing a tacit approval.

At any rate, as violence goes, he didn’t seem to have many qualms about its moral repercussions when he offered heavenly absolution to whoever assassinates Ghaddafi. Beyond that, by offering celestial pardons for worldly sins, which was a practice commonplace for Popes in the middle ages, he neatly tied in with Ghaddafi’s ‘New Crusades’ theme (Now this is turning into one sick fancy dress party!)

There are two possible explanations beyond which I can see none for Qaradawi words that are, honestly, as pointless and as dangerous as a broken pencil that is carrying the poison of a Golden Dart Frog.  The first is that he actually believed in all Arab revolutions and he did not wish to put them into a sectarian context. However, after finding out that passion fruit does not grow in Qatar and is quite expensive to import, he decided not to risk losing his supply by going against the wishes of the Qatari ruling family, which tells him when to endorse, when to denounce, and when to lose the faculty of speech altogether. Now that is a fairly sensible reason for dissimulation, I mean, would we want to come between a man and his supply of exotic fruit? (He might be getting more than a bucket of passion fruit a week from the royal family, but the principle is the same.)

The other reason is probably less sensible and would be the simple fact that he does believe in the superiority of his own sect and religion over those of other people.  The belief in religious supremacy was a hallmark of medieval Popes  and societies, but far from it that I should accuse him of such contemptuous behavior, so I shall assume that it is all about passion fruit, for now.

Common sense dictates that when people present their very own lives – be it wise or unwise (and it is not up to an outsider to judge) - as offerings at the doorstop of an Annunciation, and some demagogue vilifies their movement without evidence, it becomes – to borrow his own terms – our duty to criticize, censure, and even disparage his remarks, while his religious authority has to be questioned, and, if needed, openly mocked.  Should we do that, we hit two stones with one bird: Above all, it is an exercise in social freedom : that we should not fear words, and should not fear criticizing what warrants criticism, irrespective of the authority we face. Of more immediate concern is that by discrediting that religious demagogue and rigid moralizer, we shall manage to avoid the ugly scenario of civil and religious strife that his words, if heeded, might lead to.

For now, I can only hope that people see beyond Qaradawi’s words and that he does not dull the edge of belief they have in their own sense of morality and in each other. As for me, I only look forward to the day that a Lady of the night, as an ultimate service to God, decides to walk through the desert until she reaches Qaradawi’s place of dwelling, and guides him from a life of sin towards a life of virtue and righteousness; for what he is practicing by preaching hate – for money or for baser instincts of religious supremacy –  qualifies as being the oldest profession in the world.

By Comte Almaviva 

Shahryar, on the two thousandth night

مالك يا شهريار"

حالك حال الغريب

أنسيت أني سر من الأسرار

في وجهي بشرى ليل السمر

وفي عيني عتمة ليلٍ خطر

وجسدي جواب الغد البعيد

" على مستحيلٍ من الأمس القريب؟

...شهرزاد"

ألفا ليلة مرت ولم أدرك معنى الخطاب

أأنت حقيقة؟

أم أكذوبة من فجر الخليقة

أأنت بشر؟

أم إبنة الطبيعة؟

وجدت لتحبس روحي في مخدعها

فأنسى فضاءً بلا حدود

وفي عينين عسليتين

ينحبس معنى الوجود

من انت؟ من أنت؟

أكل شيء؟ أم لا شيء؟

إن لم تضئ روحك عن الجواب

فلي في الفضاء من سراب

وفي الصحاري من رمال

وفي  الشجر من ظلال

ما يغنيني عن تلك القيود

"وما ينسيني ألم السؤال

إذهب بعيدا يا طفلا"

وجرب النسيان

ففي رمال الصحراء

في نجوم السماء 

وفي دعاء الكروان

سأكون لك رؤيا

فتعود لي رجلا

فأنا كل ما كان

كل ما يكون

قناعي لم يكشفه بعد إنسان

فلو قدر لك أيها الشقي

بقبسات روحي علما

استقوى على عشرتي

 "يوما؟ -

by Comte Almaviva (no TM!)

Oscar Wilde and gulf monarchs

Poor Oscar Wilde. While he believed that people who know nothing make far better company than those who know everything, surely he lived at the time when the telephone was making its first baby steps, the telegraph still the only stumbling method for trans-continental communication, and, in other parts of the world, energetic ponies and sensible pigeons were still the only means of telling someone that you do not care enough to come see them in person.

Poor Oscar, how he would have had to change his mind today!

People who knew nothing used to freely admit it, and, under proper social constraints, always contributed precisely to that extent of their knowledge. But today, people who know nothing have far too many tools of conveying the emptiness within to a limitless audience of their peers.

Trouble with emptiness, It leads to resonance, and, if stupidity scales as frequencies and amplitudes do, then - just as an ill-judged high F from a Wagnerian soprano could rupture your eardrum - these resonances should easily pierce the lowest bounds of common sense assumed in post-agriculture homo sapiens.

So, how is that related to gulf monarchs and royal families? Well, it seems many people, under the banner of sense and reason, have decided to present the utmost challenge to the very sense and the very reason by defending the necessity of maintaining that dull surplus to the history of humanity in a capacity that actually affects the way far more intelligent living, breathing beings conduct their lives.

One common theme seems to be in the vein of lowering the necessary qualifications required to call a member of those wretched families – families of the royal variety naturally - a reformer. Suddenly, under the auspices of new standards concocted by many an educated and civilized person and freely distributed over new and old media by fellow sensible souls, apparently, King Abdullah of the Saudi Arabia ™, the Crown Prince of Bahrain © , and Sultan Qaboos of Oman ® , are all reformers who should be given a chance to lead their people to a better and brighter future.

Very well, that may be, and far from it for me to claim any knowledge beyond anyone else’s – so I won’t. But as logic dictates, I shall have to write down on a piece of paper the new rules defining a reform-minded leader:

a- The combined age of his four wives should be superior to his own age.
b- One of those four wives has to be foreign-born, preferably with blue eyes
c- He should speak at least one language. Reading is a plus.
d-He should be able to count till nine, and have others handy to help him count beyond that
e-Should be blissfully ignorant of something called inflation, hence should be capable of bribing his     people when he needs to, with their own money.

      f-Should possess an Italian supercar

Armed with these new definitions, I could certainly see why some people of the highly civilized, liberal and reasonable type would believe in the Crown Prince of Bahrain © as a leader of the reform movement, or the very youthful King Abdullah ™ as an agent of modernization. Then again, apart from the fact that King Abdullah can’t speak a single language properly nor read it, and that the Crown Prince probably only has three wives up till now, they do rather satisfy the new list of demands for a reformer. Who am I to argue?

But perhaps the issue goes deeper, and there exist far more interesting reasons for supporting the royal families. After all, apparently the case for democracy in gulf countries is just non-existent. In the case of Bahrain, those calling for democracy are apparently extremists and their incarceration could be tacitly approved (but not overtly since one has to keep the civilized and liberal guise). Even worse, apparently there are even more dangerous extremists who call for a republic, with an elected president and an elected government! Shock and horror, people choosing for themselves when there exist those  bright and brilliant minds already in the form of, say, Al-Khalifa?

It could possibly be all about the talents that were sent from an unseen censer to that unparalleled family, that it may rule till the end of days over a happy and content populace. However, if Fate had decided to concentrate all the superior qualities of the human race into one bloodline, then either fate is incredibly cruel, or alternatively, all descendents of that line are born with the fortunes of a daily lottery-winner. Setting aside a cruel divine intervention, even Bernard Shaw professed that his offspring together with Isadora Duncan might be neither intelligent nor beautiful, all the while the two of them were considered, respectively,  to be  the most intelligent and the most beautiful of their time (or so the  story goes, still the point is valid nonetheless).

Sadly, the pure fact is that those archaic families tend to descend from a line that at the base of it was skilled at killing and conquering rather than at chess and mathematics, while inbreeding over the years hasn’t helped much either.  At the end of the day, we have ended up with unintelligent polygamous megalomaniacs who - unlike say Napoleon or Lenin - are only barely literate, cheat through school, but then still believe they have a divine right to rule over much more intelligent and far more interesting people.

Another argument those from the self avowed liberal and civilized race project is that those reformist monarchs ™ are far better than the alternative, which so happens to be a theocracy. Beyond this seemingly unerring capacity to detect what is in other people’s hearts and minds, which, as someone who is unpossessing of it I can not possibly comprehend,  might I suggest that these monarchs are already the very embodiment of a rule-by-divine-decree?

Emperors of yore figured that one out; they knew that people did not see in them the shining light of philosophy, arts, and human thought. In fact, any Roman dynasty that spilled over three generations risked becoming a running joke and was quickly replaced by the army or by the masses. Constantine knew that, and he introduced the concept of the emperor as Isapostolos, an equal to the apostles, and used the church effectively to cement his rule. Modern gulf monarchs ™ use the same techniques: they claim a religious pedigree, and rely on a class of utterly corrupt and well-fed preachers and religious scholars, who do their bidding just as effectively as ambitious bishops did during the times of Constantine (and isn’t that precisely the difference between a priest and a prophet?  Priests justify the handiwork of their benefactor to the oppressed masses.) At the very least, true dictators are deprived of that very formidable armor which is the hallmark of a theocracy.

The only trouble is, Constantine died some seventeen hundred years ago, while gulf monarchial families live as an anachronism, a persistent pebble in the hourglass of time. Aren’t people allowed to look beyond them? I wonder…

 People who claim education, common sense, civic maturity, impartiality, and yet refuse to support others who call for an unwavering democracy, either know nothing, in which case they should accept that fact, and stop resonating with their peers, or they know everything, but are dissimulating their true beliefs and desires. If they do know everything, then Oscar Wilde is right after all and they are indeed horrible company, since what lies below the surface of their souls cannot possibly be worth exploring.

Thoughts are rather curious creatures. You might try to hide what you really believe within the deepest abysses of your heart, but, if enough people share your opinion, hiding it is not much easier than trying to hide the sun behind the moon. It may happen, but it will take a giant leap of stupidity not to know that it is there and that it will show up within a few minutes. With that, the question has to be posed to the civilized and educated supporters of princes©  and kings™  and sultans®  :

“Do you know everything, or do you know nothing?”

By Comte Almaviva