Dear Log,
Laurie Anderson once famously said: "I don't believe there's such a thing as TV. I mean, they just keep showing the same pictures over and over. And when they talk, they just make sounds that more or less synch up with their lips. That's what I think!"
And I'm beginning to think the same thing about Asia and Africa: that they don't really exist, and are just things that the press made up so that people in the Americas and Europe could think "sure, our governments are bad, but they don't really need fixing because they're not as bad as Asia or Africa, nor especially those crazy bits in the Middle East and India!"
Except that my theory has a few minor problems. First off, how to explain to people in Asia and Africa that they don't exist. (Altho if one tries to explain to people there that Asia and Africa didn't exist, but are recent inventions that they were dropped into, à la some kinda crazy Valis / Dark City freaktion, it would have the benificial side effect that if people believed it, they would presumably stop bickering over "holy places".) And second off, the problem is that there is isomorphic idiocy in Northern Ireland, a place inconveniently in Europe:
"Northern Ireland still carries the identifying mark of any society at war: two conflicting narratives held by two communities, each seeing the world completely differently."
I think what would be welcome at this point is a global outbreak of (de)constructive nihilism, so that people could stand up and say both narratives are grifty lies and, true or not, I'll have no more to do with them! Revoke my soulfully oppressed minority identity card, see if I care! I'm not mad as hell anymore, and I'm not gonna take it!"
I think it was Rumsfeld who said something to the effect that the prisoners at 'Camp X-Ray' were being treated even better than our own domestic prison inmates....the US is the richest 3rd world country on the planet it would seem.
Northern Ireland is your main counterexample? What, did Turkey move the border of Asia to the Danube while we weren't looking?
Anyway, the solution is obvious: Europe doesn't exist either. And we're all brains in vats.
-- Frag.
