Skip to main content

Sound Bites

I am listening to Suicide of the West audio-book these days, while taking my walk. Jonah Goldberg's reference to the Hamlet quote about worms and kings made me look up the text to read. The book is full of interesting asides like this one but I think the main thesis as stated in the sub-title was laid out early on. Humans are meant to be tribal and have a natural tendency to see those outside the tribe as rivals and enemies who need to be overcome. 

In the west we are returning to a primitive state by indulging in various forms of tribalism on both sides of the political aisle. The forays into history where such examples of tribalism run rife are interesting but there was not much more I learned that I already did in the first chapter. I will get through this book in hopes there may be little detours it will prompt like reading Hamlet. The author aims to be both provocative and cover a tremendous amount of ground. With that combination, the only way to get the action moving is to over-stuff the book with sound-bites and wry observations about human nature, history, economics, religion and politics. It is as if Goldberg were aiming to edify his readers in one fell swoop on every topic they could possibly care to know about. 

If I was twenty five years younger and as gauche as I was back then, I am sure I would have devoured the book and used the crumbs of wisdom from it to act like I actually knew things and had "informed" opinions on them. It would serve as the cram-sheet for someone who wanted to look cool without having put time and effort to understanding what makes the world the place that it is. So there is a demographic for this book most certainly - I am just too old and jaded to be a fit. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...