Sluggo Needs a Nap

The Western philosophical tradition is founded on
the belief that the execution of Socrates for blaspheming
the gods of Athens was an injustice. When British
Muslims carry placards reading "Butcher those who
mock Islam," they are making their differences with
that tradition depressingly plain.

There's a lesson in this for those who would have
us believe that what this cartoon conflagration
represents is a conflict of civilizations. There
is a conflict all right, not between civilizations, but
within one, and it pits those who would make Islam
barbaric and those who would keep it civilized. In
that struggle, the heirs of Socrates and the heirs of
al-Farabi must make common cause.

I was going to link to a very nice story in the Metro section of the Times, but it turns out Clyde Haberman is one of the shadowy figures lurking behind the Times Select security wall. So, the hell with it.

It concerned Dr. Charles Vialotti who practiced medicine right off Carmine street in the Village from 1941 until a couple of days ago when he retired at the age of 96. Dr. Vialotti worked without a nurse or a receptionist, kept his records on index cards, did not accept insurance but charged little and sometimes nothing. He made house calls. Almost needless to say, his patients were fiercely loyal to him.

He practiced a kind of medicine that health insurance, liability insurance and government regulations make not only impossible, but unthinkable today. He pulled them and he planted them. And in between he knew all there was to know about you and your body. He was always there and he was personally concerned with your health. You trusted him.

As it happens, I've had two experiences with nonagenarian medicoes. The first was in college when I slithered downtown to Webster Groves, Missouri and slipped furtively into the first doctors office I saw. I was suffering from a social malady.

I don't remember his name, but he was a wee tiny little guy with a steady eye and a steady hand. As I stammered out my symptoms he fixed me with his bright little eyes and after I finished he just stared at me for what seemed like days. Then he shook his head and smiled. He gave me my medicine and had me come back for another dose. He charged me $5 which included a lecture. It was some of the most intelligent and insightful thoughts on sex I've ever heard from any source. Of course, I was seventeen and what I knew about sex would fit in a Trojan. But he treated me like an adult and I felt like one when I left his office.

The other occasion was when the Goddess and I needed a large battery of shots for our trip to China. Third world hell-holes are murder on your behind.

I have no idea why we went to this particular guy, but he was older than my college doctor and steady neither of hand or eye. In the six or eight times we had to see him there was never anybody else in the waiting room. Thankfully, he had a nurse who was not much younger, but much more -- how do I put it -- in the room. She always double checked the bottle he filled the syringe from, but when he got ready to stick us, she always had an anxious look on her face, along the lines of "Ohhhh, I hope this doesn't go horribly wrong."

It didn't and we came back microbe free, as far as I know. Our very last trip to him our shots were administered by a young man who had purchased the older doctor's practice. I have a feeling we were his very last patients. He and my college doctor are probably in the big waiting room in the sky, looking forward to meeting Dr. Violatti.

They're callous and feeble cartoons, cooked up as a
provocation by a conservative newspaper exploiting
the general Muslim prohibition on images of the
Prophet Muhammad to score cheap points about
freedom of expression.

This is in the Critic's Notebook feature of The Arts page, but it does clarify things to know this was perpetrated by a conservative newspaper. I thought I detected the fine Italian hand of Karl Rove in all this.

The Western papers printed these sacrilegious cartoons
on the pretext of freedom of expression, so let’s see if
they mean what they say and also print these Holocaust
cartoons,” he asserted.

Just try to stop me, Farid Mortazavi of Hamkablam
newspaper! I’ll run as many of your Holocaust cartoons
here as I can fit; they’ll likely be funnier than anything
ever published in Jyllands-Posten.

So, the fuss about the Religious Hatred Bill was all
for nothing. It's not needed. As this cartoon affair
clearly demonstrates, no one, and certainly not
the UK press, is going to do anything to offend
Muslims from now on. Muslims have set the terms
of the debate: they decide what it is that offends
them, and from then on it's a line we can't cross -
ostensibly because of our civilised concern for their
delicate sensibilities, but in reality because we're
scared.

The whole thing has been a controversy
manufactured by the Islamists, starting with the
Danish imams who tirelessly toured the Middle East
to whip up the hysteria - adding on the way some
particularly offensive cartoons of their own - and
continued by Arab regimes only too happy to
deflect popular aggression onto Western targets:
something they're well practiced at. It's simply not
true that Mohammed is never portrayed in Islamic
culture, and there's certainly a rich tradition of his
portrayal in the West, but, as usual, it's the hard-
liners who've set the terms of this debate, claiming
to speak for all Muslims - not without opposition in
the Muslim world - and being taken at their word
by the British establishment.