Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Random African Proverb Watch    [Stephen Spruiell]

I'm in Iowa doing research for an NRODT piece about ethanol, and since I was here I thought I'd drop in on Bill and Hillary yesterday and take stock of that particular circus. My write-up is on the homepage, but as is often the case, many interesting bits fell outside the scope of the article. For instance, I remember two months ago Mark wrote a post about how "Africa is an apparently bottomless source for tribal proverbs that all exemplify the progressive communitarian worldview."

With that in mind, I thought I'd post the following excerpt from Hillary's stump speech yesterday:

There's an old saying that one of the African tribes uses. When they meet people on a pathway, they don't say, like we do, "How are you?" They say, "How are the children?"

Ah, yes. I had forgotten how much wisdom there was to be found in the old sayings of one of the African tribes. Because here in America, people never inquire about the well-being of one another's offspring. It's like nobody even thinks to ask. One wonders, though, how these Africans greet the childless. Does "the children" become some sort of euphemism in that case?

Hillary then proceeded to have a rhetorical conversation with herself in which she was the president:

Well that's the kind of president I want to be. "How are the children of America?" "They're doing well. Because we're helping them. We're reaching out to them. And we're making sure that they have access to universal pre-kindergarten... [etc.]"

Of course, that was nothing compared to Bill Clinton's story about his shape-shifting caddy. For that you'll have to just read the article.

09/04 01:49 PMShare