He must have a long spoon that must eat with the devil
[ by Charles Cameron — borrowing my title from Shakespeare, though Chaucer and Erasmus said it first ]
.
You may or may not like John Kerry. You may or may not like Assad. You may or may not like Mother Teresa, or Michèle Duvalier and Papa Doc. Rumsfeld and or Saddam. GW Bush or Abdullah bin Abd al-Aziz Al Saud. But paired photos of someone you dislike with someone many of us loathe is a neat visual tactic in which the not-so-bad party of the first part is tarred by association with the way-more-evil party of the second.
Does it ever work the other way around, though? is the party of the second part ever redeemed through contact with the party of the first? or even relieved of a few tens or hundreds of thousand dollars for authentic, charitable purposes?
What would I know?
The simplest way in which the two images above can be seen as similar to one another is that each one features someone named Teresa. But that’s not the point.
And I do have to say, that restaurant in Damascus looks pleasant enough.
September 7th, 2013 at 6:28 pm
Oh, and there’s always Jennifer Lopez and colleagues, seen here in Dances with Dictators:
Entertainment as food for thought.