He must have a long spoon that must eat with the devil

September 1st, 2013 by Charles Cameron

[ 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.

Posted in America, bush, Charles Cameron, dictator, Doublequotes, monasticism, national security, saudi arabia, Specs, state department, syria, Uncategorized | 1 comment

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  1. Charles Cameron:

    September 7th, 2013 at 6:28 pm

    Oh, and there’s always Jennifer Lopez and colleagues, seen here in Dances with Dictators:

    It was true for Beyonce, Usher, Nelly Furtado, 50 Cent and Mariah Carey, all of whom performed for Libyan strongman Moammar Ghadafi. (Now that he’s dead after the revolution there, that gravy train has stopped, at least.) It was true for Hilary Swank and Jean Claude Van Damme, who celebrated the birthday of brutal Chechnyan leader Ramzan Kadyrov. It was true for Kanye West, who collected an estimated $3 million for his performance at the wedding reception of Aisultan Nazarbayev, grandson of Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev. Basketball player Dennis Rodman seems to think his visits to North Korea are some sort of diplomatic outreach, while instead they expose him for the attention-seeker that he is.
    .
    But the case of singer-dancer-actress Jennifer Lopez is perhaps most troubling. Lopez this summer serenaded Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov – even reprising, Marilyn Monroe-style, a “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” performance. The Central Asian leader is considered one of the worst violators of human rights, according to organizations which track such behavior.

    Entertainment as food for thought.