Beginning Is Not Only A Kind Of

Exile Is Strangely Compelling To Think About But Terrible To Experience. It Is The Unhealable Rift Forced Between A Human Being And A Native Place, Between The Self And Its True Home: Its Essential Sadness Can Never Be Surmounted. And While It Is True That Literature And History Contain Heroic, Romantic, Glorious, Even Triumphant Episodes In An Exile’s Life, These Are No More Than Efforts Meant To Overcome The Crippling Sorrow Of Estrangement.

Since The Time Of Homer Every European, In What He Could Say About The Orient, Was A Racist, An Imperialist, And Almost Totally Ethnocentric.

The Other View Is Of The Official United States, The United States Of Armies And Interventions. The United States That In 1953 Overthrew The Nationalist Government Of Mossadegh In Iran And Brought Back The Shah.

Appeals To The Past Are Among The Commonest Of Strategies In Interpretations Of The Present.

The Central Fact For Me Is, I Think, That The [role Of The] Intellectual... Cannot Be Played Without A Sense Of Being Someone Whose Place It Is Publicly To Raise Embarrassing Questions, To Confront Orthodoxy And Dogma (rather Than To Produce Them), To Be Someone Who Cannot Easily Be Co-opted By Governments Or Corporations, And Whose Raison D'etre Is To Represent All Those People And Issues That Are Routinely Forgotten Or Swept Under The Rug.