June 01, 2009

Oversexed, Overpaid and Over There with the Noble Savages

Or: Joanie Making Politics on Her Back

I admit I hate the Dutch. I hate the way one, being German, is treated in that pokey little country (it has become a bit better over the years, but I still hate them), I hate that they nevertheless have no compunctions about taking our money, and I hate that sanctimonious post-war attitude even more because the valiant Dutch had been the only people raided by the Germans in WWII that surrendered without firing a single shot and who delivered their Jews gratuitously and free platform edge. I hate their ugly, pink, fat and blonde royals whom even two generations of inordinately goodlooking German husbands weren't able to prettify and I hate, once again, their sanctimoniousness which showed, impressively although not exclusively, when they disinvited the future father-in-law of the future fat, pink and blonde king from the wedding because he (the father-in-law) had once hold a mediocre office in the Cabinet of a third-rate, long forgotten South American dictator, whereas same future king's German grandfather had only been in the SS.

And BOY! DO I hate that unspeakable slag that made headlines recently because Geert Wilders (whom the Dutch don't deserve and whose only shortcoming is that he looks irritatingly Dutch) had cited her as a prime example of the moral decline of the elites in his country.

Joanie de Rijke is a Dutch journalist who was kidnapped in Afghanistan last November when all she wanted was to do some serious research on on the deaths of ten French soldiers hacked to pieces by the Taliban for the arse-and-tits magazine she is working for. Joanie looks painfully Dutch and exactly like the simpering silly bitch she is.

When she met the Taliban to 'hear their side of the story', the valiant freedom fighters, who would have thought so, kidnapped and the commander frequently raped her but not nearly enough because she wrote a book about it later and regurgitated it in chat shows (see picture) too. She still thinks (if one can call it that) that she was not taking unnecessary risks.
“This story” Wilders said, “is a perfect illustration of the moral decline of our elites. They are so blinded by their own ideology that they turn a blind eye to the truth. Rape? Well, I would put this into perspective, says the leftist journalist: the Taliban are not monsters. Our elites prefer to deny reality rather than face it. Our elites, whether they are politicians, journalists, judges, subsidy gobblers or civil servants, have dumped common sense in order to deny reality. It is not just this raped journalist who is suffering from Stockholm syndrome, but the entire Dutch elite. The only moral reference they have is: do not irritate the Muslims - that is the one thing they will condemn.”
So what did Joanie say:
"It's not black and white. It was the commander who raped me. I wanted to give vent to my hatred, to chop his head off and kick it off the cliff. He was schizophrenic: the following day, he said he was sorry. In that sort of situation - no matter how awful - you develop a bond with those people. You have to, if you want to survive. You could say the hatred and that bond go side by side."

"Just let me make one thing clear: I hate him for what he did to me. I hate him because he raped me. I was very, very mad and I wanted to kill him right away. But the day after it happened, he more or less asked me to forgive him. That was very confusing for me. It was a very schizophrenic situation because he had mood swings. I just had to cope with that. Normally you can show that you are angry but I couldn't of course. I had to get on with them. I just couldn't say to this commander what I was really thinking because then he would have killed me right away."
Very very mad Joanie said, too, that she was nevertheless shown respect.

Which eerily recalls the old joke, where the lady of the house is one female short for a proper dinner placement and, desperate, puts good clothes on a pretty maid and hopes for the best. When she asks her afterwards whether she's been respected, the girl replies: "Yes ma'am. Once on the balcony and twice in the garden."

And now Joanie is angry - not at her rapist but at Geert Wilders: "Geert Wilders bedrijft politiek over mijn rug." "He makes politics on my back." To make politics on her back is something to which Joanie can rightfully claim exclusive rights.

It may be a measure of the decline of our culture that even the attention whores have no class anymore. Many years ago Oriana Fallaci delivered a piece of memorable journalism and later recalled:
... that she found Khomeini intelligent, and “the most handsome old man I had ever met in my life. He resembled the ‘Moses’ sculpted by Michelangelo.” And, she said, Khomeini was “not a puppet like Arafat or Qaddafi or the many other dictators I met in the Islamic world. He was a sort of Pope, a sort of king—a real leader. And it did not take long to realize that in spite of his quiet appearance he represented the Robespierre or the Lenin of something which would go very far and would poison the world. People loved him too much. They saw in him another Prophet. Worse: a God.”
And nobody laughed or expressed embarrassment after it appeared in The New Yorker in 2006. It was, after all, by "La Fallaci".

It was a doubtful thing, anyway, to give Khomeini publicity to begin with, but Fallaci didn't really do research to inform but was collecting scalps and thus couldn't resist.

She, too, cashed in on matters which had better remained private. What does one call a woman who had an, as an uncritically adoring media called it, "tempestuous" affair with a much younger man who then kicked his unborn child out of her womb, a woman who didn't leave that man and rather wrote two books about it?

And exactly like that was her criticism of Islam, shrill and PMS-ingly hysterical. She stomped her little foot and wrote not what Islam is, but how "La Fallaci" found it.

But to do her justice, at least Fallaci was seriously attractive, did not write for crappy men's mags AND ABOVE ALL SHE WAS NOT DUTCH.

But what makes a serious journalist and writer like Fallaci and a floozy like Joanie de Rijke tick when putting themselves in harm's way to then write books about it? What made the ageing Fallaci swoon and drool over an old billy goat like Khomeini? Shameless lucre? Yes, but not JUST that. Attention whoredom? Yes, and again not just that. I think it's boredom. Boredom with their lifes, with the "good" men they meet, boredom with the little things in life, with a normal, ordinary life, with ordinary, everyday human decency. An able, clever woman like Fallaci goes and interviews Khomeini and Kissinger and writes well-received books about an unsavoury relationship with an unsuitable man, a silly bitch like de Rijke goes to Afghanistan to be raped by a Taliban, then writes a book about it to be totally overwhelmed by the brouhaha she caused and which to understand she is too pathetic. And at the bottom of the barrel, yes at the absolute bottom of the very same barrel we find those females who go and marry death row inmates. Our only hope remains that they'll never find out how to write books.

Hat tip: VFR.


Edited to add: To end this on a conciliatory note, I'd like to say finally something nice about the Dutch. There IS after all, something that is bigger than their dhimmitude and that's their tightfistedness. Which shows that they are not totally without principles. I overlooked that when I first read the article in the Brussels Journal from which I took the Wilders-quote.

As Joanie put it so endearingly:
“The Belgians have done nothing. They said it was a matter for the Dutch. And the Dutch authorities said they never pay ransom. In Afghanistan they know well enough that Western governments pay up after an abduction. Germany, Italy and France have all paid ransoms.”
Which may not be a terrific argument, but it at least reminds of another one of those vacuous, thrill-addicted women, the German archaeologist Susanne Osthoff, who was kidnapped in Iraq and whom I will now take up from the blog bilges in the next entry.

Edited to add: Done!

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I hate the way one, being German, is treated in that pokey little country (it has become a bit better over the years, but I still hate them), I hate that they nevertheless have no compunctions about taking our money
You just described Switzerland and Italy! But I also admit that if there is a people towards whom I am racist, it is the Dutch. And the reason is simple - euthanasia. Killing the old and the sick is NOT moral progress.

Anonymous said...

I think you misrepresent Oriana Fallaci. What she said about Khomeini was negative: he was the head of something dangerous for the whole world. He was one of the few people she had interviewed who did not look as though he had come to his position by luck and who clearly knew what he was about, but he was a villain. By contrast, she said, most of the people she met - Kissinger being a classic example - showed no root of greatness or any particular reason why they should be deciding the fates of millions rather than being clerks or teacher assistants somewhere. Is it to praise a criminal, to say that he has a strong personality? I don't think so.

The_Editrix said...

You are right about the Dutch. I forgot euthanasia, which is unforgivable.

When it comes to Fallaci, I admit that we may be seeing her from different angles, both as a man and a woman and as an Italian and a German. Of course a criminal can have a strong personality and there is nothing wrong about saying so, however, to me, her description of Khomeini had a definite whiff of admiration. Her dismissal of men like Kissinger et al. is exactly in line with what I find so irritating about her, namely her self-seeking lifestyle. I think every woman who brings up children decently and sticks to a boring middleclass life with a boring middleclass man does infinitely more for society than a Fallaci. What is worse, she sets a bad example for the many Joanie de Rijkes of this world who think they can do it too.

But that is just my opinion and one can see it, of course, differently.

Anonymous said...

Well, we have already had some notable disagreements. I don't know if I made it clear, but I am the same Fabio P.Barbieri who had a notable passage-of-quills with you about incest and Genetically Conditioned Attraction - and falling in love.

The_Editrix said...

Yes, I realise that. But we don't have to agree all the time about everything, or do we?

The_Editrix said...

"Debate is about YOU risking YOUR certainties, not about the other guy risking his; and it is only from the other guy's point of view that the opposite is the case."

That is very well said. The Internet can be both, a blessing and a curse. I think that communicating with so many different people has taught me a lot over the years. I do think, too, that we ought to be open to other peoples' views and ideas, specifically if they are backed up by sound information, and come, if possible, to at least a partial synthesis (not sure whether that is the correct term). If that isn't possible, I find it perfectly alright and intellectually honest, as you did in the case of the Beak's obsession with "commies", to say "I refuse to discuss that any further."

That said, I just re-read the thread about incest and "having to" fall in love. I still stand by my words. Again, I can have only limited knowledge of how men "function", but I remain adamant that if a woman notices the first symptoms of "falling in love" and the man is out of bounds, she CAN backpedal. The notion that this is not possible is self-indulgent, evil and has done more harm to society than most other weaknesses. Reversely, women who are even older (and wiser too) than I say that a girl, married young, can learn to love any good man. But that is beyond my own scope of experience. All I can say is that we had more stability when marriages weren't based on peoples' personal fancy. Are people happier now with all that "love"? I doubt it.

Anonymous said...

When people's marriages weren't based on their personal fancies, there were a lot more concubines (most of them going unnoticed because they were of the servant class and did paid work around the house beside satisfying the emotional needs of master or mistress - as the great Neapolitan comedian Toto' asked, what is the servant for if she doesn't serve?), a lot more people leaving the house to live alone - separation was an acknowledged legal condition - and one Hell of a lot more people who died young. That is one matter that should never be forgotten. When most people die before their forty-fifth years, that means that most marriages do not last long enough to reach the current age of average divorce. Even so, I feel confident when I say that the sexual morality of our fathers was not any better than ours.

And of course a person in love can force himself away from what he loves. In the same way, a bear with his leg caught in a wolf trap and a pack of hounds on his trail can rip his paw off with teeth and hobble away on three legs and one bleeding stump. Both things are about as easy and pain-free as each other. And since I am speaking from experience here, I don't see how you could contradict me.

The_Editrix said...

See, here we have one case where we have to agree to disagree. I am not relativizing, let alone denying, the pain you felt, but opinions based on personal experience and mentality can hardly "prove" anything because somebody else has gone through different experiences.