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O’Rourke Among the “Peasants” of OWS

At one point in another rambling essay that is supposed to be about the foreign policy of Occupy Wall Street, P.J. O’Rourke writes this: “They [the Iranians] have good reason not to like the US,” he said. “We’re painting them as warmongers. How many countries has Iran invaded?” Well, there was the entire known world […]

At one point in another rambling essay that is supposed to be about the foreign policy of Occupy Wall Street, P.J. O’Rourke writes this:

“They [the Iranians] have good reason not to like the US,” he said. “We’re painting them as warmongers. How many countries has Iran invaded?”

Well, there was the entire known world west of the Indus, plus Greece.

That is just about the dimmest retort imaginable. If the best example O’Rourke can find as proof of Iranian aggression is the history of the Achaemenid Empire, it is just possible that the person with the shallower understanding of current foreign policy in this conversation is not the OWS protester. Maybe this is why I don’t find O’Rourke’s anthropological surveys of American political movements very instructive. The conceit of this essay, like the one he wrote on the Tea Party’s foreign policy, is that O’Rourke is wise and knowledgeable about the ways of the world, and he has taken it upon himself to investigate some primitive tribes and report back on what he discovers. Instead, we find him responding to a more or less reasonable observation by one of the “peasants” with a completely irrelevant point.

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