One of my favorite college English professors was James Price. Professor Price was a brilliat teacher, among other things, of eighteenth-century literature (and I’m sure he still is wherever he is teaching nowadays). One of Professor Price’s main literary interests was aphorisms. He was intrigued by the form and enjoyed studying authors who wrote them. It had never occurred to me before that they might constitute a genre of their own.
Jack Kelly is the glorious columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade. He is a fount of sanity. I’m struck by the aphorisms Kelly works up for his superb column on the Iranian seizure of British hostages and the lame British response. Kelly writes:
Some liken liberal appeasers to those Britons who wanted to make a deal with Hitler after the fall of France in 1940. That’s unfair to those appeasers. Their attitude was not honorable, but it was reasonable. The Nazis then possessed a substantial advantage in military power. Today’s liberal appeasers embrace dhimmitude even though it’s the West that has a huge military and economic advantage.
Kelly is just getting warmed up. Here he hits the mother lode:
Liberals are not so much terrified by the threat radical Islam poses as they are oblivious to it. A recent poll indicated a majority of Democrats are more worried about global warming than Islamic terror. While many liberals do indeed need to have backbones surgically implanted, more need to have their heads examined.
Kelly also strikes an aphorism in the topic sentence of his concluding paragraph. It’s one that I am afraid we will have occasion to meditate on for some time:
The infidels Allah is about to destroy, he first makes mad.
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