More than once I've discussed with Debbie Menon the pros and cons of being a self-styled truth jihadi. She was initially skeptical, but seems to have warmed to the concept. Below is her introduction to today's Veteran's Today interview. -KB
A thoroughly effective interview by Kourosh Ziabari with Kevin Barrett.
by -Debbie Menon, MyCatbirdSeat.com
Kevin might have gained a bit more credibility with the great unbelieving kafir American public if he had left out some of his religious zeal for "jihad," and not turned the work into some religious crusade, but his thrusts at the press, the public blindness and failure to "believe," the way they treat hard truths, and the duplicity of the officialdom as well as the false and non-evidence involved in the story of 9-11, are all to the point, and effective thrusts to the heart of the matter.
Altogether, though, quite effective.
As tiring as it has become lately, to keep reading the same thing, as if reading on a literary treadmill, I really enjoyed reading this one.
Kevin wrote:
"I make fun of myself by using hyperbole (exaggeration) in order to play the role of the 'crazy radical jihadi for truth.' What is most hilarious, and most deeply serious, is that this 'crazy radical jihadi' character I’m playing, like King Lear’s fool, is the only sane character in the play, the only one who understands and tells the whole, painful truth. The humor makes my uncompromisingly honest message palatable for Western audiences. As the saying goes, 'If you tell the truth, make it funny or they’ll kill you.'"
He is right! He is a scholar of the arts and he is deadly serious in what he says, and what he is doing. Comedy in the performing arts was developed and evolved in Greece. The Greek theater employed what is known as the chorus, which are the voices offstage, or in the pits who speak the "voice of the people, or the "voice of reason," the truth.
Roman art, which mimicked Greek arts without contributing much, eventually evolved the role of the clown or the fool in comedy as a replacement of the chorus.
The Clown, or the Fool, eventually migrated to Europe and into English and modern theater as the spokesman of truth and reason, in a theater and a world fraught with darkness, fraud, deception, untruth and deceit, all of the peculiarities of man which we find so ignoble.
His role was perfected by Shakespeare in the personae of so many well-known characters, the Clown,The Fool, The Buffoon.
Of particular note is the Fool of King Lear, to which Barrett refers.... perhaps the most famous of them all, who foresaw the folly and fatal consequences of Lear's erroneous and misplaced trust and belief in the protestations of love and the flattery of his daughters and their husbands, while rejecting the simple plain but unflattering protestation of love of his youngest, Cordelia.
The Clown or the Fool has long been used in drama critical of the despotic regimes, where the playwright may claim some degree of impunity behind the thin veil and facade of comedy and farce, yet still get the message across, and into the minds of the public, while providing his Monarch with little hard evidence upon which to hang him.
It is extremely effective, and serves the same function in satire, and other dramatic forms which we see daily, on mainly American TV.
Its use follows the principle of "teaching" that it is better and more effective to present the material of the lesson in such a manner that you are not preaching or teaching, but laying out the evidence in such a manner that the student cannot fail but to learn from it, himself, and still get the intended "lesson."
To use a simple metaphor, it is best to give a hungry man seeds and tools with which to grow his own crops, than it is to run a farm and feed him.
Farming and feeding is what Kings, Dictators and Masters do. The subjects then follow the meat wagon.
I recall, once, in a "drawing class," the instructor insisted that we learn to, "...not try to sketch the object," but to "outline the space around it." There are two ways to draw a thing, and there are two ways to learn a thing.
Barrett knows what he is doing.
Labels: Debbie Menon, interview, jihad, Kevin Barrett, king lear, kourosh ziabari, theater, Veterans Today
