The "Intellectual" Politics (What Their Moms Don't Know)

Quoting a famous intellectual whose “brilliant ideas” flush over the readers of a Romanian hemi-tabloid: “The posterity remind with account to Napoleon the line he addressed to Goethe, that ‘politics is Destiny’ – ‘La politique c’est le Destin.’ Enigmatic through its lapidary, the sense of this formula is nonetheless limpid. It says that, when the basis of political power widens significantly much, the politics is inconturnable.” [My emphasis on the last word is due to the lack of English word for the French ‘inconturbable’, meaning: ‘which cannot be avoided.’] [H. R. Patapievici, Evenimentul Zilei (Day’s Event), March 22, 2007]

Why, if you can’t understand the last two sentences, I’ll translate them, as, in fact, should be the case (from Romanian to Romanian) for the newspaper readers, too. He wanted to say, “The formula, enigmatic through its lapidary, has a nonetheless limpidity. It says that, when the basis of political power widens significantly much, the politics cannot be avoided.” And he goes on, stating that “we live in a time of politics, when politics is everywhere.”

Aside from this bland observation, we should say that the guy speaks, unintended, as the whole political class do, commentators and analysts included. They embed plain ideas in enthralling quotes and not so well commanded hard-to-understand words, twist the phrases so that one can hardly recognize the sense from beneath, then draw the conclusion: It’s not good! That is not good! Then, when someone comes up and tries to shed some light on the “problem,” they react: Shut up, you’re not a celebrity! Or something like that. So that politics is everywhere, and everybody discuss politics. And when it comes to work, there’s no one. And when is one, he probably ‘cooks’ something. Do you remember the experiment with the monkeys beating the daring one who would try to get the bananas, apparently without reason? (They were rained with water before, every time they tried to reach the bananas, and then replaced one by one, each newcomer being beaten in his place – by the vets knowing what could happen –, and so… educated.) Well, you got the point!