Quotable Quotes

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Just can't resist quoting excerpts from Umberto Eco's NYT's piece in DC today:

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"...On hearing Letterman's interview, my jaw dropped. Could this high-profile figure, whose interviews have the potential to help people gain some measure of understanding of the world we live in, really have such infantile ideas about what exists beyond the United States' borders?

Yet Letterman was expressing a common American mindset --- not among intellectuals, but among those immense masses who live in the center of the country, where local newspapers will report extensively on a calf born with two heads, while presenting only vague news coverage of the rest of the planet. Places where the New York Times can't be delivered, or can only be found in select high-class locations, at twice the regular price. Places where, in years gone by, long-distance and international calls could only made through a switchboard operator; places like the one where, when someone once asked a young operator to place a call to Rome, he was asked which Rome he wished to call -- because there's one in Georgia, one in New York state, one in Indiana and one in Tennessee, not to mention a few others that I no longer recall. On discovering there was a Rome in Italy too, the operator expressed utter amazement.

A few years ago at a conference in Florence, a person who worked with the Pentagon or the White House (I don't remember which), after having enjoyed an excellent fish dinner, and on finding out that the fish came from the Mediterranean, asked if the Mediterranean was a salt lake.

Sometimes I wonder how average American politicians (who occasionally get as far in their political careers as George W. Bush did) can make so many mistakes when dealing with Europe, Africa and Asia. Perhaps we should just ask Letterman."

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I guess we should ask our Indra, who said 'intellectuals' like at Princeton were no better...they never heard of Calcutta, nor hilsa...although they seem to have heard of IIT KGP...by now... ;-)


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