One stumbles upon insight gold. Here’s a line from the title poem of Egyptian poet Iman Mersal’s book The Threshold:

One long-serving intellectual screamed at his friend / When I’m talking about democracy / you shut the hell up.

It’s quoted here in the blog ArabLit & ArabLit Quarterly. The book’s translator from Arabic to English is Robyn Creswell. As wicked captures do, Mersal’s verse struck my funny bone straight off the bat, then triggered a spate of joyful obscenities.

Contagious rue notches nicely with the spirit of commentary by two academics from Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences:

In the absence of civic education, it is not surprising that universities are at the epicenter of debates over free speech and its proper exercise. Free speech is hard work. The basic assumptions and attitudes necessary for cultivating free speech do not come to us naturally. Listening to people with whom you disagree can be unpleasant.. Disagreement is in the nature of democracies.
(Debra Satz and Dan Edelstein, “By Abandoning Civics, Colleges Helped Create the Culture Wars,” New York Times, 9-3-23)

In another feat of stumbling one hears Christopher Hitchens relate that Samuel Johnson, renowned English lexicographer, was congratulated by a group of ladies for not including any indecent or obscene words in his famous dictionary. Johnson replied, “Ladies, I congratulate you on your ability to look them up.” The Hitchens talk is linked to here in a post titled “Free Speech” by fellow blogger Peter Robinson.

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