While searching for a written transcript for the Codrescu item i went to his "Message du Jour" archive. An old one on Kosovo contains this gem about being a kid in a country where Tito had banned inter-ethnic rivalries...Without knowing it at the time, I had the misfortune of belonging to one of the top-hated categories. I was Jewish, from a Hungarian and Polish background, and my mother, who was Jewish, had remarried a Romanian from a part of the country hated by everyone, including the local Romanians. I didn‚t know that my home town had been subject of territorial disputes between the Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman empires, then between the nations of Romania and Hungary. These facts were relayed to us in a highly comforting version in history class, a version that blamed all misfortune on class relations and tensions within economic systems. And was this version wrong? Not necessarily. The problem with it is that it left out the one unpredictable element that usually renders nonsensical the best theories, namely, people's deep-seated and emotionally unassailable stupidity. (emphasis added)
I guess my question is:
"Why must it be only the poets who use the word "stupidity" in the analysis of current events and history?"