Word: kans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Fairy tales in the West begin, "Once upon a time." In the Arab world they start, "Kan ya makan." The words mean "There was, there was not." That is, maybe it happened. On the other hand, maybe it didn't happen...
...Kan ya makan: the Arabic language is capable of magical effects. On a squalid Cairo street early on a cold, foul day, people greet each other with small bouquets of words: "Morning of blessings! Morning of light!" They have conjured a moment, and smiled, and passed, and then, poof! they are back on a miserable street among the pariah dogs. If people are poor and live in the desert, language may be their richest possession: Why not? It opens miraculously onto other worlds. The Koran, with its bursts of sonority and light, describes a paradise that has everything the desert...
...Kan ya makan is intoxication enough. It was out of the desert that humans conjured monotheism -- absolute God to suffuse utter emptiness. When kan ya makan enters politics, its genius makes language a reality superior to the deed -- even renders the facts of the objective world unnecessary and graceless. The vivid hallucination becomes the act: the prophecy is more satisfying than its literal fulfillment. If the demagogue-bard says the infidel will swim in his own blood, then words have pre-empted the work of armies. Ambiguity has an ancient history in the West, but the Middle East...
...William B. Lacy, who directed the presidential campaign of U.S. Sen. Robert Dole (D-Kan.) and worked with Presidents Reagan and Bush...
...another member of Congress rose to voice reservations about war in the Gulf, but support for the proposed resolutions. Their reason: President Bush needs to present a credible threat of war to Saddam, and Congressional pusillanimity would undercut his standing. No less a hawk than Sen. Robert Dole (R-Kan.) warned that Bush should not interpret the resolution as "a hunting license." The Washington Post backed the use-of-force resolution only because it might move the country "measurably closer to peace," and The New York Times gave its hesitant endorsement for the same reason...