Carthage must be destroyed

From "In my mid-adolescence... I became obsessed with William F. Buckley." by Ann Althouse. Though she has struggled in the past year, Professor Althouse often has very good discussions among her commenters.

In this post she is criticizing Malcolm Gladwell for, in an interview, instinctively paying obeisance to his perceived audience by mildly walking back his comments and throwing his family and community under the culturally privileged bus.

Carl comments:

I'm reminded of reading an editorial in The Daily Californian, the student newspaper at Berkeley. It was the 80s, and apartheid was all the on-campus rage among the 30-second-attention-span set, which includes a lot of people when you're in your 20s and full of raging hormones.

Anyway, this student journalist lamented that he could not write anything at all unless he took care to make it all about how evil apartheid was, and the struggle to rid the world of its scourge the Manichaen truth of the era. He solved his problem (in this editorial) by ending every sentence with "...and apartheid is evil." As in, "Yesterday I went to the laundromat and apartheid is evil, and afterward I wanted some coffee so (apartheid being evil) I went to the coffee shop..."

Marshall then observes:

He solved his problem (in this editorial) by ending every sentence with "...and apartheid is evil.

An old tradition rediscovered.

Carthago delenda est

Wikipedia explains, Carthago delenda est

is a Latin oratorical phrase which was in popular use in the Roman Republic in the 2nd Century BC during the latter years of the Punic Wars against Carthage, by the party urging a foreign policy which sought to eliminate any further threat to the Roman Republic from its ancient rival Carthage, which had been defeated twice before and had a tendency after each defeat to rapidly rebuild its strength and engage in further warfare. It represented a policy of the extirpation of the enemies of Rome who engaged in aggression, and the rejection of the peace treaty as a means of ending conflict. The phrase was most famously uttered frequently and persistently almost to the point of absurdity by the Roman senator Cato the Elder (234-149 BC), as a part of his speeches.

An old device with a lot of life left in it, given that so many arguments today are not arguments at all but simply monotonous recitations of belief, much like the tourist, with great consideration, speaking louder and slower so that those thick foreigners can better understand English.