Stating the obvious

A reader wrote a few weeks ago:

You have an incredible ability, at times, to make the obvious clearly obvious. Especially astute was your observation, “That man [Muhammad] created a nation of one billion clones of himself.”

I’m not entirely sure it was a compliment, but I like the reader’s phrase, “making the obvious clearly obvious.” I think that is what I am trying to do much of the time. Of course her comment also echoes Orwell’s famous line: “Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious,” and its variant, which is more relevant to our time, “We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 25, 2005 11:34 PM | Send