Quote from The Blacklist

Been getting into The Blacklist, thanks to Aly. Still early days, but Raymond 'Red' Reddington went into a monologue once that goes like this:

A farmer comes home one day to find that everything that gives meaning to his life is gone. Crops are burned, animals slaughtered,
bodies and broken pieces of his life strewn about. Everything that he loved taken from him - his children. One can only imagine the pit of despair, the hours of Job-like lamentations, the burden of existence. He makes a promise to himself in those dark hours. A life's work erupts from his knotted mind. Years go by. His suffering becomes complicated. One day he stops - the farmer who is no longer a farmer - sees the wreckage he's left in his wake. It is now he who burns, he who slaughters, and he knows in his heart he must pay.

Fantastic oration by James Spader, here and in many other monologues. Kinda reminds me of a post I wrote 6 years ago discussing heros and villians, and then a revisit on the topic 2 years ago. Also reminds me of Frank Costello - played by Jack Nicholson - in The Departed:

When you decide to be something, you can be it. That's what they don't tell you in the church. When I was your age they would say we can become cops, or criminals. Today, what I'm saying to you is this: when you're facing a loaded gun, what's the difference?

When it comes to binary oppositions, does it matter what the extremes are?

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Serving up the fix

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Thoughts about Egypt

The city I was just in about 6 months ago - which owns more than a million years of human history - is now hearing a desperate, angry, and fearless roar of reform from its people, whose voice is reverberating across several Arabic-speaking countries. Egypt is an extremely valuable player on the global playing field. It's ancestors are known to have built one of the first far-reaching ordered civilizations the world has known. Medieval Egypt significantly advanced scholarship in the sciences and philosophy. In contemporary times, it has been looked at as a model of modernization amongst Arab states. Even more recently, Egypt has provided strong support in brokering peace in the Middle East, and negotiating as well as facilitating the transfer of resources from and to the Western world. The people of Egypt, therefore, have witnessed many, many changes in leadership. Moreover, they have experienced diversity in the most deepest historical aspect of the word. Surely, a people with s...

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