Il Milione

The title and theme of my last essay was “Poverty of Vision,” which is something that has ravaged Washington over the course of the last few decades. Peter Frankopan, who is the author of a very noteworthy book titled “The Silk Roads: A New History of The World,” alludes to this “Poverty of Vision” on the part of the Western world when he wrote:

“What has been striking throughout the events of recent decades is the west’s lack of perspective about global history – about the bigger picture, the wider themes and the larger patterns playing out…In the minds of policy planners, politicians, diplomats, and generals, the problems of Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq seem distinct, separate, and only loosely linked together.”

Thus, instead of Joe Biden and Janet Yellen holding themselves and others who were and are in government accountable for their “Poverty of Vision” to borrow from Cornel West, Biden and Yellen decide to raise taxes on people without even a single announcement and in a totally surreptitious and unceremonious manner. Had this been the year 1776, the reaction to this sly and sneaky maneuver would have been much different by the American people.

Also, when it comes to developing and executing a vision, one’s vision should not be limited by a woman either. On one hand, there are brilliant and respectable women, and on the other hand there are women who “lack a sense of justice” and are “enemies upon one another” to borrow from Schopenhauer. Thus, not all women are the same, and one should avoid making generalizations not just about women, but about everything and everyone else as well.

As a young person, a professor and teacher can either enhance or diminish a young person’s imagination and vision. Also, it is worth nothing that young people rarely forget what a professor or teacher does or says. But through self-education, one’s sense of self-esteem and self-respect would not allow a person to subject themselves to a knocking down of a person’s grade due to the lack of imagination and vision on the part of an old and hackneyed professor whose views about the world are obsolete.

Previously, I mentioned Marco Polo, a Venetian merchant and writer of the late Medieval and early Renaissance period in Europe who by happenstance became an adviser and envoy in Beijing for Kublai Khan, who was the grandson of the famous Genghis Khan and was also the most powerful and wealthy Mongol emperor of all-time. Marco Polo is known to have had a sizeable share in Kublai Khan’s wealth, and as a result, Marco Polo’s nickname was “Il Milione,” which translates into “The Millions” in Italian. In addition to having been credited for fostering trade ties between the West on one hand and China and India on the other hand, Marco Polo was also a famous travel writer.

To a certain extent, I have followed in the footsteps of Marco Polo in the sense that I am also an entrepreneur who has shared images of my travels and have written about my travels when I was on social media. The greatest travel writer of my time was none other than the late Anthony Bourdain, whose absence has clearly left a mark on the quality of what is broadcasted on television these days. But the greatest travel writer of all time is Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan Muslim who surpassed Marco Polo in terms of the number of kilometers travelled.

In the tenth grade, my AP World History instructor was a man named Gary Bender, who happens to be an American Jew. One of the assignments which Bender gave us for homework was to write a paper on Ibn Battuta and to identify the major “flaw” in his writings. According to Bender, Ibn Battuta’s biggest flaw was “bias.” Bender’s assumption that Ibn Battuta suffered from “bias” was one of my first experiences with what is known as Zionist envy and jealousy of Islamic culture, heritage, and history. After all, Zionists even stole the Medieval Arabic “Seal of Solomon” and appropriated it under the guise of the “Star of David.” However, there is a big difference between Zionism and Judaism. As I said before, one cannot generalize an entire group of people. Thus, it would be unjust and unfair to accuse all Jews of the Zionist envy and jealousy which I experienced in the tenth grade.