tongue salt

Arendt saw this hierarchy of work as a fundamental misunderstanding of what happens in the home—a misunderstanding that arose from the unique temporal features of care work and housework: the labor performed in the home moves so quickly, and produces so rapidly, Arendt wrote, that “its effort is almost as quickly consumed as the effort is spent.” Ancient political philosophers, Arendt writes, at least recognized the vital productivity of their servants, who, they believed, left behind “nothing more or less than their masters’ freedom or, in modern language, their masters’ potential productivity.” In antiquity, the work performed in the home was understood as constant, life-sustaining work that always produced: indeed, it produced the very possibility of public productivity; it created the possibility of shared communal life outside the home.”]

“If I have one message to give to the secular American people, it’s that the world is not divided into countries. The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don’t know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.”