The Camel in Camelot

Politico.com Interview with Obama, Feb. 11, 2008:

LH [Leon Harris]: One other issue that is of great importance to the people of the district here, is gun control.

You said in Idaho here, recently, that “I have no intention of taking away folks’ guns.”

But you support the D.C. handgun ban, and you’ve said that it’s constitutional.

How do you reconcile those two positions?

(or not)

B[H]O: Because I think we have two conflicting traditions in this country. I think it’s important for us to recognize that we’ve got a tradition of handgun ownership and gun ownership generally. And a lot of people – law-abiding citizens use if for hunting, for sportsmanship, and for protecting their families. We also have a violence on the streets that is the result of illegal handgun usage. And so I think there is nothing wrong with a community saying we are going to take those illegal handguns off the streets, we are going to trace more effectively, how these guns are ending up on the streets, to unscrupulous gun dealers, who often times are selling to straw purchasers. And cracking down on the various loopholes that exist in terms of background checks for children, the mentally ill. Those are all approaches that I think the average gun owner would actually support.

The problem is, that we’ve got a position, often times by the NRA that says any regulation whatsoever is the camel’s nose under the tent. And that, I think, is not where the American people are at. We can have reasonable, thoughtful gun control measure that I think respect the Second Amendment and people’s traditions.

Wikipedia on the Camel's nose metaphor:

The camel's nose is a metaphor for a situation where permitting some small undesirable situation will allow gradual and inexorable worsening....

An early example is a fable printed in 1858 in which an Arab miller allows a camel to stick its nose into his bedroom, then other parts of its body, until the camel is entirely inside and refuses to leave.

According to Geoffrey Nunberg, the image entered the English language in the middle of the 19th Century. Nunberg could not find an Arab source for the saying and suspected it was a Victorian invention.

Lydia Sigourney wrote another version, a widely reprinted poem for children...

AN ARAB FABLE

Once in his shop a workman wrought
With languid hand, and listless thought,
When through the open window's space
Behold! - a Camel thrust his face.
"My nose is cold," he meekly cried,
"Oh, let me warm it by they side."

Since no denial word was said,
In came the nose, - in came the head,-
As sure as sermon follows text
The long, excursive neck came next,
And then, as falls the threatening storm
In leap'd the whole ungainly form.
-----------------------------------------------

An early citation with a tent is "The camel in the Arabian tale begged and received permission to insert his nose into the desert tent." [New York Times,
April 21, 1875]

By 1878, the expression was familiar enough that part of the story could be left unstated. "It is the humble petition of the camel, who only asks that he may put his nose into the traveler's tent. It is so pitiful, so modest, that we must needs relent and grant it."
[New York Times, March 14, 1878]

In a 1915 book of fables by Horace Scudder, the story, titled The Arab and His Camel, ends with the moral:

"It is a wise rule to resist the beginnings of evil."

A Palestinian man interacts with a camel ... on the Mount of Olives overlooking Jerusalem's Old City, Jan. 14, 2008
(BtB archives)

Comments

[Hope]

I like this picture. That guy is always there with that camel for people to take pictures with and ride on.