You want drama and reality, mixed together? Then check out the hit show, airing for its 61st season in all the newspapers and on most of the news networks right now: “The UN General Assembly conference.” As my brother put it, and I am paraphrasing, ‘these delegates act like a bunch of seventh graders – no wait, I teach seventh graders, and these guys are worse than seventh graders!’ And you know what? I have to agree, because while my intolerance for middle school aged children and their irreverent use of sarcasm annoys me more than the sound of laughter coming from young children playing while I’m trying to sleep in, this week, the leaders of our world actually annoyed me far more than either of the aforementioned nuisances. I must concede that I do understand that middle school children are not actually nasty demons committed to annoying most of society with their shenanigans; no, they are simply experiencing the ubiquitous phase of life that most of us experience; the phase where you rebel against everything you have trusted and liked for the first twelve years of your life (like parents), for the pure and simple sake of rebellion.
But it’s a little perturbing that the most important and powerful people in our world are spending their precious time together calling each other names and picking on each other like rival kids on the playground. For example, Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, in a speech to the General Assembly, called Bush “the devil” in front of over one hundred international delegates, and then later, in a speech in Harlem, NY, he called Bush a “puffed up John Wayne wannabe.” Well, I’m surprised that there is a Spanish word that is translated directly into the English slang word “wannabe”, but moreover I’m surprised that a grown man would resort to such verbally abusive tactics when speaking at a conference dedicated to ensuring and providing a sense of order and peace for our world.
Alas, we are talking about the United Nations here; a powerless body of government so bureaucratic and useless that it has yet to really do anything aside from creating human rights laws that no one follows when it really matters. Regardless of what I think about the UN, about America, and about Hugo’s playground taunting rhetoric, he did receive a standing ovation from the world leaders at the general assembly, right after saying that the pulpit, the one that Bush spoke at, still smelled of the devil’s sulfur. So uh, memo to my fellow Americans, other countries think that we’re kind of, well, evil, like, you know, that famous evil guy—Satan. And they’re willing to laugh about our international bullying while at an assembly being held in our own country, in front of our ‘most powerful leaders.’ Just a FYI for those of you who think that we’re spreading peace, love, and democracy to the rest of the world, and that our ‘bomb them into democracy’ campaign is garnering good PR for us.
Before I get berated by many of my readers for writing what I feel to be an unbiased perception of what is going on in the world right now, I want to make sure that none of my readers think that I’m a democrat or a liberal, after all, if this mistake were to be made by my readers, than one of my ‘irrational fears’ would come true, and that is “this week’s irrational fear:” My fear of being branded as a leftist or a liberal. I want to make it abundantly clear that I hate dishonesty, and that I feel that far too many of the politicians in our world are inherently selfish and dishonest, and so I don’t want to ally myself with any one party in particular, whether they wear blue and spout endless rhetoric about helping the people and saving the environment, in between expensive plane rides on their gas guzzling private jets, or whether they wear red and spout endless rhetoric about spreading democracy into the world after passing legislation that removes our constitutional rights to freedom. Nope, I don’t like or trust either party right now, because neither side has ellicited any proof of having a strong backbone when it comes to pursuing anything more than winning an election at any and all cost.
Let's get back to the soap opera reality show that was last week’s Assembly. After Chavez called Bush the devil, Nancy Pelosi, a liberal member of Congress, and a fierce opponent of Bush, called Chavez “an everyday thug” and a ‘“Simon Bolivar wannabe,”’ for making his comments about Bush on such a grand stage. Pelosi hails from none other than California, the same state that invented frivolous lawsuits, the triple iced vanilla breast milk machiatto, and Richard Nixon, so you would think she’d be used to hearing celebrities and politicians trash talk each other on a regular basis. But since the UN General Assembly seems to bring out the seventh grader in everyone, I guess she decided to be rubber, and to make Chavez glue, and bounce his wannabe comment back at him.
So we’ve got a pretty good show going on here, what with the rich kid bully (Bush), who is used to projecting his interpretation of democracy on the rest of the world and not having anyone stand in his way (except the class nerd, the French), and then we have the tough new Latino kid who just moved into town (Chavez), who figures that the bully won’t beat him up because he’s making his comments in front of the teacher, (Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the UN), and so the new kid (Chavez) calls the bully (Bush) the devil, and does so because he knows that at worst, he only risks getting a detention slip. But here’s the ‘seventh grade diplomacy’ kicker: The United States does what any smart bully who gets made fun of in the classroom does; he waits until school is out, and then gets his revenge outside of the classroom. So the day after the Assembly, at JFK Airport, The US Homeland Security detains Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s foreign minister, for ninety minutes, “strip searching and verbally abusing” him before his flight.
Maduro, come on! What did you expect when you were trying to leave the playground after your best friend publicly berated the most powerful leader of the free world? Did you actually think that the rest of the kids in school would walk out there with you and protect you from the bully? No way, you’re insane: ninety minutes of verbal abuse and strip searches is just our seventh grade equivalent to verbally berating the weakest kid in gym class and then giving him a giant wedgie and hanging him up by his underwear on a tether ball poll for all to see– so Maduro, get over it. But the drama didn’t stop there, because this is better than reality TV! After what Bush’s press secretary labeled an “egregious error” on our part, in a formal apology to Venezuela for treating Maduro like we normally treat a lot of not-so-white-looking foreigners trying to travel by plane in our country, Hugo refused our apology, and dubbed the act a ‘provocation’ against his nation.
And the drama continued right on after Chavez' rant. Following Chavez and his “Bush is a big bully” taunt in the classroom, other nation's leaders, like Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, decided that they too could finally speak up about certain past wrongdoings committed by the US. As most of us can recall, for the last five years, Musharraf has smiled into cameras and pledged his allegiance to the United States in our war against terrorism, mostly because he wants UN approval for a nuclear program for his nation, but during this week’s assembly, in which the world finally decided that it’s safe to accuse President Bush of doing things he’s actually done, Musharraf has come out and officially claimed that a Bush military aide called him up on the phone right after 9/11 and told him that he’d better give America some airspace for our bombing campaign in Afghanistan, lest his nation be “bombed back into the stone age.” Well Musharraf, if that’s even your real name, I don’t understand what your problem is, because in our seventh grade culture, it’s an absolute standard to use lofty threats in order to gain something in return. Let me translate: “Give us airspace or we’ll bomb you back into the stone age” means “give me your milk money or I’ll give you a knuckle sandwich” -- it's mostly an empty threat. Mostly.
But it’s not just Venezuela and Pakistan who decided to take a stand against Bush this past week. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, who looks and talks just like that pesky handsome and rich athletic kid whose parents earned more money than yours did, also said some pretty harsh things about Bush. Ahmadinejad, which is a clever acronym for MAD JIHAD-EAN, is that zany oppressive yet “freely” elected misogynist President, who makes less of an effort than Mel Gibson to hide his Anti-Semitism (He said a couple of months back that he wishes he could “wipe Israel off the map” and notoriously claims that the Holocaust never happened...). Mahmoud, who also claims that “his audiences don’t blink when he talks” slammed the United States for oppressing many nations across the world, and for trying to neuter the UN by coercing the security council into letting the US invade any nation that it wants to. Be careful, Iran, if you keep this kind of talk up, you could end up being the next nation to get invaded by Bush Co. (Bush has until January 20th, 2008 until the end of his eight-year reign as “a wartime president”). And if Mahmoud thinks he hates freedom, democracy, and the western world, just wait until he tries to sleep in with a bunch of Halliburton employees doing construction right outside his palace at seven in the morning!
Personally, I think what offended Bush the most about Ahmadinejad’s speech, was his ‘outrageous’ claim that the United States “has abused nuclear technology for non-peaceful ends including the production of nuclear bombs and even [has] a bleak record of using them against humanity." Where did he get that crazy idea? Sorry, Ahmadinejad, but if you’re going to go on record and state that that The Holocaust didn’t happen, and try to teach your citizens that version of history, then I think it’s a little unfair to bring up the whole “US nuking Japan” thing. But I guess, technically, he’s right; I suppose we did kill a handful of people (or so) with an atomic bomb, once, or maybe twice, way back when, in the nineteen forties. But c’mon, that was a long time ago, there has to be some statute of limitations on hypocrisy! What’s next? Is someone going to get all ‘nitpicky’ on us, and say that our use of napalm and Agent Orange in Vietnam was irresponsible and cruel? Why can’t people live and let die—leaders of the world: let bygones be bygones. After all, we used to assist Saddam Hussein when Iraq was fighting Iran for seven years in the early eighties, and then we realized that he was an evil madman, so we bombed his palace, killed both of his sons, and dragged him out of a hole in the ground so that we could put him on trial for crimes against humanity! Unlike Militant Islamists, here in America, we’re not afraid to recognize and embrace change, even if it renders us the label of hypocrite! Na na na.
Well there was even more drama than I have time to write about, like the giant food fight at the dinner banquet, in which some of Dick Cheney’s peas went astray and hit Bush in the throat, and the leader of Hezbollah gave the President of Israel a nuggie, and then shoved a pie in his face, but hey, what else can you expect when you let a bunch of seventh graders gather at a conference without adult supervision? This is why middle school dances have parental chaperones. And this, of course, leaves me with only one question: In a world in which men like George Bush, Hugo Chavez, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can rise to the top, and still act like unruly, unsupervised seventh graders, just who are the parental chaperones, and where have they been for the last century?