What They Think of Us

MaxedOutMama reports on an enthusiastic discussion in a Spanish newspaper's reader opinion section about the scale and scope of human hunting in America. That is, humans hunting humans. What, you didn't know this was going on in your backyard? Stupid Yankee. The Spanish know:

I've been told that in some US state, North Caroline, Virginia and Mississipi there are manhunts, they set a prisoner free and he is hunted like a rabbit, the victims are marginalized populations, generally blacks or hispanics, and they are hunted as if they were deer, with dogs and large caliber ammo, millions of dollars are involved in these hunts, human life is worth nothing in that country.

Or:

The hunting of men is real, as Fontana says. There are illegal bets (or perhaps "illegals are targeted"?), it is done in several states, and has been denounced by the "Baltimore Today" and the "Philadelphia Chronicle".

As far as I know, there has been no "Philadelphia Chronicle" since the 18th century. But then what do I know? I was born and raised in Philadelphia, so I'm just a stupid Yankee. If the Spaniards say there is one, there is one.

For my ignorance, and for their outrage, I, of course, blame Bush.

Dying for This?

It seems they could do this just as well without our help.

La Moonbat en Rose

Actress Marion Cotillard accuses America of fabricating the 9/11 attacks, moon landing.

The 32-year-old French actress, who received an Oscar last month for her performance as singer Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose, openly questioned the truth behind the terrorist atrocity in an interview broadcast on a French website.

"I think we're lied to about a number of things," Cotillard said, singling out the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center as an example of the US making up horror stories for political ends.

Referring to the two passenger jets being flown into the Twin Towers, Cotillard said:

"We see other towers of the same kind being hit by planes. Are they burned? They [sic] was a tower, I believe it was in Spain, which burnt for 24 hours. It never collapsed. None of these towers collapsed. And there [in New York], in a few minutes, the whole thing collapsed."

She added that the towers, planned in the early Sixties, were an outdated "money-sucker" that would have cost more to modernise than to rebuild altogether, which is why they were destroyed.

She said: "It was a money-sucker because they were finished, it seems to me, by 1973, and to re-cable all that, to bring up-to-date all the technology and everything, it was a lot more expensive, that work, than destroying them."

... She said: "Did a man really walk on the Moon? I saw plenty of documentaries on it, and I really wondered. And in any case I don't believe all they tell me, that's for sure."

Should fit right in in Hollywood, though. As for the rest of us, well, I suppose nobody will object if she continues to take her clothes off on screen. For a while.

Soul of the U.N.

I read this book review more out of interest in the author, Francis Fukuyama, than in the subject, Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N. bureaucrat killed in a 2003 al Qaida attack in Baghdad.

But I became more interested in Vieira de Mello as I read. And, if Fukuyama is painting him in accurate tones, he could stand as a platonic ideal of the whole type of international bureaucrats since the day of Dag Hammarskjöld. "More than anyone else at the United Nations," Fukuyama writes, "he embodied the organization’s idealism, as well as its limitations."

Vieira de Mello was born in 1948. The son of a Brazilian diplomat, he was a prototypical global cosmopolitan who grew up in Europe and, as a student, manned the barricades during the événements of 1968 in Paris while studying Marxist philosophy. The young Vieira de Mello was instinctively anti-American and cringed when he heard an American accent. After earning his degree, he found work with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, traveling to southern Sudan, Mozambique and Vietnam, and passionately embracing the United Nations and international law as the embodiments of global justice.

Emphasis added, for the sake of those who cling to the silly notion that America only "lost the respect of the world" in the time of the current incumbent. There is no indication from Fukuyama that Vieira de Mello ever lost that tic. Or his other propensities.

Samantha Power argues that Vieira de Mello underwent a personal evolution that tracked the United Nations’ experiences. In his early days he carried the United Nations habit of being nonjudgmental to an extreme: he dined with the bloody Khmer Rouge leader Ieng Sary; he cultivated a friendship with Slobodan Milosevic (which earned him the nickname “Serbio”). “Chasing the Flame” is critical of Vieira de Mello for, in the words of one of his colleagues, “siding with power” when he helped organize forced returns of refugees to Vietnam and Rwanda. But the book is not entirely convincing in its claim that by the end of the 1990s, Vieira de Mello had concluded that the United Nations needed to shift from peacekeeping to peace enforcement as part of a new, global “responsibility to protect.” If he believed such a thing, he never articulated the view or disavowed the earlier United Nations posture as fundamentally broken, as Kofi Annan was eventually to do.

I'm sure Fukuyama will not take it amiss if, after reading all this I am more convinced that the U.N.'s "idealism" and its "limitations" are flip sides of the same coin.

“Chasing the Flame” argues, as Vieira de Mello himself once did, that the United Nations is often unfairly blamed for failures to protect the vulnerable or deter aggression, when the real failure is that of the great powers standing behind it. Those powers are seldom willing to give it sufficient resources, attention and boots on the ground to accomplish the ambitious mandates they set for it. At present, the United Nations is involved in eight separate peacekeeping operations in Africa alone; failure in a high-profile case like Darfur (which seems likely) will once again discredit the organization. Power (who has been a foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama) makes the case for powerful countries like the United States putting much greater effort into making the institution work.

Emphasis added, again, this time for the sake of those trying to peer into the hypothetical futures of the possible next administrations.

World of Disrespect

Can we do better than this? Please?

One hour after his plea for more Saudi oil was publicly rejected by the kingdom's oil minister, President Bush made a private visit to Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah to again ask him to open the spigots.

...

Earlier Tuesday, Bush made his case for having OPEC, and particularly American ally Saudi Arabia, increase oil production as the price of gas hovers around $3 a gallon.

The Saudi oil minister, however, waited only a short time before announcing that oil prices would remain tied to market forces — a direct slap at Bush.

The president went over the head of the oil minister and made his case to King Abdullah and White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said the private conversation may have yielded some daylight in the Saudis' hard-line stance.

"The king says that he understands the situation. He's worried about high oil prices and how they can negatively affect economies around the world," Perino said aboard the presidential jetliner. "The president said there's a hope that as a result of these conversations that OPEC would be encouraged to authorize an increase in production … to help deal with the tight supply problems in this time when we have growing economies across the world, especially in China."

Meanwhile, a French chatterer reveals what America must do to ... you guessed it, win back the respect of the world.

Disgraced today throughout the four corners of the globe America would in a single leap, resume its lost grace, its capacity to inspire the imagination, that combination of myth and reality that makes it the country of all possibilities – the democracy par excellence that has such power of seduction and likeability, despite all of its gaping flaws.

What is it? Clean out the corruption at the U.N.? Guard peace and guide reconciliation in Iraq? Evolve a new energy network and tell the Saudis to go pound sand? Reconcile Israel and the Palestinians?

No, no, no, nothing so simple. All we have to do to make them all love us again is elect Obama.

After the Bush years, it would be a total image reversal, as fruitful and necessary as when America under Roosevelt became the global locomotive of the welfare state, social protections, or under Kennedy, when idealistic young people united and mobilized against racial discrimination.

Even the attempt at praise drips with condescension. Do we want this respect? Do you? I'd rather have the kind of respect that comes from a president who doesn't have to go to the Middle East and act like he's in the Welfare office.

FtW

One of the mantras of this election is that whoever sits in the White House next must lead America so as to regain the respect of the world. So let me get this: The "world" respected us when we funneled aid and intell to Saddam, and let our allies load him down with high-tech weapons systems and nerve gas, and didn't really pay too much attention to what he did with any of it. And it lost all respect for us when our sons and daughters started dying to overthrow him, and to give the people of Iraq a chance to run their own country.

Letters to America

This new blog lets the world say things to our faces. It's a good idea -- at least you know the people who write these things will be addressing you, not someone in their homeland. But take your blood-pressure medicine anyhow. It will teach you how far behind we are in presenting ourselves to the world. There's more than one cause for that, of course. But I'm beginning to wonder if it's coincidence that the people with the most dour and cynical views of America all protest that they love Hollywood movies and American television -- which tend to offer up a consistently dour and cynical view of America. I'm aware of the argument that says the ability to write, speak, film, and publish that way about your homeland is one of the great advertisements to the world of our freedoms. That it is. But when that's all you've got, how is that different than peeing in the public pool?