Lo, the U.N. By What Name Do We Call Thee?

Every crisis is an opportunity, a time when the fissures and cracks of received wisdom and worn-out habits of thought are exposed. The years since the terrorist attacks on 9/11 have been such a time for the United States. Decades of intellectual corruption, moral flabbiness, and blithe indifference to the reality of a dangerous, unpredictable world all culminated on 9/11. Yet despite the gruesome severity of that lesson, the same bad habits persist. Nothing demonstrates this truth more clearly than the unwillingness of many Americans, including the current administration, to accept once and for all that the United Nations has outlived whatever use it may have had as an institution for defusing crises and managing conflict.

The U.N.'s failures just in the last twenty years are legion — in Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia, and currently in Sudan, hundreds of thousands have been brutalized, mutilated, raped, and slaughtered, often right under the noses of U.N. forces and observers. This failure to prevent violence and keep the peace reflects the false assumption that created the United Nations. Like its earlier incarnation, the League of Nations, the U.N. was the fruit of an old Enlightenment dream: that negotiation, diplomacy, and rational discussion could manage crises and avoid the use of force in settling conflict. Such global parliaments had been the stuff of numerous utopias over the years, a dream particularly attractive for those horrified by the nationalist-inspired carnage of modern warfare and enamored of the idea that humans could progress beyond war and violence, which were considered primitive vestiges of a less civilized world rather than eternal realities of human nature.

Attention U.N. -

You swine. You vulgar little maggot. You worthless bag of filth. As we say in Texas, I'll bet you couldn't pour p!ss out of a boot with instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won't go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you. You're a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon. You are a bleating foal, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done. I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell? Try to edit your responses of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able to access it more rapidly. You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs. You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won't have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot. And what meaning do you expect your delusionally self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake? You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile, one-handed, slack-jawed, drooling, meatslapper. On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go. You smarmy lagerlout git. You bloody woofter sod. Bugger off, pillock. You grotty wanking oik artless base-court apple-john. You clouted boggish foot-licking twit. You dankish clack-dish plonker. You gormless crook-pated tosser. You churlish boil-brained clotpole ponce. You cockered bum-bailey poofter. You craven dewberry pisshead cockup pratting naff. You gob-kissing gleeking flap-mouthed coxcomb. You dread-bolted fobbing beef-witted clapper-clawed flirt-gill. You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go away. I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid, so stupid it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I'm sorry. I can't go on. This is an epiphany of stupid for me. After this, you may not hear from me again for a while. I don't have enough strength left to deride your ignorant questions and half baked comments about unimportant trivia, or any of the rest of this drivel. Duh. The only thing worse than your logic is your manners. I have snipped away most of what you wrote, because, well... it didn't really say anything. Your attempt at constructing a creative post was pitiful. I mean, really, stringing together a bunch of insults among a load of babbling was hardly effective... Maybe later in life, after you have learned to read, write, spell, and count, you will have more success. True, these are rudimentary skills that many of us "normal" people take for granted that everyone has an easy time of mastering. But we sometimes forget that there are "challenged" persons in this world who find these things more difficult. If I had known, that this was your case then I would have never read your post. It just wouldn't have been "right". Sort of like parking in a handicap space. I wish you the best of luck in the emotional, and social struggles that seem to be placing such a demand on you.

We don't call them at all. I have been a long-time defender of the UN and the intentions behind its formation who has step by step been forced to concede that it has absolutely no purpose remaining that is useful either to the interests of the United States or, more tellingly, to those of the world at large.

The theory behind the UN was one of leadership of the principal standing nations after WWII - that leadership consisting of a deliberate willingness to suspend immediate pursuit of strictly national objectives in an effort to persuade less powerful nations to do the same. It was a harness willingly assumed in the perhaps naive hope that the threat of its being discarded would persuade refractory nations to play along. Better a Saddam or a Gadafi or a Mugabe or an Amin would bend to human rights standards and inspections than the U.S. would throw off that harness and stride through the world an unchecked giant. It wasn't a bad notion, it simply didn't work - those men and others like them found it possible to cheat, to utilize the harness while disregarding the intended costs of its use. The members of the UN should have realized as this cynical manipulation progressed that it constituted a steady erosion of credibility; surely some of those members wondered at the cupidity of the U.S. to continue to play along.

The real stake through the UN's heart was the willingness of those members not only to use their votes to oppose the U.S. reflexively, but to sell that service to the highest bidder. That corruption manifested itself most signally in the Oil For Food debacle but has been a worm eating away at the UN for much longer than that. The moral high ground once ceded so hopefully to the UN was taken over, step by step, by a class of international elitists who realized that it was their ticket to a wealth and power unearned by military or economic prowess and theirs merely for the shouting. And shout they have, and still are, but fewer listen, those who still do being principally people whose emotional committment to a "higher truth" than nationalism has blinded them to the fact that that belief has no manifestation in reality and is not to be realized through wishful thinking, however fervent.

And so it is over, the entire paradigm of a supernational governing body whose moral suasion alone gave it the right to power. It's done, and what we have before us is a shriveled husk covered in parasites who desperately attempt to suck the last life left in it. We're going to have to try something else - the dream is done, and it has proven very, very ugly in the ending.

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