Posted on 06/23/2005 6:22:43 AM PDT by Pokey78
New Hampshire
Theres a moment in the new Batman (reviewed elsewhere in these pages) that made my ears prick up almost as much as those on top of the dark knights cute little Bat-mask. Bruce Wayne has just bumped into his childhood sweetheart Rachel Dawes in the lobby of some Gotham City hotel. Unfortunately, hes sopping wet, having been cavorting in the ornamental fountain with a couple of hot pieces of arm candy. Rachel is a crusading district attorney and Bruce can see shes a bit disappointed to discover her old pal is now Paris Hilton in drag. So he attempts to assure her that deep down he still cares about all the worthy stuff. Rachel swats this aside. Its not what you feel inside that counts, she says. Its what you do that defines you.
Bruce wanes, visibly, under her withering riposte. I wouldnt claim this film has anything as coherent as a philosophy, but they thought enough of that line to reprise it late in the action. Its what you do that defines you, Batman whispers to Rachel before diving off a rooftop to go whump the bad guys. Bruce...? she says, faintly.
A couple of days later I read that Oxfam had paid the best part of a million bucks to Sri Lankan customs officials for the privilege of having 25 four-wheel-drive vehicles allowed into the country to get aid out to remote villages on washed-out roads hit by the Boxing Day tsunami. The Indian-made Mahindras stood idle on the dock in Colombo for a month as Oxfams representatives were buried under a tsunami of paperwork. Aside from the tax, they were charged £2,750 demurrage for every day the vehicles sat in port.
This was merely the latest instalment in whats becoming a vast ongoing Tsunami Tshakedown Of The Day retrospective you can usually find it at the foot of page 37 in your daily paper, if at all. Fourteen Unicef ambulances sent to Indonesia spent two months sitting on the dock of the bay wasting time, as the late Otis Redding so shrewdly anticipated. Eight 20ft containers of Diageo drinking water shipped via the Red Cross arrived at the Indonesian port of Medan in January and are still there, because the Indonesian Red Cross lost the paperwork. Five hundred containers, representing one quarter of all aid sent to Sri Lanka since the tsunami hit on 26 December, are still sitting in port in Colombo, unclaimed or unprocessed. At Medan 1,500 containers of aid are still sitting on the dock.
The tsunami may have been unprecedented, but what followed was business as usual the sloth and corruption of government, the feebleness of the brand-name NGOs, the compassion-exhibitionism of the transnational jet set. If we lived in a world where its what you do that defines you, wed be heaping praise on the US and Australian militaries who in the immediate hours after the tsunami struck dispatched their forces to save lives, distribute food, restore water and power and communications.
Instead, a fellow Quebecker of my acquaintance sneered, Can you believe those Americans? A humanitarian disaster strikes and they send an aircraft carrier! Er, well, yes. Because for large-scale humanitarian operations it helps to have a big boat handy. It seemed unlikely to me that even your average European politician would utter anything so fatuous in public, but Clare Short came close. The sight of Washington co-ordinating its disaster relief efforts with Australia, India and Japan outside the approved transnational structures was too much for her. This initiative from America to set up four countries claiming to co-ordinate sounds like yet another attempt to undermine the UN, she told the BBC. Only really the UN can do that job. It is the only body that has the moral authority.
Whether or not it has moral authority, the UN certainly cant do the job. It becomes clearer every week that Western telly viewers threw far more money at tsunami relief than was required and that much of it has been siphoned off by wily customs inspectors and their ilk. If you really wanted to make an effective donation to a humanitarian organisation, youd send your cheque to the Pentagon or the Royal Australian Navy.
But that would be in a world where were defined by what we do. Instead, on tsunami aid, what matters is what we feel inside, and when it comes to showing what we feel inside on the outside we can only do it through the proper channels by sending a donation to the Indonesian Customs Inspectors Retirement Fund, or by demanding our government double/triple/quadruple/whatever its contribution to the relief effort, which means a man in a UN office in New York, wholl hold a press conference announcing theyre sending someone to the region to conduct an assessment of the situation, just as soon as the USAF emergency team have flown in and restored room service to the five-star hotel. The tsunami farrago would be a scandal but, like Western aid piling up on the docks in Indonesia, right now weve got more UN scandals than we need Oil-for-Food, Darfur, child prostitution rings at UN peacekeeping missions.
The passionate hostility of Miss Short and co to action to getting things done is remarkable, but understandable. Getting things done requires ships and transport planes and the like, and most Western countries lack the will to maintain armed forces capable of long-range projection. So, when disaster strikes, they can mail a cheque and hold a press conference and form a post-modern Task Force which doesnt have any forces and doesnt perform any tasks. In extreme circumstances, they can stage an all-star pop concert. And, because this is all most of the Western world is now capable of, taking action means little more than taking the approved forms of inaction.
For example, Id be far more amenable to criticism of American policy in Iraq if it werent being levelled by the same folks notably Do-Nothin Doug Hurd who fiddled transnationally while Yugoslavia burned. Bosnia is, in fact, everything the anti-war crowd predicted Iraq would be: 250,000 people were killed, which is what the more modest doom-mongers estimated would happen in Iraq, and thats 250,000 out of a population a fifth the size of Iraqs. We were told that toppling Saddam would do nothing but create thousands more radical Islamists across the Middle East. In fact, its Bosnia where, under the nose of its EU viceroy, Wahabist infiltration is recruiting tomorrows jihadi. Week after week, weve seen sob stories on the TV news in which some hapless Baathist clerk from the Department of Genital Severing reveals that hes been out of work now for two years, but when was the last time you read a piece on unemployment rates in Paddy Ashdowns Bosnia? Its officially 45 per cent, and its only the drug-dealing, child sex and white slave trade that boom around every UN mission thats holding it down that low. However Iraq turns out, its already a hundred times healthier than Bosnia, and its effects are rolling on through Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Kuwait, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. But because Bosnia is the quintessential expression of international lack of will, it will always get a better press than Bushs war for oil.
Most Westerners remain committed to wasteful incompetent transnationalism on the grounds that, by golly, it may do nothing for the poor and suffering of this world but it makes me feel good. The G8 summiteers will get a taste of this next month when they fly in to Gleneagles to get berated over Africa by elderly Caucasian pop stars. The whole G8/Africa thing these last few weeks rang a vague bell with me: where had I heard that before?
Oh, yeah, thats right, I went to the 2002 G8 summit in Alberta. And, mainly because the then Canadian prime minister didnt want it to be all about terrorism and war and Iraq and other issues to which his own country was and is entirely irrelevant, hed decided to make Africa the big centrepiece. A bunch of friendly dictators were flown over for photo-ops with the G8 bigshots, and the papers were full of cooing reports about the Canadian prime ministers breakthrough Africa initiative. Well, the Calgary papers were. The Fleet Street papers were full of cooing reports about the British Prime Ministers breakthrough Africa initiative. But the point is, whoevers initiative it was, plenty of Western leaders were eager to take credit for it. Except for Bush, who, as with the tsunami, was roundly criticised for embarking on his own direct initiative with Africa.
Anyway, the 2002 initiative was called NEPAD, pronounced kneepad. And not having heard a thing about it in the three years since a Canadian G8 official triumphantly handed me the press release, I wondered how it was getting on. Well, theres an official report on NEPADs Achievements In The First Three Years, but even on a close reading its kind of hard figuring out whats actually happening:
On the development front, the African leaders launched comprehensive studies covering conflict resolution, political, economic and corporate governance, education, health, science ...Official Direct Assistance (ODA) reforms ...debt cancellation ...foreign direct investment....
Gotcha. They launched comprehensive studies of a lot of things. And why did they do that? The primary objective was to develop a comprehensive development framework based on a thorough understanding of the most up-to-date information and trends in each area.
Terrific. So they launched comprehensive studies to develop a comprehensive development study for holding meetings on developing more comprehensively a framework for studying the development of further meetings. So comprehensively did they do this that in 2004 the NEPAD secretariat overspent its seven-and-a-half million-dollar budget by more than two million dollars. Still, Im sure the taxpayers of Finland, who chipped in half a million bucks to NEPADs communications and conferences bill, travelling costs, corporate services and other expenses, enjoyed the delicious frisson of doing something for Africa.
On the evidence of the NEPAD report, Africas tragedy or its latest tragedy is that its advanced straight to late-period Western-decadence transnationalist bureaucratic blather without the intervening stage of economic dynamism. A few years ago a couple of New Hampshire neighbours of mine decided to treat themselves to a rather exotic honeymoon. We went to Africa, said the wife.
Oh, really? I said. Which country?
Africa, she said. I just told you.
Thats the level at which initiatives for Africa are proposed and supported. There is no Africa, at least not in the sense that you can devise programmes, reforms and structures to embrace Libya and Swaziland, Niger and Mauritius, Liberia and Botswana. The biggest thing the West could do for Africa is over here, not over there: end European and American agricultural protectionism. The second biggest thing would be to stop making a multicultural virtue of denuding the continent of its best and brightest: Birmingham now has more Malawian nurses than Malawi. In Africa itself, the one issue which is clearly no respecter of national borders Aids is the one on which Western do-gooders are most hampered by their own cultural prejudices and pieties.
But on almost everything else, the way to change Africa is to start small and local. The head guy in NEPAD is Chief Obasanjo, Nigerias strongman. Instead of being flown in to shake hands with Jacques Chirac and Vladimir Putin at the G8 or swanking about at African Union summits, he ought to stay home and make a few simple changes to Nigerian economic regulation: for a piece of property to change hands in Lagos requires 21 different bureaucratic procedures and takes over nine months. Instead of pretending to fix his continent, Obasanjo should try mending his backyard.
Whats good for the African Union goes for the European Union, too. The EUs big ideas the constitution, the currency are dangerous delusions that prevent individual member states taking responsibility for their own problems. And, if there are any solutions to Europes economic sclerosis and deathbed demographics, theyll start as in Africa small and local.
Any large gathering of world leaders is a waste of time, especially if theres any kind of permanent secretariat or bureaucracy involved. Mr Bush will be polite at Gleneagles, but its no coincidence that his closest relationship is with a man he hardly ever meets in person, and never at the big talking-shops John Howard of Australia, who doesnt get to go to the G8 or Nato or the EU and yet works more effectively with America than Canada or any of the so-called major European allies like France and Germany. Summits are, so to speak, one huge bluff.
According to my favourite foreign minister these days, Australias Alexander Downer, Iraq was a clear example about how outcomes are more important than blind faith in the principles of non-intervention, sovereignty and multilateralism.... Increasingly multilateralism is a synonym for an ineffective and unfocused policy involving internationalism of the lowest common denominator. Multilateral institutions need to become more results-oriented.
Which is pretty much the Batman thesis: Its what we do that defines us.
Sir Bob is so goofy and I don't think he ever could sing .
This week he told Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin to stay home from the G8 meeting because Canada has not met its commitments. Later, outside the Commons, Finance Minister Ralph Goodale said British Prime Minister Tony Blair issued the invitation to the G8, not Geldof.
Why does ANYONE respond to Sir Bob, let alone Canadas Finance Minister? I do not get it.
Steyn hits it right on the mark with this column, again.
Also, is Batman still "The Caped Crusader" in the movies or has Hollywood red penciled that?
Please don't feed the animals.
Feeding them just reinforces their bad behavior.
Iraq was a quagmire before it became a quagmire. Same with all the other kingdoms in the Middle East. We were content to let the kingdoms produce little more than local quagmires until they decided to export them to downtown NYC, the banks of the Potomac and farmland of PA.
Since my World History classes in High School-- the names of these kingdoms hadn't changed in these Shi'iteholes. That was in 1986.
Now we've forcibly changed 1 of them. Removed another regime in the perpetual Afghani quaqmire. Transported the Libyan centrifuges to a location you can visit off Hwy 40 in Tenn. Effectively kicked the Syrians out of Lebanon without firing a shot. Have the Egyptians talking of ending decades of "Emergency" rule. Have the Saudi's recognizing women as more than vassals for sperm.
Now we've pushed the quagmires back into their own backyard. You must periodically beat back the Mohammedan.
Steyn seems a little harsh in his criticism of lack of progress in Bosnia. After all it only took eight years to decide what shade of blue should be used on their flag. (Last I knew they were still working on the crest.)
On the contrary. It's been one of the most astounding successes in military history. The "daily carnage" pales in comparison to what has happened during a typical war. There is more "daily carnage" on US highways.
Once they know you're watching, they'll start throwing their feces at you.
Not a memoir per se, but selected recollections.
And now that I know more details about his life, the fact that he is where he is now is ten times as amazing to me as I thought previously.
Would you believe that he used to be a Marxist?
No problemo AmishDude. I think you and I have crossed paths before. Thanks for the flag on whatchamacallit's animalist proclivities, because I don't enjoy flamewars with the few cranks that the forum does (unfortunately) include.
BTW, I've got lots of ancestors that were Amish. The Hostetlers are in my line, fwiw.
"The Hostetlers"...That's funny. They have a couple of pages in the Lancaster phone book.
Now that's just plain funny. Wow, thats a bunch of Hostetlers. Is that Lancaster PA?
All others are cheap imitations, including Burt.
Perfect!
Include me out of that one. The paucity of Polish jokes here doesn't mean we've turned Polish, either.
Sounds to me like she got that just about right.
As Drudge says,
Developing ...
Mr Bush will be polite at Gleneagles, but its no coincidence that his closest relationship is with a man he hardly ever meets in person, and never at the big talking-shops John Howard of Australia, who doesnt get to go to the G8 or Nato or the EU and yet works more effectively with America than Canada or any of the so-called major European allies like France and Germany. Summits are, so to speak, one huge bluff.According to my favourite foreign minister these days, Australias Alexander Downer, Iraq was a clear example about how outcomes are more important than blind faith in the principles of non-intervention, sovereignty and multilateralism.... Increasingly multilateralism is a synonym for an ineffective and unfocused policy involving internationalism of the lowest common denominator. Multilateral institutions need to become more results-oriented.
... Its what we do that defines us.
According to my favourite foreign minister these days, Australias Alexander Downer, Iraq was a clear example about how outcomes are more important than blind faith in the principles of non-intervention, sovereignty and multilateralism.... Increasingly multilateralism is a synonym for an ineffective and unfocused policy involving internationalism of the lowest common denominator. Multilateral institutions need to become more results-oriented.
Thanks for the ping to another brilliant Steyn-sighting!
LOLOLOLOL!
I'm getting my chequebook out right now...
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