Posted on 08/30/2002 4:55:56 PM PDT by Pokey78
In his Guardian column this week, our old friend George Monbiot argued persuasively that poverty made people happier: "In southern Ethiopia, for example," wrote George, "the poorest half of the poorest nation on earth, the streets and fields crackle with laughter. In homes constructed from packing cases and palm leaves, people engage more freely, smile more often, express more affection than we do behind our double glazing, surrounded by remote controls."
He's so right. That's why I'm glad I made the effort to attend the opening gala of the Earth Summit, truly a night to remember. The banqueting suite of Johannesburg's Michelangelo Hotel was packed as Bob Mugabe warmed up the crowd with a few gags: "I don't know about you," he said, "but I'm starving millions of people!" The canned laughter - an authentic recording of happy Ethiopian peasants clutching their bellies and corpsing - filled the room.
After the chorus of native dancers clad only in packing cases and palm leaves, Natalie Cole came on to sing her famous anthem to industrial development, "Unsustainable/That's what you are", and 65,000 of the world's most eligible bureaucrats, NGO executive council members and BBC environmental correspondents crowded the dance floor to glide cheek to cheek under a glitter ball of premium ox dung specially flown in from Bangladesh. It glittered because of the 120,000 flies buzzing around it, their gossamer wings dappling the international activists below in a myriad of enchanting shadows.
And then I saw her. She was wearing a low-cut dress and had the most fabulous pair of melons. "Holy cow!" I said, as she approached my table. "They've gotta be genetically modified!"
"No," she said, sliding into the chair opposite and giving me a good look at them. "They're all natural." She tossed them to Kofi Annan. "They're for his organic juggling routine." I had to laugh. Sabine Arounde is the Belgian delegate to Unescam, the United Nations Expensive Summits & Conferences Agenda Monopolisers and, lemme tellya, when she's in a room the rising temperatures are nothing to do with fossil fuel emissions.
"We met at Durban," I reminded her.
"Oh, yeah," she said. "The conference on world health"
"Racism," I corrected her.
"Yeah, right," she said. "This one's more my bag. I'm very into S&M."
"Come again?" I said.
"Sustainable Alternative Natural Development Mechanisms," said Sabine.
We were interrupted by the waiter, as oleaginous as a tanker spill. "Will sir and madam be having the Beluga caviar, foie gras, lobster and magnum of champagne?"
"Certainly not!" I snapped. "The papers back home are full of stories about how we're all scoffing the caviar and chugging down the bubbly while just a mile down the road the locals are holding the Distended Belly of the Week competition. In compliance with Foreign Office guidelines, I'll just stick with Set Menu B."
"An excellent choice," he said. "Would sir prefer the mako shark soup or the black rhino confit on a bed of Amazonian mahogany leaves?"
"I'll have the rhino," I said, "followed by the lightly poached panda with a goldenseal salad and two green-cheeked parrot's eggs over easy."
"And would sir like to see the wine list?"
"Just bring me a Scotch and humpback whale oil on the rocks."
As Sabine ordered, she looked coolly into my eyes and Natalie Cole's voice wafted across the room to capture the moment: "Like a cloud of smog that clings to me/How the thought of you does things to me" The orchestra pit had been converted into an authentic replica of a Rwandan latrine and, even as Natalie sang the line, it sprang to life in a hundred dancing fountains of E. coli-infected martini.
"There's something heady in the air tonight," I murmured.
"It's the CO2 ," purred Sabine.
Four hours later, the exhausted UN lovely, her spent body glistening with the heat of passion, lay back on the shards of her shattered headboard. "Wow!" she whimpered, struggling for breath. "Now that's what I call sustainable growth. You are incredible!"
"UN seen nothin' yet, baby," I said. Yet, to my extreme annoyance, who should burst through the door but everybody's favourite Guardian columnist. "You know, of course, George Monsanto," said Sabine, hastily pulling the tigerskin bedspread around her.
"Monbiot!" I said. "I thought you were running away from the Guardian to join the gaily pealing fields of Gamo Gofa."
"I am. I'm on my way to Ethiopia right now. But I just wanted to stop in and thank you for coming here, eating the caviar, drinking the champagne, sucking the praline-flavoured centres out of the individually wrapped Belgian chocolates on your king-sized bed, and blowing all the billions of western taxpayers' dollars. Without your sacrifice, those poor industrialised chumps would have even more money to spend on double glazing, making their pathetic lives even more worthless and hollow."
"You're right," said Sabine. "But I don't know how much longer I can sustain this level of sustainable development conferencing."
"Rather you than me," said George. "I can't wait to be just a happy, laughing Ethiopian peasant."
"Better hurry up," said Sabine. "Male life expectancy in Ethopia is 42.88 years."
"Abyssinia," I said, giving George a cheery wave.
No, that would be leaving them there. In an orphanage where they have little food, poor medical care and the staff is, let's say, less then kind. In fact, deviants and degenerates fits them kind of well. And then at sixteen they are tossed onto the street. Shall I save maybe one kid a year in search of the best or should I save twenty by taking what is better?
These kids by the way are not abandon after they are placed. A big part of our job is follow up to make sure that the kids are well treated and happy. We do a much better job with our children adopted from overseas then the FIA does with their kids. 189 which they have literally lost I might add.
You send me the perfect couple and I will just about guarantee you that they will want a perfect kid. Well, I happen to be fresh out of perfect kids. I have kids who only have one eye, who are deaf, who scream if you touch them, who are scarred inside and out.
Shall I abandon these kids to a life that is purely hell on earth because of a shortage of the best? Or should I try to get them something better?
So far I have not had to make that decision. But just what, Mr. Allen would you have me do? Shall I place them with a nice lesbian couple who are not pedofiles or should I leave them to be raped by the orphanage staff?
a.cricket
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