Well, this has been a great week for reality Television. Turns out the United Nations in New York has been running the best and zaniest show of all. What a cast! -- Can you believe it -- First of all we have President Barack Obama reprising his favorite role, the messiah spouting pious platitudes and feel good m really good intentions just dripping with high grade kumbaya and making apology after apology for all the evils his bastard of a country has committed again and again. Spare me Dude, like a Cook County Democratic office holder really is a saint. The worse thing for me is that he apparently believes this gushing load of good intentions and feel good aspirations. At the peak of his messianic pitch Obama talked about abolishing all atomic weapons. You’ve got to wonder if Barack looked around the UN at the parade of tyrants, criminals, crooks and patently crazy “world leaders.”
What a big wishful bit of dreaming and willful blindness. Right now the tragedy of our times is not a delay in getting rid of existing atomic bombs, it is keeping every piss ant little banana republic from getting its very own nuclear arsenal. It is clear Iran and North Korea have done it already and at least a dozen other nations like Saudi Arabia and Turkey, Egypt and Dubai are serious about it. This week a Brazilian cabinet member seriously suggested Brazil nuke up. So far only two nation who have had nuclear weapons have given them up: South Africa and the Ukraine. Three others have stopped their progress to nukes, Iraq and Syria because Israel bombed the hell out their facilities and Libya which threw in the towel before it’s facilities were bombed. We are facing a world where it is ever more likely that Egypt and Bolivia, Nigeria and Burma, Brazil and Kenya, Saudi Arabia and Honduras could be nuclear powers. Like Jackie Gleason used to say on his TV show fifty years ago, “You can be the first on your block to RULE THE WORLD.”
But it turns out President Obama was just the show’s up beat opening act. Follow the Bamster was a nearly two hour performance by Libya's ever popular dictator for life, Colonel Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi. Peace be upon him. Now this guy was socko, I mean he was everything you could want in a dictator from from a fly blown hot dusty Islmanic third world country. He talked, then he shuffled his notes and hitched up his flowing cloak and then he talked and talked then talked some more. He tossed around booklets of the UN charter and the Security Council rule book.
Gaddafi has rambling episodic style, his performance was not classical oratory building slowly to a grand summation. Naw, Muammar rambled and wandered, he returned to the topic and segued away to something new then segued to an unexpected insult or demand. He went on and on, causing at least one of the UN’s staff translators to have a total breakdown -- normally at the UN the translators have a printed text of the speech to prep for translation ahead of time. No such luck, the guy talked and talked and not in the formal rolling cadences of cultivated classical Arabic, but in his unique Sahara dialect mixing in back county idioms and obscenities and sometimes utterly incomprehensible talk. What a show and just think beside his Earol Flynn costume picture outfit and glazed eyes, he also came to New York with his own tent. Sound track, “I am the Sheik of Araby.”
Now of course we had other mad dog horror film freaks at the United Nations high marble rostrum, leading the pack of villains was Iran’s ever popular President and election fixer Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or AJ as they call him in New York tabloid headlines. While Gaddafi is an old style Arab strongman complete with flowing robes, AJ from Tehran is a modern urban rat face tool of Satan. He dresses like somebody in an almost cool ‘80’s working class dance hall kind of way. His rodent shaped face is always insincere and his eyes glow in the dark like the flaming eyes of a heathen idol in an Indiana Jones movie. You just know in the words of Randy Newman’s great song, AJ can not wait to “drop the big one.”
Then of course we have supporting characters including the Cholo in a red beret, the great hombre himself Hugo Chavez. He is the clown version of the traditional “my people love me” Latino strong man. For some unfathomable reason all the hip Hollywood “progressives” are now hobnobbing with Hugo. I will grant Fidel Castro some gravitas and a real histrionic swagger. But Hugo Chavez is a garden variety caudillo in the long and sleazy tradition of Latin American tyranny and megalomania. What in hell has got into Sean Penn and Oliver Stone among many others to get taken in by a central casting Latino Dictator? I just don’t see how he looks good in their eyes. Even serious left-wingers in Latin America are repulsed by Chavez and his macho postures and barely literate drivel and constant vulgarity.
In a recent interview, Chavez talked about how that world class gavacho intellectual Noam Chomsky had visited Venezuela and proclaimed it great and true democracy. Well, dude, if Noam Chomsky says you are the cat’s whiskers, you must be. Good old Noam is a guy who has spent his life telling us that day is night, black is white, lies are true, and down is really up. Only Noam could look at Hugo Chavez and see a great democratic leader, a banana republic Jefferson or Mandella. The rest of the world sees him as a cochino faced clown doing a world class job as the lord of misrule. At least we know sooner or later the oil money will run out and Hugo will end up hanged by his heels when his long suffering peons rise up and end the comedy. By the way Hugo announced he is opening a “peace base” in Cuba to help the poor Cubanos in case the gringos invade. And just think I didn't make any of this up.
It is only once a year that heads of government beeline it to Manhattan for the United Nation’s annual “open mike” week. What a great show. The only favorite world figure missing was North Korea’s beloved leader Kim.
