Month: August 2008

There are occasions when one nation’s foreign policy can look more like a toddler’s tantrum over toy privileges, rather than a mature response to the actions of another country. Using US naval destroyers to deliver aid to Georgia is a perfect example.

The USS McFaul is the first of three naval vessels to arrive off the port of Batumi, on the Georgian coast, supposedly carrying blankets, hygiene kits and baby food.

While aid agencies are working in the area, the need for aid shipments isn’t quite clear. During the conflict, around 30,000 South Ossetian refugees fled to North Ossetia, part of Russia and presumably beyond the domain of western agencies, and it’s estimated 128,000 were displaced within Georgia. This is not, however, sub-Saharan Africa. Georgia is a European nation. A minor skirmish with its larger neighbor, that lasted two weeks, can hardly have depleted stocks of merchandise sufficient to require an operation more suited to Ethiopia or Sudan.

It begs the question whether three US warships laden with babymilk are really answering a desperate plea for assistance from the Georgian people, or if their response has more to do with the need of the US government to wave its flag off the Georgian coast, in the hope Russia’s military will notice and flee in fear and trembling, back to their homeland.

Neither is the case. The purpose of the USS McFaul, and its sister ships, is to wave the flag towards the folks back home in America. It says to Americans, “Look at us. We’re here to stand up to those nasty Russians and sort the problems they caused by invading poor, defenseless, little Georgia.”

Unfortunately, the US warships presently lying off Batumi can’t get into that port to unload, because the water’s too shallow. There’s a much bigger port up the coast at Poti, with good depth of water, but the US warships dare not go there.

It’s still occupied by the Russians.

Filed under: Georgia on my mind

Now that the Beijing Olympics are running their final course – the Olympic Village a sea of hastily stuffed suitcases and used sneakers; athletes packing to catch their flights home, and the famous Bird’s Nest stadium about to be demoted to just another execution site for Chinese political prisoners – I have a few words to say to the American sports commentators, flown at great expense from the United States to double our delight and pluralize our pleasure, during this momentous, quadrennial event:

“FOR GOD’S SAKE, SHUT UP!”

I’m no great sports fan. I don’t savor the weekend ballgame or rush off to the golf course at every opportunity. I don’t even know what ESPN stands for. Just once in a while, however, my interest in matters physical raises itself above the level of a female body beautiful and attaches me to the cathode ray tube for a week, or a fortnight, of sport spectacular.

The British Lawn Tennis Championships at Wimbledon; the soccer World Cup; the Olympics. Throughout my life these events have held a certain fascination. Then, sadly, I moved to the United States of America.

Yes, I can still view these events, albeit through a constant barrage of Pepsi Cola, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Viagra marketing, but the enjoyment is sucked away as surely as a Texas teen demolishing a Coke in the heat of a Dallas summer, by the inane chattering of certain employees of the US corporate media who misrepresent themselves as, “commentators”.

In truth, their aim is to distract the viewer from the current event by disclosing lurid details of their past life, latest acquisitions from Christian Dior, or in the case of one female broadcaster at the Olympics, a lecture on the architecture of the stadium roof during a particularly engrossing performance of a Russian rhythmic gymnast who needed no commentary, other than the most delicate of vocal punctuation, to transport one to a blissful state of nirvana by her beauty, poise, and ballet-like dexterity.

The woman responsible for this rape of art and physical flawlessness is no exception to the rule. Rather, she is the norm. Wimbledon is ruined annually by the vocal floodgates of ex-US tennis stars-cum-media reporters who have about as much idea how to conduct a commentary on play as the Roman Emperor Nero had of Christian forgiveness.

Last year’s World Cup soccer tournament suffered similar inanity.

There’s a good reason for such lack of professionalism brazenly displayed by those employed by US corporate media outlets like NBC, (who, incidentally, have somehow secured the contract to exclusively cover both the Vancouver winter Olympics of 2010, and the London Olympics of 2012). It’s an automatic assumption that ex-players make good commentators. Nothing is further from the truth. While a sports commentator benefits from a thorough grounding in his particular field, the art of commentary has nothing to do with physical expertise in any particular sport.

Those of us mature enough to remember great BBC radio commentators like John Motson, Kenneth Wolstenholme, and Eddie Waring know that sports stars don’t necessarily make good commentators – something the US media has yet to fathom.

This supplanting of vocal expertise by pointless prattle is a necessary part of televised American sport. With the possible exception of basketball, other activities – baseball and American football – involve short periods of involvement interspersed with long, grotesquely boring, eons of inactivity that necessitate some form of vocal interlocution to prevent the viewer lapsing into somnolence. For this, the American ‘commentator’ is indispensable.

Fortunately, in the rest of the world sport partakes of sufficient activity to render such vacuous verbiage unnecessary to the point of distraction. Not to make too fine a point, it’s bloody annoying.

If US commentators have nothing better to say during a sporting event than to comment on such matters as the stadium roof, we’d all be much better off if they stayed at home and left the grace and skill of the competitors to speak for itself.

Filed under: Undesirable vocal proliferation

Hearty congratulations must be in order for Condoleeza Rice and the US administration, headed by the worst US president in history, for successfully concluding an agreement with the Polish government that will allow American missile bases in that country.

This one act signals the beginning of another Cold War-style standoff between Russia and the West. Just as we citizens of Earth were beginning to hope the thawing of relations through the late nineties would result in a peaceful world for our children, along comes Bush and his belligerent cohorts to kidnap America, set fire to the Middle East, and threaten Russia with nuclear annihilation by placing warheads in her own backyard.

To fan the flames more strongly, Bush then proceeds to huff and puff because Russia isn’t as quick as he’d like in getting out of Georgia. As if it were any of his business.

The American public, meanwhile, slumbers more peacefully in its bed trusting in the knowledge Mister Bush and Co are defending the homeland from attack by ‘rogue’ states, when in fact America’s badly-named ‘missile defense system’ is about as much use as a fart in a colander, and likely to remain so for the next fifty years. During that time, billion of dollars will be poured into defense contracts, supposedly to make it work. It’s unlikely that it will.

George Monbiot reports more fully on this aspect of the Pentagon’s financial benevolence to private industry in his Guardian report entitled,”The Magic Pudding”. It’s Sparrow Chat’s ‘Hot Link’ of the week, and can be found in the sidebar. For those who won’t get around to reading this before Thanksgiving, by which time the Hot Link will probably have changed, it’s also reproduced at the bottom of this post.^[1]

In conclusion, this week’s grand announcement of Polish/US entente cordiale has nothing whatever to do with defending the West against ‘rogue states’ or crazed Russians. Instead, it ensures a goodly supply of American taxpayers’ dollars to the private defense industry for the next two generations.

To achieve this, the White House is prepared to risk plunging the world into another Cold War.

^{[1] “The Magic Pudding” ~ Monbiot.com August 19th 2008}

^{NOTE: Monbiot.com has been down for some time, so the above link has been switched to the original Guardian article.}

Filed under: Warmongering