Parade magazine, that venerable arbiter of objectivity and fairness, is running an on-line poll this week about the United Nations. It’s a simple question: Does the U.N. still matter? That’s a fair question — would that it had been asked in the context of a fair and objective article.
But it’s not. The article is long on criticism of the U.N. and short on criticism of the Bush administration, which has done much to harm the effectiveness and standing of the United Nations. The administration’s only act more crass than thumbing its nose at the world body on the eve of the invasion of Iraq was to send John Bolton — a stolid critic of the organization — there as U.S. ambassador.
Granted, the U.N. has never been that cool, collective, Esperanto-speaking, august body of the world’s best and brightest solving the world’s problems to make a better world. But it’s all we’ve got as a super-national entity. There’s not going to be any 20-foot tall robot named Gort to come down and make the nations of the Earth stop fighting like in “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” Closest we have is U.N. Attorney General Ban Ki-moon.
So go to the Parade poll and vote that the U.N. still does matter.
Why would ANYONE care what Parade magazine has to say. Have you EVER seen an article in this once-a-week-fishwrap that meant anything?
While I agree with you, George, the problem is that plenty of folks actually read that pap, rely on it, and would abide by its pretend poll. So, it isn’t as irrelevant of a magazine as you think, unfortunately, because Georgie Porgie and Tricky Dicky Cheney have sufficiently dumbed America down to make it relevant, at this point.