The Cherry Orchard

I’ve earnestly been trying to keep up with the United Nations General Assembly debates, checking in on day two, day three and day four so as to report on the quality and integrity of each speech by each national representative.  This was the first time I’ve tried to pay anywhere near this much attention to UN’s annual autumn bash, and four days in I am already over my head.  Discouraged by technical problems at the UN.org website and frustrating lapses in coverage (such as the failure to provide an English translation of Venezuelan President Huge Chavez’s speech, which made the biggest headlines of the event so far when he called George W. Bush “the devil”), I’m now aiming for coverage that will be more impressionistic than complete, and I’ll try to dig in harder next year (assuming the planet and the institution known as the United Nations are both intact by next year, and I hope both will be).

As I said above, Chavez stole the headlines.  I don’t think George W. Bush is quite the devil, but I’d probably rather spend a day at the beach with Chavez than with George Bush, and I am amused to learn that the Venezuelan President and I share a high regard for Noam Chomsky who, I agree, everybody should read.

 In contrast to Chavez, here are the surprising words of Jalal Talabani, President of Iraq, who seems to like George Bush more than either I or Hugo Chavez do:

“We here renew our gratitiude for these forces that took part in liberating our country from the worst dictatorship known in history.  We specifically thank George W. Bush for his leadership of the campaign to liberate Iraq from tyranny and opening the doors for a new, democratic, pluralistic and federal Iraq that is at peace with itself and the world.”

Maybe this goes to show that theoretical issues of war and aggression look rather different when you are inside the nation fighting the war then when you’re sitting in Venezuela reading Noam Chomsky or Queens, New York posting to a blog. However one spins it all, it’s clear that a few causes get all the mic time at this debate: Israel and Palestine are number one, America and Iraq a distant second, Darfur virtually nowhere at all.

But what are we to think when despicable royals like Prince Faisal al-Saud of Saudi Arabia say all the right things about the importance of compromise settlements between Israel and Palestine, while Foreign Affairs Minister Tzipi Livni of Israel fails to rise to the occasion at all?  I’d hoped Israel’s plucky young representative would throw a curve-ball or otherwise try to inject some sand into the vaseline of international hypocrisy on display here, but she instead delivers a cool-toned speech including some prayers in Hebrew and an invocation of Ariel Sharon as “a great leader” – something even a person who cares deeply about the fate of Israel (such as myself) cannot agree with.

Leave it to Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine to deliver the best speech I’ve read so far, in which he speaks passionately for a fair peace and wistfully recalls the still-surprising and, of course, infinitely difficult 1993 compromise agreement between Yasser Arafat of Palestine and Yitzhak Rabin of Israel.  We need more speeches like this one, and we need more moderate world leaders like Mahmoud Abbas.

The debate returns on Monday with speeches by representatives of several straggler nations that didn’t make the cut for the kickoff sessions, including Laos, Nepal, Vietnam, Gabon, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Gambia, and Uruguay.

Quiz question: name three influential political scientists or academic theoreticians who play a major role in shaping world opinion on important global issues.

If I spend my day asking this question to everybody I see, I expect to hear two alternating answers:

a) (silence)

b) “Noam Chomsky” (followed by silence)

I am ashamed to admit that I can’t even come up with three good names myself. But, please understand that I have only been running this blog for a week, and have barely begun doing the research that will, I hope, make this site informative and useful (I’ve actually spent the last few years absorbed in literary news and fiction and poetry scenes, and I’m only now beginning to invest the same amount of my time into staying thoroughly up to date on political topics).

So, at this moment, I am in the same position as most people I know — I’ve read some Noam Chomsky, and other than that I have absolutely no idea what the most brilliant representatives of our top universities and research centers and think-tanks are doing to improve our world. I know there are many academic journals read by specialists in the field, like the Political Science Quarterly, but I don’t know anybody who reads or talks about these publications.

What should we think about the fact that our top contemporary academics have so thoroughly failed to penetrate popular consciousness? Doesn’t this amount to some kind of failure? I think it does.

And then there’s this amusing fact about Noam Chomsky, the only academic I can think of who has managed to penetrate popular discussion of global issues in our times: he’s not a professor of political science. Noam Chomsky is a linguist, and he made his reputation in 1956 with the introduction of the Chomsky-Schutzenberger Hierarchy, described by Wikipedia as a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars that generate formal languages (which is probably a very exciting development if you’re a linguist). Books like 9-11, Failed States and Manufacturing Consent have benefited from Chomsky’s reputation as a highly-respected academic, but Chomsky is an academic in a field completely unrelated to political science or history.

It seems that the contemporary community of top political academics are utterly failing to play a role in the popular understanding of global issues. I hate to use a cliche like “ivory tower”, but that’s apparently where these guys are broadcasting from, and it doesn’t seem like anybody’s tuning in.