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4 April 2009

Sorry, Mr President, but bringing your own car to the G20 summit was plain rude

Like I said, it’s rude. And somehow we’ll get back at you. Our leaders will give you gifts that require electrical plugs with three pins, that safely earth. Our diplomats will ensure that all discussions include the words ‘herbal’ and ‘aluminium’, and will pretend not to understand you when you say them wrong. At state banquets, you will be presented with a salt-shaker (with one hole) and a pepper-shaker (with many holes) and left to fend for yourself. Assuming, that is, that you haven’t brought your own salt and pepper along, too. Although you probably have.

*I’m also going out on a limb and assuming that your big scary car wasn’t actually hit by an RPG. If it was, sorry.

Did you see President Medvedev speaking to Andrew Marr last weekend? I kept one eye on it, while browsing the papers, waiting for Medvedev to say something about how much Marr looked like Vladimir Putin. I also wanted Marr to ask him why he wears such very big ties. It’s odd. He always looks like he’s on his way home from a low-ranking job in the City five years ago.

Medvedev called the economy ‘a global problem’. And at that exact moment, I was reading in the foreign pages about Chinese state-sponsored hacking. No such thing, said a Chinese spokesman. Hacking, he said, ‘is a global problem’.

Gordon Brown is fond of global problems, too. So, on a whim, I decided to have a wee search through the world’s news for the past week, to see how many other global problems I could come up with. There were loads. The economy aside, Barack Obama thinks that terrorism emanating from Pakistan is a global problem and Dipu Moni, from Bangladesh, thinks this about her own domestic militancy, too. In New Zealand Aids is a global problem, in Russia tuberculosis is a global problem, and in Newcastle the environment is a global problem.

In Biotech Business Week, ‘the infection of man and animals with parasitic nematodes is recognised as a significant global problem’. In the Philippines, piracy is a global problem. The Australian Wine Research Institute reckons that smoke-tainted grapes are a global problem.

It sounds like the globe has a lot of problems. Or maybe people just like describing things as a ‘global problem’ so that they personally can’t be held accountable. This could be a problem, and not a local one.

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Alide

April 3rd, 2009 11:17pm Report this comment

Hugo, who the heck are you talking about rudeness? Your are rude to the nth degree, and ignorant to boot.

Ruth Fitch

April 6th, 2009 1:49pm Report this comment

He won't get it you know - too much irony. But I liked it.

Ken Bishop

April 6th, 2009 5:47pm Report this comment

Poor Alide, an American perchance? Calling someone "ignorant" is not debate, unless you provide some reasoning to justify the remark. Keep it up, Hugo, you make me chuckle every time. And you make a serious point too.

Alide

April 7th, 2009 12:43am Report this comment

No, Ken, I am not an American!

The Masked Marvel

April 7th, 2009 1:35am Report this comment

Alide,

So you're not an American. This means that you went out of your way to defend the leader of a foreign country against a fairly routine "Ooh, That Arrogant US President" column. How strange.

Cult of Personality, or what?

Malc Dow

April 7th, 2009 12:08pm Report this comment

"It sounds like the globe has a lot of problems. Or maybe people just like describing things as a ‘global problem’ so that they personally can’t be held accountable."

A truer word...

If the article was worth reading, for Politics is a bit naff as a subject (one can go on and on...),it was for this.

There is a funny smell about this 'global' stuff.
Reminds me of something...

Way back then in the stone age times, when the majority of the population was 16 or younger (imagine the noise), when the 1 in 300 who had reached over 30 years old were privy to certain cycles that the majority of the population were not.

This is power over the people of course.

The vast amount of monies that are expended on researching what results in 'secret' reports, surely can't be all wasted.

We must have the technology (thanks to the tax payer), that can predict certain fundamental elements of the universe as we know it.
Including the financial world. In fact very much the financial world.

Do 'they' know something 'we' do not? I think we should be told etc...

After all, while you struggle with your mortgage, 'they' just print more of the stuff.
The budget, as far as one can see, is dependent on the speed of the printing press.

Of course it makes good business sense, as it did in the times of yore, to keep a trick or two up your sleeve.

"Where does a General keep his armies??"
"Up his sleevies" is the obvious answer.

Global warming, global crash, global anything, if you have prior knowledge to anything 'global', as any fan of TinTin and his adventures in the land of the Incas' will tell you, is a powerful thing.

And yes, it is the small details about Barack Obama that should cause concern.

Little glitches in the program perhaps.
But this can result in a computer crash, and wwe wouldn't want that, again.

One trusts 'they' are working on it.

Alide

April 9th, 2009 7:20pm Report this comment

Neither, Masked Marvel. It's just that I know a little more than you or Hugo seem to know. Besides, I don't resent Americans the way most Brits and other Europeans do. Get over it, man.

Blaze N.

August 4th, 2009 8:45pm Report this comment

I don't know how things are run over there, but in the USA you are taught not to trust other people. -Any- other people. Why? I don't know, it's a bunch of crock, but you can't easily break habit.

You would, however, think the elected leader of a large, powerful country could resist the habitual urge and actually lend credit to those he visits. Oh, and to also not clog up their streets with the same atmosphere depleting garbage that is rampant here.

It's just common courtesy.

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