THE NEXT LUNCH HOUR

Dear Wife has left The Study for a long weekend with Daughter and Cousin. They will enjoy a traditional, annual visit to a small town country fair; shop; dine; visit and visit and visit; and do all sorts of things I do not even know about. There will be cocktail hours and in-home and out-of-home dining and hopefully, fun to be had by all.

Sophie Matilda and I will hold down The Study.

There are the usual chores.
Hopefully, some of these will get done.

And there will be time, God willing, to monitor and think and talk and write about what on earth is going on around us.

As suggested in these pages earlier, we at The Study do not listen ‘live’ to any speeches by b.o. or his minions or to speeches by any of the foreign leaders [in our judgement] who are not worthy of being listened to.

Instead, we rely on analyses from a wide variety of resources and, on occasion, to reading the texts of said speeches.

We used both methods of understanding last night and this morning regarding the remarks yesterday by b.o. and gaddafi at the u.n..

We could say a lot of things about these two speeches. It is at times like these that I regret not being able to have lunch with all my former colleagues in our History Department.
We were a somewhat diverse group – liberals, moderates, conservatives, and some crossovers hard to describe.

Folks from other departments would sometimes come up to eat with us, just to observe or participate in often lively exchanges.
Only rarely would tempers flare.

But sentiments would invariably be strongly expressed.

Such would be the case on a day like this, a day after some remarkable performances by some of the world’s leaders.

At that luncheon table, a decade ago, i might have poured my coffee and made my sandwich and then have opened up with, “Well, gotta give him credit, b.o. is really out to change the role of the United States of America in world affairs.”

And that would get us going. If I didn’t do it, someone else would make a similar or a different point.

I find that Sophie Matilda agrees with almost everything I say, except when we talk about her baths or her taking of medicine.

To my colleagues, I might have said that I am not going to parrot the ridicule and disbelief which has greeted the statement by our President – except to say that he misrepresented reality, completely and entirely – in everything he said yesterday.

I might have said that it was an embarrassment, a humiliation, that I can imagine what any knowing observer must have thought.

I know what I now think about the speech, twenty-four hours later.

The professional diplomats, if not the politicians, the good ones, know the score.

They know the nature of science; the inevitability of the spread of technology, including nuclear technology; the role of alliances, even the necessity of alliances; of balances of power; of the inherent inequality of nations; of the need for a peacekeeper; of the importance of national interest; and on and on.

And then, of course, there is the matter of the u.n. itself and its abilities, or rather its inabilities, to cope with the problems of the world since its inception so many decades ago.

I would have suggested that the u.n. is a relic of WW2 – a leftover of the mindset that helped the Good Guys win that epic struggle: the idea that victory in that war would allow the world to move into broad, sunlit uplands, as, I believe, Churchill proclaimed.

Well, our side won the war but the uplands we moved into had some clouds.

And the clouds are getting denser, the more years that go by. And the u.n., the agency of peace created by the victors, has not turned out to be the innovation that its creators thought it would be.

And then our lunch hour would be over and we would go back to our twenty-five or thirty young students – and we would do what we could to share with them the skills we hoped would help them develop into responsible young persons.

And I would look forward to the next lunch hour.