Category: Humor

“… the United States lost interest in the region, leaving behind thousands of militant people with few jobs but many guns.”
No, not North America.

1990’s Afghanistan, according to Madeleine Albright. And as is well known, plenty of other decades and places.

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Madam Secretary, A Memoir” by Madeleine Albright with Bill Woodward, published in 2003.

Albright was born in May 1937. She and her parents fled their native Czechoslovakia for England the following year. They moved back after the war. In early 1948, Communists took over Czechoslovakia, while she was sent to boarding school in Switzerland. Meanwhile, her father, a high-level diplomat, moved to the Czech embassy in South Asia to help resolve the dispute over Kashmir. Her mother, brother and sister made their way to the United States. They were eventually granted political asylum.

Albright married a journalist from an “economic royalist” family with extensive real estate and corporate holdings. “We continued to go to Georgia… Colorado… Virginia, where we added land wherever we could…” She built a high-powered career, beginning as a volunteer for political causes that required frequent global travel in the late 1980’s. “But my American passport made all the difference. I was able to meet with dissidents, then board a plane and leave. I didn’t have to make the choices they [Czech citizens, when they were a Soviet satellite] had to make each day of their lives.”

Albright served as UN ambassador in president Bill Clinton’s first term. She switched to secretary of state in the second term. In spring 1997, there remained numerous nations suffering continuous and continual political crises that arguably necessitated military intervention– despite the end of the Cold War. Albright represented the United States government in talks that resulted in an increase in the number of NATO members from sixteen to nineteen through adding Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary because they were approaching democracy sooner than other political territories.

Albright claimed that economic sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council on Libya actually motivated Libya’s leader Muammar Gaddafi to turn in the two suspects (traced to Libya) for trial, in the terrorist bomb-attack on Pan Am flight 103. However, around the same time, sanctions in the form of a trade embargo, failed to change any of the cronyism and corruption practiced by Fidel Castro of Cuba. Apparently, he wasn’t in a power struggle, and wasn’t afraid that his worldwide reputation would be tarnished by treating his country’s citizens worse than usual.

As for North Korea, in June 2000, president Clinton visited leader Kim Jong il in the capital Pyongyang for a summit meeting that resulted in reunions of South and North Korean families who had been separated for more than fifty years. “North and South Korean athletes marched as one during opening ceremonies of the 2000 Olympic Games…” Ah, the good old days.

Anyway, read the book to learn much more about Albright’s trials, tribulations, and triumphs in trying to achieve world peace. Here is a parody that briefly describes a high-level, foreign-service position.

JOB OF A LIFETIME

sung / spoken to the tune of “Once in a Lifetime” [the long version] with apologies to Talking Heads (Brian Eno, Christopher Frantz, David Byrne, Jerry Harrison, and Tina Weymouth.)

And you may find yourself
living in a luxury hotel.
And you may busy yourself
flying all over the world.

And you may kid yourself
behind the scenes of a large cease-fire agreement.
And you may seat yourself
in a situation room
with a complicated plot.
And you may declare to yourself, well,
There’ll be no nuclear war here!

Trying to do your best
while the media cut you down.
Attending meetings, writing reports
while shenanigans abound.

Picking your battles again.
Tribal fighting never gone.
Job of a lifetime, though shenanigans abound.

And you may mutter to yourself
How do I word this?
And you may ask yourself
What happened to that peace-keeping mission?

And you may lament to yourself
This is not in my country’s best interest!
And you may think to yourself
Good luck with that civilian administration.

Trying to do your best
while the media cut you down.
Attending meetings, writing reports
while shenanigans abound.

Picking your battles again.
Tribal fighting never gone.
Job of a lifetime, though shenanigans abound.

We need more global cooperation.
We need more global cooperation.
We need more global cooperation.
We need more global cooperation.
We need more global cooperation.
We need more global cooperation.
We need more global cooperation.
We need more global cooperation.

Conflict Resolving and troubleshooting.
There is conflict all over the earth.
Visit the conflict, minimize the conflict.
Resolve the conflict, all over the earth.
Conflict resolving and troubleshooting.

Trying to do your best
while the media cut you down.
Attending meetings, writing reports
while shenanigans abound.

Picking your battles again.
Break the silence on war, there is conflict on the earth.
While the media cut you down.
Trying to do your best
while the media cut you down.
Trying to do your best
while the media cut you down.

Picking your battles again.
Tribal fighting never gone.
Job of a lifetime, though shenanigans abound.

You may wonder to yourself
Who is that foreign minister?
You may mumble to yourself
What is the world coming to?
And you may sigh to yourself
Who is right? Who is wrong?
And you may growl to yourself
Arrgh! What is going on?

Trying to do your best
while the media cut you down.
Attending meetings, writing reports
while shenanigans abound.

Picking your battles again.
Tribal fighting never gone.
Job of a lifetime, though shenanigans abound.

Trying to do your best
while the media cut you down.
Attending meetings, writing reports
while shenanigans abound.

Picking your battles again.
Tribal fighting never gone.
Job of a lifetime, though shenanigans abound.

Witnessing history all the time.
Witnessing history all the time.
Witnessing history all the time.

Thank goodness that war is over.
This treaty has too many loopholes.
And another disaster.

Promote democratic values worldwide.
Promote democratic values worldwide.
Promote democratic values worldwide.
Promote democratic values worldwide.
Promote democratic values worldwide.
Promote democratic values worldwide.

Trying to do your best.
Witnessing history all the time.
And the refugees come.
And here come the refugees.
Lost in translation.
Trying do your best (Witnessing history all the time.)
We need more global cooperation…