Saturday, June 16, 2007

looking back

News of the demise of Kurt Waldheim is making me oddly nostalgic for simpler, less invasive times, when one could become secretary general of the United Nations without anyone discovering one's Nazi past.

That wouldn't happen today. Today, someone on the UN hiring committee (in the UN HR department? at the headhunting company that supplies the UN with potential secretaries general? I'm a little fuzzy on process here) would google "Kurt Waldheim" and discover his MySpace page, replete with swastikas and glowing reviews of Mein Kampf and "I HEART Hitler" buttons and it would be game over.

Everything was simpler in my day (please don't ask me define exactly when "my day" was, it varies according to my mood - sometimes I'll swear it was the mid-70s glory years of the Montreal Canadiens). Take Maggie Thatcher's invasion of the Falklands. Now there was a war. No "shock and awe" tactics, no precision bombing, no invasion-justifying whoppers about weapons of mass destruction - just Maggie, smacking Argentinians into submission with her handbag. And when it was over, it was over - no counter-insurgents, no suicide sheep bombers, no nothing. I know she was a little long in the tooth for active duty at the time, but I kind of wish they'd dusted her off and sent her into Iraq. (Of course, she and Saddam would probably have gotten along like a house afire and all thoughts of regime change would have been abandoned in favor of a crackdown on the real enemy - the unions.)

But such times are past, gone the way of rotary dial telephones and glass milk bottles and privacy (other things about which I could wax nostalgic, but won't), and it's probably better to embrace the complications of modern existence than to continually bash one's head against them. So I'm going to google "UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon" and I'm telling you right now, I'd better like what I see.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mary - where are you? am itching for a new post

chihuahua lady said...

hey maire, write somethin, kurt waldheim has had his time on the spolight