This is UN week here in New York, an event most of the country will be spared, even unto the reporting of what the princes of the three worlds tell us. There is a certain amount of color to it all, no denying that. This morning the dictator of Nicaragua went jogging in Central Park, followed by Secret Service guards carrying hidden machine guns. The day before, Mr. Mobutu hired two private railroad cars to take him and his staff to Washington. En route they were served caviar and champagne, among other things, and perhaps pondered the plight of the poor nations. The frugality of Mr. Mobutu is in contrast with his appearance at the UN in 1973, when he a) denounced America and the West in general, and b) traveled here aboard the S.S. France, where he had eighty first-class staterooms for his entourage, including his private photographer and his wife’s hairdresser. So, in 12 years, Mobutu is reduced to fifty attendants and the S.S. France to none: The government in Paris said, in effect, that it couldn’t afford to keep up the France as long as Mobutu traveled on it only once a year.
There is a lot of that kind of sniping against the Third Worlders, whose economic profligacy at home is quite simply a scandal: Mengistu of Ethiopia spending $50 million on a new building in Addis Ababa while American middle-class citizens send dollars to relief agencies for Ethiopia and musicians sing rock round the clock to raise money. There is that part of the UN that strains charity, but it is probably fair to say that most New Yorkers have got used to it, arid not many speeches these days are devoted to it.
They talk about other things. Charles Lichenstein, the bright political scientist who served on the staff of Jeane the Great when she was our ambassador to the UN, electrified the world when, provoked, he reminded a UN official that the UN was always free to pack up and head out to sea, with a whole lot of Americans waving it goodbye as it sailed off into the sunset. Never mind that sailing into the sunset from Manhattan would end the UN up in Hoboken, nobody ever said Chuck Lichen- stein was a cartographer. It was the thought that counted, and that thought had great and deep echo chambers in the American spirit, because the UN has outraged every ideal enunciated at its founding.
The United Nations is the greatest distillery of anti-Americanism outside the Kremlin.
That is what worries the thoughtful residents of New York. I mean, the idea of a celebration. Celebrate is what you do when you run the four-minute mile, or when you win a world war, or when Christ is risen. The problem with this week in New York City is that everyone is here to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the United Nations, but there is nothing to celebrate, unless you take the position that anything forty years old is worth celebrating, in which case AIDS has about 37 years to go before we celebrate it.
The United Nations is the greatest distillery of anti-Americanism outside the Kremlin. It is the greatest distillery of anti-Semitism even including the Kremlin. It is, to quote myself, the greatest assault on moral realism of any institution in the world today. The reason for this is that within the United Nations the assumption is that statesmen are concerting to advance liberty and comity. That underlying assumption is traduced by the behavior of the men who, in the United Nations, spread falsehoods, encourage hostilities, and deplore and restrict the growth of freedom, while excusing and indirectly encouraging the increase in terrorism.
Can it really be all that bad? No. Nothing is all that bad. There are fine men and women associated with the enterprise, who labor mightily to surface a clean thought every now and then. And, every now and then, the delegates are exposed to intelligent and resourceful research, even to a good speech. There is no doubting that there is a felt hunger in the world for peace and just a little liberty for oppressed peoples. And an adventurous spelunker willing to delve into the depths of UN oratory will every now and then bump into a little stalagmite expressing the deeply hidden ideals of the United Nations.
But there is precious little to celebrate. If ever it were relevant that the background of the President of the United States is that of an actor, it will be relevant on the day he arrives in New York to celebrate the UN’s fortieth anniversary.