(I composed this to my senator, Marco Rubio, after I saw the segment on Thursday’s episode of The Daily Show about UNESCO. I write him a lot of letters; I hope his letter-reading staff gets a kick out of them.)
Again we meet, my beloved nemesis.
Time and time again, I have tapped out my little screeds, my clever pocitos, my meager missives into this here off-blue box. I convince myself that if I can get a few laughs out of your gatekeepers - yes, YOU, the person reading this, I’m talking about YOU - then maybe my voice will get passed up the grapevine and land on your desk, and you can wrap yourself in the sweet velvet of my indignation and maybe grow a little wiser from it. Today, I face a special challenge, O my brother, for I have already written to Bill Nelson and told him that I have composed for you, my sweet prince, a masterpiece. Somebody should be round to your office from his office asking to read it. As you can imagine, this places quite a burden on my shaky shoulders. Let’s get this thing going.
I consider myself to be something of a traveler. North, south, east, west - I’m even working on up, to get in a few hands of preferans with the good people on the ISS. Foreigners* say a lot of bad things about us Yankees, brother sir. We’re loud, boorish, stupid, we don’t pay attention, we’re all fatty bom boms, and we lack any kind of talent except for blues music and setting things on fire - and we’ve recently gotten pretty rubbish at those, our trademarks!
But nobody, and I mean NOBODY has ever called us misers. You know why? ‘cuz we ain’t misers, Marco Rubio. We ain’t, not in this ol’ country of ours. We’re not sophisticates, we’re not intellectuals, we do more harm than good and we freely admit to it - but when something needs doing (or when we think something needs doing), then we go balls to the wall and we spend whatever needs spending and we make it happen. I thought the sun would rise in the west before we Americans - we! Americans! who invented the goddamn triple cheeseburger! - would be spendthrifts, especially when the amount of money is so small.
(and we’re crap at blowing things up, too. This is why John Bird, Vice-Admiral of the 7th Fleet, said that the purpose of the Navy is not to fight. You might want to call him to task on this.)
Yes, the amount of money is miniscule. Oh, gracious, you budget hawks love to harp on pennies, don’t you? I’ve never heard you folks ask whether the Air Force really /needs/ those ridiculous F-22 Raptors - 150 mil apiece - or whether the Army /needs/ another M1A2 - 6.21 mil apiece - or anything like that. The Pentagon, of course, is sacrosant; their crisp uniforms and shining medals give them a moral authority that we worthless, ungrateful civilians can only grovel before. It’s us, the regular folks, who have to pay for Wall Street’s misdeeds.
UNESCO lost out on $60 million dollars because of our sadomasochistic love affair with the Kadima party. I appreciate the fact that, under law, we had to do that. We passed a law about it - we passed it like a jagged kidney stone, but we passed it nonetheless. But what is made by the stroke of the pen can be unmade just as easily.
You know what really makes me mad? You and I, as Miami lads, should understand this best of all. As South Floridians, we have often been shackled to the insane and arbitrary whims of the panhandle; as Floridians of any stripe, we have been dragged behind the General Lees and Smoky and the Bandits of the Deep South in too many of their misadventures (like the civil war, for one), dragged like a kid who got mixed up with meth. We Floridians have been held hostage to the bad behavior and the cruel politics of larger powers time and time again.
For that reason, my heart goes out to the people of the world who have benefited from UNESCO, and who will lose out because of our snit-fit. They have done nothing to deserve this bad treatment.
And isn’t this what you so famously discussed at the Reagan Library? Here we are, in the community of nations, and our neighbors are sick. It behooves us, I have heard you say, to help them.
I think my point has been made clear. It is shameful, and I mean that in the fullest sense of the word, that a nation of such unsurpassing puissance and majesty as the United States of America is behaving with such penny-pinching shortsightedness. Please support any legislation that will allow us to return to our good relationship with UNESCO at once.
P.S. What was with that asterisk? Oh yes. *Foreigner. Yes, like - ahem - you. Today you’re the golden boy of the Tea Party, but tomorrow, once that falls out of fashion, the same people who are cheering for you will kick you to the curb and count you among their hated Cockroach People. Your relationship with the American Far Right is a marriage of convenience, and an abusive one, to boot.