lenny unencumbered

It’s Heritage Day here in South Africa. It’s a public holiday which celebrates our diverse cultural traditions, languages (we have 12 of them, all official), and history. I’ve already squandered far too much of it, watching YouTube videos of recent events in a completely different country.

I just can’t help feeling pity for a nation that elected a monumental idiot as its President and is evidently completely and utterly paralysed to do anything to correct its humongous blunder. They appear to be transfixed in the grin-and-bear-it phase of FAFO.

One video I watched shows the welcome given to Chinese President Xi Jinping during his current visit to America. While U.S. President Donald Trump appears as delighted as a five-year-old by the U.S. Air Force B-1B Lancer supersonic bombers that performed a flyover at the welcome ceremony, Jinping was not in the least bit impressed.

Why would he be? Jinping has spent trillions of dollars building infrastructure for his country, turning it into a futuristic world superpower. Meanwhile, Trump has spent trillions of dollars building a military that he claims obliterated Iran several times over, but according to a completely bonkers United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) speech he gave yesterday, it may have to be annihilated again after the midterm elections.

At the UNGA, there were two other speeches that were enlightening, something unusual for the U.N., which has abjectly failed to live up to the ambitions it was constituted for. It remains a club for rich nations to give marvellous speeches defending their debauchery, theft of resources, and military belligerence while poorer nations beg and grovel.

One speech was by Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, which was both unprecedented and extremely brave, being delivered on enemy home ground. He must surely have ruffled a few imperialist feathers when he divulged who the real terrorists are by producing receipts.

The other was by the President of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, one of the few politicians I still respect in the world. While lamenting the past failures of the U.N. and calling out some of its delinquent members such as the USA and Israel, he hoped it would reform and live up to its once noble mandate. One reform he called for was abolishing the veto held by just five countries in the Security Council, which the U.S. has abused most to hold other countries to ransom.

There was one other speech given by a genocidal madman which evoked a walkout by many members of the UNGA, but I won’t bother to say anything further about that spectacle as this is where I walk out too…