Gilligan's Planet

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[I don't know if the author of this piece knows it, but there really was
a show called Gilligan's Planet. It was a Saturday morning cartoon that
lasted a single season.--DC]

http://tinyurl.com/5ldf6q
Gilligan’s Planet
Last week in Beijing, Georgia and Russia faced off on opposite sides of
a line drawn in the sand.
Sunday, August 17, 2008 11:36 AM EDT

Last week in Beijing, Georgia and Russia faced off on opposite sides of
a line drawn in the sand.

Powered by a pair of hired guns from Brazil, the Georgians routed the
Russians in less than an hour.

While four women in bikinis settled the ancient question of beach
volleyball supremacy in the Caucasus, Russian tanks and planes were
reminding Georgia and the rest of the world who’s still boss in a
sandbox rivaled only by the Middle East in mindless brutality and
disproportionate international influence (oil).

Bullets, bombs and the wails of the dying weren’t the sort of background
noise the Chinese government and the International Olympic Committee had
planned as the 29th Summer Olympic Games lumbered out of the starting
blocks.

Like any other totalitarian regime desperate to spackle over the ugly
realities of its iron rule, the Chinese government has micromanaged
every aspect of the games, from inserting computer-generated fireworks
into “live” coverage of the opening ceremony to trotting out an
impossibly adorable 9-year-old to lipsynch a song actually sung by a
7-year-old whose angelic voice originates behind crooked teeth.

The government also put migrant workers and dissenters under wraps and
ordered “man’s best entree” removed from the menus of Beijing
restaurants, which was a blow to epicurious foreigners eager to sample
the Lassie lo mein.

Before the shooting started, the story of the week was American merman
Michael Phelps, who seemed to win a gold medal every time he came into
contact with water. At 23, Mr. Phelps is being hailed as “the greatest
Olympian of all time” and is polling better than Arizona Sen. John
McCain and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama combined.

While it was a shame to see the world’s best athletes shoved aside by
tanks, there was a bit of delicious irony in seeing a repressive,
corrupt Communist regime upstaged by a “democratic” counterpart
revisiting its repressive, corrupt Communist roots.

Irony aside, Russia is on the march, and that’s never good.

As the world circles the bowl, our ship of state is being piloted by the
most inept navigator in the nation’s history and a foreign policy team
only slightly more competent than the crew of the S.S. Minnow.

Welcome to “Gilligan’s Planet.” Anyone know how to build a coconut radio?

After it was explained to President Bush that Russian planes were not
bombing Atlanta, he sat down to trade sentence fragments with NBC’s Bob
Costas. Mr. Bush denounced Russia’s “disproportionate response” to
Georgia’s ill-advised invasion of South Ossetia, a former Soviet speck
with fewer residents (70,000) than the city of Scranton (74,000).

Georgia’s total population is about 5 million, or roughly half the size
of the Pennsylvania Legislature. How small is Georgia? To field a
competitive Olympic beach volleyball team, it had to hire a pair of
Brazilian mercenaries who have visited the tiny republic twice. How
inspiring.

“I was very firm with Vladimir Putin. He and I have got a good
relationship...,” the president said of the Russian Prime Minister and
former head of the KGB, whom Mr. Bush famously nicknamed “Pooty-poot.”

Mr. Putin agreed to a cease-fire, which, like any former KGB head worth
his cyanide cufflinks, Pooty-poot promptly violated.

The resulting global freak-out makes me nostalgic for the good old days
of the Cold War, when the constant threat of a thermonuclear apocalypse
brought a certain anxious order to geopolitics and inspired
sanctimonious, self-absorbed pop stars to sing sugary elegies to red
balloons and wonder aloud about whether the Russians love their
children, too.

They do, I’m sure, but I bet it’s a tough love.

The crisis led to a rare public sighting of alleged Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, who always appears to be drowning yet somehow unaware
of it.

“This is not 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, where Russia can
threaten a neighbor, occupy a capital, overthrow a government and get
away with it,” Ms. Rice said, somehow with a straight face. She didn’t
mention the American invasion of Iraq back in 2003, which Russia is now
waving like a hall pass to the world.

Neither did Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who
declared, “The days of overthrowing leaders by military means in Europe
— those days are gone.”

Clearly, the insertion of “in Europe” was meant as a drape over the
Iraqi elephant in the room, which would be pathetic enough if not for
the fact that Georgia is actually in Asia, which, despite its
considerable ambition, is still not Europe.

The quote of the week, however, was uttered by Sen. McCain, R-Exxon,
whose senior foreign policy adviser just happens to be a former paid
lobbyist for (drumroll, please) the Republic of Georgia.

Like a true statesman, Mr. McCain vowed not to make political hay out of
the crisis. He then proceeded to make political hay out of the crisis.

“In the 21st Century, nations don’t invade other nations,” Mr. McCain
said on Fox “News,” the premiere source for dispatches from that
alternate reality where up is down, black is white and objective fact
and critical thinking are viewed as un-American.

Randy Scheunemann, who quit his lobbying job to join the McCain
campaign, remains a close friend of Georgian President Mikheil
Saakashvili, who clearly believed his investment — along with the 2,000
troops Georgia contributed to the Iraq debacle — would buy more than
saber-rattling after he poked the big bear.

“I heard Sen. McCain say, ‘We are all Georgians now,’ ” Mr. Saakashvili
said in a TV interview. “Well, very nice, you know, very cheering for us
to hear that, but OK, it’s time to pass from this, from words to deeds.”

Talk about the audacity of hope. Hang in there, little buddy. The
Czech’s in the mail.

Mr. McCain, of course, is in no position to offer anything but tough
talk. Neither is President Bush, who dispatched Ms. Rice to the region
with a planeload of coconut radios manufactured in China.

Welcome to the world the neocons have made. The elective, mismanaged
misadventure in Iraq and the necessary, neglected war in Afghanistan
have pushed our military to the breaking point. Pretty soon, we’ll be
deploying Eagle Scouts and high school hall monitors.

American credibility and influence are at all-time lows. We are tossing
trillions of dollars down a rat hole in Iraq while millions of Americans
go without health insurance and inflation and home foreclosure rates
soar. Once the most powerful nation on earth, we are now an impotent
bystander rattling a dull saber, rearranging deck chairs as the waves
lap at our clay feet.

We truly are all Georgians now, nervously eyeing the red horizon and
waiting for a real leader to rescue us from ourselves.

President Phelps, your country needs you.

CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist, keeps falling during the floor
exercise. E-mail: kellysworld@timesshamrock.com

--
Dan Clore

My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
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News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
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Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
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