You are for us or against us

When we’ve butchered your son, boys

When we’ve butchered your son

Have a stick of our gum, boys

Have a stick of our bubble-gum

We own half the world, oh say can you see

The name for our profits is democracy

So, like it or not, you will have to be free

‘Cause we’re the Cops of the World, boys

We’re the Cops of the World

The brute arrogance with which the rulers of the United States are using military might to impose their will on the world was reflected in George W. Bush’s address to the United Nations General Assembly on the 10th of last month.

The US was giving notice, he said, that the war it was waging in Afghanistan would continue not only until Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network had been extirpated, but until all “terrorism” had been eradicated from the world.

“Terrorism”, he went on, “depends on the aid or indifference of governments”. Countries whose governments give “terrorists” refuge were “equally guilty of murder and equally accountable to justice”.

The United States would make these countries “pay a price”.

Bush didn’t waste words arguing that this ought to be the approach of other nations. He simply spelt out what the US proposed to do and warned other States that they had a choice – back the US or be treated by the US as complicit in “terrorism”.

It wasn’t the United Nations or the “international community” which would make countries which chose wrongly pay a price. The US would both decide what constituted terrorism and dictate the response to it.

In essence, there was nothing new in this. It was the “You are for us or against us” sound-bite enunciated in the immediate aftermath of September 11th. But the occasion and the venue lent the repetition a special significance. The position was being put formally on the record for the whole world to take note of.

No mainstream Irish political party, from DUP to Sinn Fein via the Ulster Unionists, Fine Gael, and Fianna Fail, has repudiated the US position outlined at the UN.

Nor has any mainstream party commented on the identity of the man who will have played the lead role in crafting the speech – John Negroponte, Bush’s appointee as US ambassador to the UN.

Negroponte’s is a name which reverberates down the years, at least in the minds of us greybeards who attended or spoke at events in the 1980s to raise funds and solidarity for the victims of US-backed savagery in central America. At the time, he was Reagan’s ambassador in Honduras, when that country had one of the worst human rights records in the world.

In 1993, the Honduran National Commissioner for the Protection of Human Rights published a report on the men, women and children who had been listed as “disappeared” between 1980 and 1992. It commented that “Until now, not one person has been tried by a court of justice to answer for the fate of any of them”.

The election in 1993 of Carlos Roberto Reina as President had created great expectations among human rights activists, victims and their families that justice, or at least ease, would come with the identification and punishment of the military and political officials involved in torture and murder over the previous decade. However, Amnesty reports, “President Reina has now ended his term in office, but impunity persists”.

Speaking last month at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Noam Chomsky poured scorn on any notion that the US embassy in Tegucigalpa could have been unaware of or unvolved in the abuses. “As proconsul of Honduras, as he was known there, (Negroponte) was the local supervisor for the terrorist war”.

Nobody went to war in outrage against the deaths of the Honduran victims of terrorism. Instead, the man who supervised their suffering is Washington’s top international official drafting key policy documents for a “War on Terrorism” which the entire political establishment in Ireland has endorsed.

Let us laugh that we might not lose ourselves in tears. And sing a verse for the late Phil Ochs.

We pick and choose as we please, boys

Pick and choose as we please

You’d best get down on your knees, boys

Best get down on your knees

We’ll spit through the streets of the cities we wreck

We’ll find you a leader that you can’t elect

Those treaties we signed were a pain in the neck

‘Cause we’re the Cops of the World, boys

We’re the Cops of the World

I see that that John Waters’ guru has got his own Church. This significance of this has been missed by some who have disputed Waters’ opinions in the media in recent weeks.

Rich Zubaty, the US delusionist Waters regularly recommends to readers of his Irish Times column as the supreme font of transcendent male wisdom, has announced the formation of The Church of Men.

Zubaty’s explains on his web-site that the idea came to him during four months spent “fishing and thinking on a small island in the South Pacific – a coral atoll with no electricity and no roads.”

The Church will be based on “a format employed by Hindu ashrams, Christian communes, and Buddhist monasteries around the globe...

“I want to found a facility that addresses men’s spiritual, economic and political aspirations.” says Zubaty. “My dream is this: We acquire 12 acres in an apricot orchard anywhere from the US to Australia – as long as the phone lines work...Our job is to create a male-friendly community and serve as a model for other men in other countries. Let us move past the corporate model for organizing life and strive to Re-Village Our Planet...

“Maybe it will be a plum orchard. Maybe a vacated mansion in a rundown part of London. Maybe a lake rippling with smallmouth bass north of Toronto. Maybe an old farm in the South of France. Maybe a crumbling villa in Mexico or Costa Rica. What we are talking about is launching an Artists Colony founded on male-flavored spirituality and focused on men’s issues. There is an important germ of an idea here, I’m passionate about it, and I need your help developing it...”

As to how you can help – Zubaty reckons that what’s required is guys with enough faith to put down $50,000 each to secure the property and set about equipping it.

Send your money now to the man Waters reckons is the sage of the age...

Zubaty is a sad crank with a poor writing style and confused, shallow ideas. That Waters regards him with reverence – it’s not too strong a word – is sadder still.

The other day – November 19th – Waters was lashing out at a fellow Irish Times columnist who had wondered how Waters could believe Ireland is run by mad feminists when women are chronically underrepresented in the top layers of virtually every institution of Irish society.

In response, Waters explained that there is indeed “a man-hating elite” in Ireland – but this elite is “overwhelmingly male”. Ireland’s ruling class may be minimum 90% male, but it “is governed by feminist ideas”. Social policy may be formulated and implemented by men – but by “man-hating” men.

This exchange gave rise to an entertaining but unenlightening confrontation on a popular radio programme. One of the reasons for the unsatisfactory nature of the argy-bargy was that neither Waters’ antagonist nor the programme presenter knew from whence the Castlerea man had dredged and dreamed his fantastical notion.

Here’s a passage of Zubaty’s posted recently on his web-site: “What most men want to know is: How come we live in a society that appears to be run by men, but feels like it’s run by women?”

The Government. The armed services. Business. The media. The medical establishment. The legal profession. The Churches. Zubaty believes that, in the US, all these institutions are dominated by pro-woman, anti-man ideas. George W. Bush, Colin Powell, the late Cardinal Spellman, the editor of the New York Times, the US Supreme Court, the CEO of Boeing – subtle purveyors of mad feminist ideology one and all.

Waters has picked up Zubaty’s exposition of this thesis and, changing the syntax here and there, applied it to Ireland.

Religion being little more than systematised superstition, it’s perversely logical that adherents of such beliefs should turn their minds to the formation of their own Church.

Will ex-members of the Taliban be welcomed?, I wonder. Will women be allowed in? Will Waters become a cardinal?

So many questions. So few

answers.