Hypocrisy

It is really ironic that western nations are bearing down on the Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai, demanding that he crack down on corruption, when western leaders are unable to do anything at all about the immense web of corruption that has almost brought the western financial system to its knees.

This is cognitive dissonance at its best. There is a great deal of public anger building about outrageous banker bonuses at previously bailed out companies, but there is precious little that any western government can do to sling a few sorry, pin-striped behinds into jail as a warning to other transgressors. In the meantime, increasing numbers of people are out of jobs, school budgets are being cut left, right and center, and within the next year, many people may have to choose between food and home heating as energy prices are expected to rise. Not to mention, those pesky tea partiers are likely to party even harder this summer.

Given this dismal state of affairs at home, all the lecturing and hectoring of the (no-doubt) corrupt Afghans fail to leave any observer impressed. It especially fails to impress the observer with a keen sense of observation and irony. You see, dear formerly great wielders of global authority, information is now available to anyone with an internet connection and a Web browser. The old game of "do as I say, not as I do" is less and less of an option when a) you're broke and b) you are unable to clean out your own pig sty first.

There is a way, however, to get the Afghan government to conform to one's (abstract, theoretical) moral standards of fiscal integrity - threaten to leave, taking all the troops with one. The military option is really the only real leverage that donor nations have. Just don't invoke "values", "integrity" and "efficiency" as leverage against Afghan official corruption - doing so will only result in resounding and mocking laughter all around. Better still, let's get this fiscal mess sorted out here first, then we will all be in a position to lecture again.

Who Wants to be a Toff?

Just finished reading Sarah Lyall's book, The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British. Overall, what stayed with me were the characteristics she outlines of the British upper class, a status that everybody else in Britain aspires to reach, including the "aspirational middle class" so despised by the toffs. Here is what I understood: in order to be a member of the aristocratic upper class in Britain, one has to eat some very bad food and drink a lot of very good alcohol (no doubt to wash down the execrable food). Lyall writes about going for a picnic with an aristocrat of long lineage who served his guests canned soup, bad ham and white bread sandwiches, swilled down with good wine. Given these criteria, here is a list of peoples and nations who will never be upper class Englishmen or Englishwomen, and some who might be eligible:

1. Indians. No way, will the people who eat fragrant biryanis, pulaos, chutneys, dosas, sambhar, curries, spiced dals and fresh yogurt, ever belong to the world of mediocre food. Besides, Indian alcohol sucks. Except for Old Monk rum, when hidden inside a chilled glass of Coca Cola.
2. The French. They are disqualified on two counts. First, the wines of France are ambrosial. Second, why would any Frenchman or Frenchwoman in his or her right mind ever give up Confit de Canard, Coquilles Saint-Jacques and Pommes Duchesse in order to eat Wonderbread and canned soup? No, no, the food and the drink is too good to qualify them for the English aristocracy.
3. Italians, Greeks, Spaniards and Portuguese. See last sentence in previous paragraph.
4. South Americans. The alcohol probably sucks (I don't know, have only drunk Chilean wines which are pretty good) but the food is great. So sorry, amigos and amigas, you can't join the bad food club of the English upper classes.
5. Chinese, East Asians in general. Again, no alcohol, but the food - oh my God! So, no entry to them either.
6. Americans. Inspite of the best efforts of McDonald's and Burger King, a people that can invent things like Buffalo Chicken wings and gumbo, and peach cobbler and smothered pork chops, are barred from the English upper classes. Well, maybe the North East with their love of boiled dinners might qualify, except that their clam chowder might prevent them from enjoying full membership benefits.

So what does that leave us? I'm going to offend a lot of people here and offer up for full membership of the English aristocracy, based on the criteria of bad food and lots of alcohol - the Germans.* Any others who might qualify?

*I say this with great sadness. The nation of bratwurst and frankfurters, the land of bad food, how could that be?! Well, it was the boiled cabbage that decided it, for me.