I’m a little late with this post, but here goes: On 16. December, 2007, an agreement was reached at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Bali. At the conference, U.S. recalcitrance was fully on view.
In Bali, when India proposed an amendment strengthening requirements for richer nations to aid poorer with technology to adapt for climate change impacts, Dr. Paula Dobriansky, U.S. Undersecretary of Democracy and Global Affairs and head of the United States delegation, objected, “We are not prepared to accept this formulation.” According to the AP, she was booed “loud and long.”
A slightly different version of the story was published by Voice of America online (“UN Conference Agrees to Launch Negotiations for New Global Warming Accord,” voanews.com 12/15/07): “Shortly afterwards, the assembly burst into applause when [Dr. Dobriansky] made a dramatic announcement: the U.S. was dropping its opposition to the G77 plan.” (G77, of which India is a member, is the largest intergovernmental organization of developing states in the U.N.).
This all matters for so many reasons, and yet it is just a very small example of one theme that I would like to put forward. In Greek, the word myth derives from muthos, or “mouth.” It matters what we say and how we say it, because we are myth-making all the time. A myth is not merely another story or way of saying something (like “applause” instead of “booed”). A myth is a myth because it has power, juice, it sticks. And, it creates realities. The whole point of this blog is to examine in many ways, some more direct than others, that our myths live us.
Many people recognize that the Bush administration has capitalized on a litany of very potent myths, and masterfully took the stage soon after Al Qaeda bequeathed to Dick Cheney and the neocons the gift of flying two hijacked jets into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. (This following a few hours after Bush sat, initially frozen, in a primary school classroom, holding a copy of “My Pet Goat” open on his lap, upside down. Long-time web surfers will remember that Cheney and Rumsfeld published an online manifesto before the 2000 election, that put forward the America-first policy, baldly stating that the American people would never accept a sufficiently forward leaning stance without the occurrence of “another Pearl Harbor.”) The availability of these myths for exploitation created a shockingly destructive machine that remained seemingly unstoppable for well into two tems of office. (And we are not through yet. I highly recommend Wolfgang Mieder’s The Politics of Proverbs: From Traditional Wisdom to Proverbial Stereotypes for a study of the kind of manipulation of language–as I have pointed out, the basis for myth–that was practiced by the Nazis. Those who shivered when the Department of “Homeland Security” was created will especially appreciate this.)
In Bali, delegate after delegate rose to criticize Dobriansky’s stonewalling (not one spoke in support). Finally, Kevin Conrad, the delegate from Papua, New Guinea, took the microphone and said, “We seek your leadership, but if for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of the way.”
Dobriansky backed down. According to the AP story (published online in the Chicago Sun Times, “U.S. booed at climate conference,” suntimes.com 12/15/07):
She later told reporters the delegation dropped its opposition because it was reassured that developing nations would make a contribution to emissions restrictions under the Bali Roadmap. Hans Verolme, World Wildlife Fund climate campaigner, offered a different interpretation. “We have learned a historical lesson: if you expose to the world the dealings of the United States, they will ultimately back down.”
Note that here as elsewhere “U.S.” stands for the country as a unified entity, not differentiating the citizenry from the executive branch of government (a form of metaphor called synecdoche, when part of the whole stands for the thing, e.g., “hands” for “workers”). When the Bush administration cynically invokes national unity, it is invoking a myth in two senses of the word: the long-cherished creation myth of a nation founded on the principles of democracy, human liberty and fraternité; and ‘myth’ in the sense of fabrication, in other words, a lie. No administration in recent history has inspired such bitter disunity. Hence the common cry among citizens on this and too many other issues to count: “Not in our name.”
As we struggle through the ordeal of upcoming presidential elections, let us cowed citizens who have been staring at the ongoing, majestic, arrogant display in a state of paralysis, hope that we can take courage from friends from abroad such as Mr. Conrad, who surely recognized and politely called out a plain truth we know from yet another myth (otherwise known as fairytale): the emperor has no clothes.
And, let us gracefully get out of the way, to take our places on foot, amid a new procession. What would a powerful, compelling myth of global unity look and sound like?
Footnote: Gains on the fast-shifting terrain of climate change are still being systematically undermined by continuing erosion, as implacable and unhurried as Nature herself has been thought to be until recently. Significantly, the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that emissions should be reduced by 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 to give us all a ghost of a chance of mitigating the severest effects of global climate change. This was written into the early versions of the Bali Conference statement, as a non-binding guideline. As we well know by now, the Bush administration is allergic to anything that smacks of reining in unbridled donor capitalism (another myth), and Dr. Dobriansky succeeded in getting the figures expunged from the statement. In fairness, it must be said that this move was supported by Canada and Japan, all three saying that actual figures should be part of the negotiations following the conference (according to VOA, the Climate Change Panel figures appear in a footnote to the Bali document).
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