When I was a boy, there was a mawkish and immensely popular television program called “Queen For A Day“. Each episode featured a panel of miserable women, who vied for the prize by telling a plangent tale of woe. (The poor things wept, sobbed, and wailed as they pleaded for money, appliances, etc.; it’s easy to see why so many people enjoyed it so much.) At the end of every show the winner was determined by the relative loudness of the audience’s applause, with a VU meter indicating the degree of pity each of the contestants had evoked. (Perhaps, it occurs to me, this early introduction to audio gear was what awakened my interest in sound engineering.)
Being able to watch such a dismal spectacle every day was one of the many blessings of being born in the 1950s; it gave a lad perspective. Sadly for you youngsters, though, Queen For A Day ended its run in 1964, when I was eight. I’m glad to tell you that we now have something even better.
The nation of Kiribati is a collection of little islands strewn across millions of square miles of the central Pacific Ocean. They are made of coral, and they sit low in the water — as coral, being the discarded calcareous skeletons of small aquatic animals, tends to do. Kiribati also sits low on the GDP-per-capita list: the World Bank recently ranked it 162 out of 185, just above Zimbabwe.
Well, the president of lowly Kiribati, Anote Tong, now has the biggest stage of all with which to try, as profitably as possible, to break our big, soft hearts: the convocation of the world’s leaders, and their Praetorian media, at the climate talks in Paris. Little Kiribati is about to slip beneath the waves, you see — and it’s all our fault. (Mr. Tong was not alone, either: the parade of supplicants, and of witnesses to our sins, went on all day.)
What a gift! What more could the vile and pallid people of the First World, wretched in the depths of our collective guilt, have hoped for? What a perfect chance for penance, atonement, and salvation! How the world will love and forgive us, redeemed at last in our ostentatious virtue! I fear my poor heart must surely burst.
Wait — what’s that you say? That this is nothing more than opportunism and ressentiment, a chance for a gang of two-bit nations — working in happy cahoots with an Earth-girdling coalition of globalist busybodies, eco-profiteering oligarchs, international socialists, rent-seeking bureaucrats, pie-eyed Utopian lotus-eaters, environmental Jacobins, and pious, anti-capitalist uplifters — to get their hands on our collar, and their fingers in our wallet? That this agitation about sudden and life-threatening sea-level rise in Kiribati due to carbon dioxide emissions is, according to actual tide-gauge data, a lot of hooey?
Hush! You obviously know nothing about good TV.
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From Wikipedia we learn:
I have an idea — why don’t we simply give these people Social Security cards, driver’s licenses, and Obamacare, and transport them to San Francisco, the wondrous refuge by the Bay. How much could that possibly cost?
Though it’s not without its flaws, I liked the travel book The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific by a European who found himself in Kiribati. He described the local government as “coconut Stalinism”, although “Stalin,” he noted, “got something done.”
Boy, did he ever.
Yup. If not for Stalin, you would be blogging in German and I would have long been dead.
The Paris “Beggars Banquet” was truly unseemly. First world leaders with their delusions of adequacy giving a sympathetic ear to the hustlers of the third world. What an opportunity for global leaders to do some virtue signaling in front of the cameras to appease the global socialists.
I live in Idaho. So, to the Kiribati’s I say, that sucks but there is a place called up.
Not to be outdone, DiploMad has posted a fine polemic of his own. Excerpt:
RTWT here.