Who cares about human rights! Business as usual in DC.

“You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose” the late Mario Cuomo often said.  And what wonderful poetry we had from Barack Obama when he was the candidate. There is poetry and then there is prose.  The dull and boring prose of the reality of  governance and international realpolitik.

Case in point: the Armenian genocide.

“As president I will recognize the Armenian genocide,” Barack Obama vowed in January 2008. He even had his top campaign foreign policy adviser, self-styled “genocide chick” Samantha Power, issue a plaintive YouTube vow to the Armenian American community that this time they wouldn't be double-crossed.

But, that was the candidate sweet-talking with poetry during the courtship of campaigning.  After the election, the title Senator was replaced with President, which then meant that old campaign promises are meant to be broken:

In his annual statement on the mass death of Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire in 1915, President Barack Obama once again declined to use the term “genocide” — breaking a campaign promise he made eight years ago.
In his commemoration on the mass killings, which may have claimed as many as 1.5 million lives, Mr. Obama paid homage to the victims and vowed to “to learn from this tragedy so it may never be repeated.”
His lengthy statement released Friday, however, did not use the term “genocide” — the source of a major geopolitical dispute between Turkey and Armenian about the historical context of the massing killings.

As I noted in this post from six years ago, the victorious candidates apparently lose their testicular fortitude and elections are nothing but castrations!

Why care about something that happened in 1915?  Well, the actor who has all the good looks and presence that I don't have says the very thing that I would like to say:

Take the case of George Clooney. The irrepressible actorvist feels so strongly about the recognition issue that on April 24 — officially known in the U.S. as the National Day of Remembrance of Man's Inhumanity to Man — he will be in Yerevan to award the inaugural $1 million Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity, presented “on behalf of the survivors of the Armenian Genocide and in gratitude to their saviors.” You can't prevent tomorrow's genocide, Clooney plausibly argues, if you can't even use the G-word to describe something that happened 100 years ago.

If the leader of the mightiest government on the planet does not have the balls to label the incidents from a hundred years ago as "genocide"--the term that he boldly stated during his campaign days--then how confident can we be that the leader of the free world will lead the fight against ongoing crimes against humanity?

Meanwhile, the developing situation in Burundi has people worried.  "Today in Burundi, many people hear echoes of 1994" notes the Economist.  We can expect poetry from the Democratic candidates.  Only from the Democratic candidates because the wannabes from the other side author nothing but toxic prose even while campaigning!

Ah, democracy!

Men lost their charm ... maybe we never had it?

Easy there, before you draw your weapons.  Calm down.  Don't jump to conclusions, yet.

First, consider this excerpt:

Most men hold charm in vague suspicion: few cultivate it; still fewer respond to it; hardly any know whether they have it; and almost none can even identify it. Women commonly complain about the difficulty in gaining any conversational purchase when, say, trying to engage the fathers of their children’s classmates or the husbands of their tennis partners. The woman will grab from her bag of conversational gambits—she’ll allude to some quotidian absurdity or try to form a mock alliance in defiance of some teacher’s or soccer coach’s irksome requirement. But the man doesn’t enter into the give-and-take. The next time they meet, it’s as though they’ve never talked before; the man invariably fails to pick up the ball, and any reference the woman might make to a prior remark or observation falls to the ground. Men don’t indulge in the easy shared confidences and nonsexual flirtations that lubricate social exchange among women. Even in the most casual conversation, men are too often self-absorbed or mono-focused or—more commonly—guarded, distracted, and disengaged to an almost Aspergerian degree. 

No, not the time yet to draw your weapons.  Put them back. Especially if you are a woman; "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" :)

The essay, from which I excerpted those few lines, comes at an interesting time in my life.  (Yes, every post is always about me.  It is my blog!)

You know, who better than me--a divorced, single, middle-aged guy who occasionally stirs out of his home to wonder how the world outside is--to ruminate on the male charm and how much it has disappeared!  "If I were charming" is a line that reminds me of "if my aunt had balls, she would be my uncle" ;)

I mean, we don't refer to Prince Charming as a yardstick for nothing!  Well, it is also a fictional character for all the compelling reasons!

No, put that weapon down. Behave!

Back to that excerpt.  I, as a straight guy, agree that there are very few men who I find to be charming.  If it were not for his utterly atrocious treatment of women, former president Bill Clinton would be way up there.  But, "no cigar" in more ways than one, unfortunately.

When it comes to personalities on the screen, which is what that essay is mostly about, I am not that different from most when I think of George Clooney or Bradley Cooper.  Though, when discussing the movie that we watched, my daughter thought that Cooper was overrated in this category.  Maybe charm, too, is in the eye of the beholder.

In the old days, the phrase a charming man was often code for “a gay man,” and undoubtedly the undying but unfounded speculation about Grant’s bisexuality is based on the suspicion that no man so charming could possibly be heterosexual. There is no getting around the basic womanliness of charm.

Maybe.  As one Seinfeld episode put it, we live in an age when a guy who is not bad looking, has healthy habits, and keeps a clean home, is easily thought of as a "gay man."  "Not that there is anything wrong with that" as the episode kept up the theme, remember?  Now, think about me: I cook, keep a relatively clean home, have healthy habits, without any protruding beer gut ... thank heavens I am far from good looking!

You worked up enough?  Calm down by watching Charade, which brings together a charming man and one of the best looking women to ever be a movie star--the one and only Audrey Hepburn.

If you are worked up even after watching it, then you may draw your weapons ;)

Photo of the day: Paul Krugman loses it :)

"I’ve Never Actually Seen the Resemblance" captions Krugman, from whose blog I got this graphic:

Pretty good, eh :)