The United Nations is being lauded with praise, criticism and questions about its relevance and future as it celebrates its 75th anniversary this week.
In my book Custom Maid Knowledge, I dedicated a whole chapter on why the U.N. has outlasted its sell-by-date. Chapter 4, U.N.-Funded Failures, spells out the reasons I advocate its demise and replacement with a new body relevant to the 21st-century.
I want to share my reasons why, that go back to my law school days at Hastings Law School, in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, where the U.N. was founded. Hastings, a few blocks away from The U.N. Plaza, is where I decided to practice international law.
The plaza and neighborhood of the U.N.’s birth, is the perfect metaphor for what the U.N. is. A sad irrelevant dinosaur.
Designed in the mid-1970s, it honors the ideals expressed in the founding of the U.N. Reading all the noble pronouncements embedded in The U.N. Plaza, to end war, live together in peace, provide economic and social advancement of all people, reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, equal rights, justice and respect for international law, is a real soul-searching moment whenever I go back to San Francisco and visit the Plaza.
There I am looking at homeless people congregating and sleeping all over the plaza and its platitudes. The U.N. Plaza does represent reality. Despair, homelessness and deaths for millions worldwide, with a glamorous artsy-fartsy image and presentation to the world, not much different from the arts and crafts on sale at the Plaza.
The Plaza ends at Hyde Street, in the Tenderloin, a block away from where there is a statute of Simon Bolivar on a horse, whose posterior is appropriately facing the hollow U.N. pronouncements on the plaza.
The Tenderloin Museum details the lurid gambling and whoring history of the Tenderloin – and where in 1945, many of the U.N. Organizing Conference delegates spent their time gambling and whoring.
The legendary San Francisco columnist Herb Caen quipped “The United Nations was founded at Sally Stanford’s whorehouses.”
The United Nations is a geopolitical Jurassic Park. An outdated global failure. A museum of failed peace missions, resolutions, squandered billions of dollars and millions of senseless deaths, perpetuated by failed corrupt whoring career politicians and bureaucrats.
The U.N. headquarters in New York was built on the site of a former abattoir – a slaughter house. Erected in 1952, the retro-modernist building, with stained-glass by Marc Chagall, murals by Fernand Leger and a tapestry of Picasso’s celebrated anti-war painting, Guernica, had to spend billions of dollars to remedy violations of New York City safety and fire codes. The building was packed with asbestos, had no sprinkler system and leaked about a quarter of the heat used to warm it in winter. It had to build another temporary multi-billion dollar headquarters next door during renovations so the headquarters could be gutted. What an appropriate metaphor.
Why not just go for the kill?
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Illustration: Mark Caparosa
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