The Grey Won

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com I was speaking at an academic conference in Toronto recently with an old friend who, for his sins, was made UN ambassador for his Central European country. He was telling me, I suppose mostly off the record, about the surrealist or "dada" environment of that day job. He'd noticed that conventional diplomats were perfectly aware that others of their colleagues are, quite literally, insane. "You can't help but notice the symptoms, when you get close to them." And yet, in every public statement, our diplomats speak as if they did not know, did not even suspect, what they freely acknowledge privately. Somewhere in the grey area are those who think the U.N. is a world legislature, whose members propose to negotiate peace agreements with madmen, who make concessions before the negotiations even start, and apply crude public pressure, but only to their allies. The current U.S. president is in that grey area.