"Knock Knock","Who's There?", "Tsunami", "Tsunami Who?" "Tsunami gonna come up with a punchline for this joke"

Let me just start, as all startlingly unoriginal polemicists do, with some statistics. Some agents of the United States of America, which UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland called "stingy" last week, have ponied up the following:

-Pfizer: $35 million
-Coca Cola: $10 million
-Exxon Mobil Corp: $5 million
-Citigroup Inc.: $3 million
-Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: $3 million
-Merck & Co. Inc: $3 million in cash, plus drugs and health supplies
-Johnson & Johnson: $2 million, plus drugs and health supplies
-Abbott Laboratories Inc.: $2 million, plus drugs and other supplies.
-Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.: $1 million in cash, $4 million in antibiotics and antifungal drugs.
-Nike Inc.: $1 million
-American Express Co.: $1 million
-General Electric Co.: $1 million
-First Data Corp.: $1 million
-Amazon.com: collected about 87,000 donations totaling more than $6.2 million for the American Red Cross
-Wal-Mart Inc.: $2 million, plus donations.
-Catholic Relief Services: $25 million

That's more than $125 million and counting. This list is non-exhaustive. Also, it's a week old. Oh, and it doesn't include personal donations. Um, or the $1 billion in aid set to be paid out by the Feds themselves.

Just for grins, one could add that the US was responsible for 40 percent of all disaster relief aid paid out this past year. And if we were feeling particularly saucy, we might even let slip that Uncle Sam (or is it Uncle Scrooge?) donated $826 million to the UN World Food Programme, $100 million more than all the EU countries combined, despite the EU's larger population and GDP.

Stingy? If the US is stingy, then I'm unpretentious and satisfied with the size of my penis.

But boy, am I just all broken up about the fact the UN, the EU, the pot and the kettle all think we Yanks are a bit tight with the pursestrings. Its just that, by the time Marshall and Eisenhower and the boys got around to unclusterfucking Western Civilization and getting the electricity and running water turned back on in Brittain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the whole of Scandanavia, Germany, Austria, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, the Balkans, the British and French Near East, Northern Africa, Turkey, Greece, Japan, China, Indochina, the Phillipines, Australia, Micronesia, and Luxembourg, we were a little light on walking-around money and a bit wary of real estate scams. But, if the free world is done borrowing the Modernity we loaned it, it could give it back and we could totally hawk it at the pawn shop for like, at least a hundred bucks.

See, what's sad is that a handful of minor powers have seen fit to make a point of outspending the US in Tsunami relief. The goal is to get into a pissing contest. If for nothing else, we can credit Bush with not biting. No press conference or forced contrition, just an envelope under the table and another subtle fuck you to the UN. Bush himself donated a measly 10K out of his own pocket. Why so little? Two reasons: 1) Sitting Presidents' assets are placed in a blind trust, and word is Bush's portfolio took a dive on account of some bad advice about Enron, and 2) Bush is setting a realistic example for every American. Nobody has to break the bank to help out. If you've got a hundred decent regular people, you don't need one Hollywood hero.

And you don't need your government proxying for you either. The American people are perfectly capable of recognizing a noble cause when they see one, and the needy are far better off when that recognition comes at the business end of a debit card than when it comes at the business end of a 155mm Howitzer.

There's a little spark of something left on this side of the pond that some other parts of the world look at as peculiarly as if it were a BetaMax(R) cassette player, and it's called Civil Society. You see, Civil Society is where people get together and do things without inviting George Bush and Nancy Pelosi. Sometimes they do silly things like sell each other tupperware, or collectively ape Oprah's literary tastes, or bowl for the league championship; and sometimes they do naughty things like dress up in latex and spank each other, or burn crosses, or vote; but every now and again they do something downright strange, like put a couple cans of soup or a few dollars or a little brawn and elbow grease on a plane and send it to people they'll never meet so their lives can be a little less miserable. Odd, I know. But then again we've always been a little fucked up like that.

I close, as all startlingly unoriginal polemicists do, with a quote--nay, a Gospel--from a petty Minnesota bourgeoisie by the name of Scott Fitzgerald. He said, "France was a land, England a people. But America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter. It was the graves at Shiloh, or the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, or the country boys who died in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart."

Now, despite my wont to make the occasional lighthearted quip, there is absolutely nothing capricious or funny about Mr. Fitzgerald's words. Except that "heart" rhymes with "fart".

-The Ugly American