Mark in Oshawa
27th May 2010, 19:14
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=3075851
From Today's National Post in Toronto:
Summits are useless, expensive and potentially dangerous anachronisms.
Let's take the G20 summit, which will be held June 26-27 in Toronto. No one from the general public will be meeting with the world leaders--summits are not for mingling. So why are the leaders gathering in the middle of Canada's most populous city when the very idea of interacting with any of the city's population is absolutely impossible?
Once inside the summit venue the leaders -- and their insanely bloated retinues --will be almost antiseptically sealed off from every other bit of Toronto. It's all fortified meeting rooms and security-proofed hotels for them. Effectively, they will come to Toronto, stay behind a shield of impassable security and talk to leaders they've already met. It makes zero sense.
There's another objection. In older, less cynical days the leaders of the world enjoyed some genuine prestige. There was a sense that a city was receiving "an honour" when the leaders from other countries visited. Not now. In a world rocked by recession, terrorism and the threat of terrorism, there is not only no thrill to leaders visiting, in some cases there is palpable resentment.
World leaders are neither revered nor even, in most cases, seen as very interesting. Why do you think these summits so frequently drag in poor tired old Bono? To get a little second-hand celebrity sauce for an otherwise very flat meal.
Finally, from Seattle to Quebec City to Toronto next month, who really "owns" these summits? With the leaders invisible under their security blankets, the summits belong to the protesters.
Summits are the high holy days, the carnival of ritual protest and vacuous street theatre. You can't hold a "global" anything these days, even a joyful event like the Olympics, without the tired kabuki of protest groups jamming the streets, shouting their impenetrable litany of anti-everything. They're always acccompanied, of course, by the usual band of black-masked pseudo-anarchists allergic to Starbucks and thirsty for the two-day fame a little provocation or a lot of violence can bring them.
Finally, I know we're in the age of large numbers, but can anyone seriously rationalize spending close to a billion dollars to hold a pair of meetings?
This one consideration in itself is obscene. Face time, as the ugly phrase has it, is valuable, but it's not worth a billion dollars, nor a fraction of it, in the middle of a recession.
Meet in the White House, or in a resort, or at Al Gore's house (if space is a consideration) -- anywhere but in a 21st-century downtown of a modern city, where security suffocates the meeting, and protesters are given the most expensive magnifying glass the world has even known.
- This is a transcript of Rex Murphy's Point of View commentary from yesterday's broadcast of The National on CBC Television. Readers can watch Mr. Murphy's commentary at cbc.ca/thenational.He is also host of CBC Radio's Cross Country Checkup.
Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=3075851#ixzz0p9ctzgdF
From Today's National Post in Toronto:
Summits are useless, expensive and potentially dangerous anachronisms.
Let's take the G20 summit, which will be held June 26-27 in Toronto. No one from the general public will be meeting with the world leaders--summits are not for mingling. So why are the leaders gathering in the middle of Canada's most populous city when the very idea of interacting with any of the city's population is absolutely impossible?
Once inside the summit venue the leaders -- and their insanely bloated retinues --will be almost antiseptically sealed off from every other bit of Toronto. It's all fortified meeting rooms and security-proofed hotels for them. Effectively, they will come to Toronto, stay behind a shield of impassable security and talk to leaders they've already met. It makes zero sense.
There's another objection. In older, less cynical days the leaders of the world enjoyed some genuine prestige. There was a sense that a city was receiving "an honour" when the leaders from other countries visited. Not now. In a world rocked by recession, terrorism and the threat of terrorism, there is not only no thrill to leaders visiting, in some cases there is palpable resentment.
World leaders are neither revered nor even, in most cases, seen as very interesting. Why do you think these summits so frequently drag in poor tired old Bono? To get a little second-hand celebrity sauce for an otherwise very flat meal.
Finally, from Seattle to Quebec City to Toronto next month, who really "owns" these summits? With the leaders invisible under their security blankets, the summits belong to the protesters.
Summits are the high holy days, the carnival of ritual protest and vacuous street theatre. You can't hold a "global" anything these days, even a joyful event like the Olympics, without the tired kabuki of protest groups jamming the streets, shouting their impenetrable litany of anti-everything. They're always acccompanied, of course, by the usual band of black-masked pseudo-anarchists allergic to Starbucks and thirsty for the two-day fame a little provocation or a lot of violence can bring them.
Finally, I know we're in the age of large numbers, but can anyone seriously rationalize spending close to a billion dollars to hold a pair of meetings?
This one consideration in itself is obscene. Face time, as the ugly phrase has it, is valuable, but it's not worth a billion dollars, nor a fraction of it, in the middle of a recession.
Meet in the White House, or in a resort, or at Al Gore's house (if space is a consideration) -- anywhere but in a 21st-century downtown of a modern city, where security suffocates the meeting, and protesters are given the most expensive magnifying glass the world has even known.
- This is a transcript of Rex Murphy's Point of View commentary from yesterday's broadcast of The National on CBC Television. Readers can watch Mr. Murphy's commentary at cbc.ca/thenational.He is also host of CBC Radio's Cross Country Checkup.
Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=3075851#ixzz0p9ctzgdF