The non-aligned blog.

Except for rainy days, I am again walking between the commuter station and home. The bottom of my cast is decaying and dirty, but the heel ought to stay on long enough to get me to my next doctor’s appointment, which is Monday. So my mind has taken to wandering again, during these walks, and the other day I brought back a whole set of memories that had been stored in a dusty filing cabinet somewhere in a mental root cellar.

The cabinet is marked “Odd Experiences, High School.” In the fall of 1978 or maybe in the spring of 1979, I attended a mock UN at a nearby college, Incarnate Word I think. I don’t remember how I got involved in it. Something to do with my affiliation with the NFL — the National Forensic League, that is, the speech and debate club. I was a third- or at best second-rate debater, but the other kids were interesting to hang out with, and the out-of-town trips to speech tournaments were much fun. As a member of the NFL, I went all over Texas: Austin, Corpus Christi, Dallas, Houston, even picturesque Midland/Odessa once.

But this wasn’t an NFL function per se. I don’t know who organizes mock UNs, or why exactly. To teach high school students the art of diplomatic pettifogging, maybe. I do remember signing up, and being offered one of about a half-dozen countries to represent. I picked the most interesting one on the short list: Iraq.

The extent of my research for the meeting was a few hours in the library, mostly not reading about Iraq, though I did look it up in a couple of standard references. I read enough to know that it was a one-party state, run by the Ba’ath Party. This was just before a certain mustachio’d dictator had consolidated power in that country, though he was on his way up — like Stalin in ’28, perhaps. Anyway, his name didn’t come up. With me in representing the Republic of Iraq was my friend and debating partner, Kevin N.

So one Saturday, we met in a large campus auditorium, in morning and afternoon sessions, with kids from all around San Antonio pretending to represent countries from all around the world. It wasn’t long before the Arab representatives began conspiring to make life difficult for both the Israeli delegation, and the moderator of the sessions — a college girl who didn’t really seem to want the job.

As far as I know, none of the “Arab” delegates were actually of Semitic extraction. We were just role-playing. In case I haven’t conveyed this, this mock UN was just a lark for Kevin and me. Not so, I think, for a few other kids. Especially those who dressed up for the parts, such as the girl who had observer status for the PLO, or the boy who represented Jordan. The girl was quite fetching in her drab green fatigues with Palestinian head-scarf; the boy made less impression on me, but he did have a command of the rhetoric of his position. He prefaced every speech — and there were several — with several sentences about the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

As I said, we harassed the moderator. “Madam Chair, the Republic of Iraq proposes the expulsion of the representative of Israeli, and his replacement by the PLO representative… Madam Chair, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan wishes a resolution calling for the immediate withdrawal from lands occupied in the Six Day War… Madam Chair, the PLO observer condemns in the strongest possible language….”

You must remember, at this time the World Trade Center was merely a set of new buildings in New York, and jihad was more of a historical notion. Osama bin Laden was an unknown rich kid who was evidently having trouble picking up girls in Oxford, and as mentioned, Saddam Hussein was still a tyrant-in-training. When people my age thought of the Arab world, we thought of Arab-Israeli wars and OPEC.

For a while the irritated chairwoman swatted down our motions, but after we had a meeting of non-aligned nations in mid-morning, we got more traction. Also, Kevin, who wasn’t always in the room, came back and started putting his knowledge of “Robert’s Rules of Order” to use in circumventing the chairwoman. I think she was glad when the lunch break came.

But we were busy even then. Someone had the idea that being part of the non-aligned bloc wasn’t good enough. We wanted an Arab bloc, with its own meeting in the afternnon. So as soon as lunch was over, we demanded this. Permission denied. If I had been chairing this thing, I think I would have said OK, just to get rid of us for a while, but the girl was trying to run things according to some agenda, and there was no place on it for a new bloc. We demanded it again. Permission denied. And once more. No go.

So, as we had agreed during lunch, all the Arab representatives and some sympathizers walked out of the mock UN. That was the end of it; the organizers called it quits at that point. I suspect no one was more flabbergasted than the organizers, who were teachers.

My experience in diplomacy. We brought the house down.