Sunday, October 21, 2012
A nonentity dies
Occurs to me that both Nixon and McGovern wildly overestimated McGovern.
(1) Nixon went to all the trouble of Watergate to insure that McG wouldn't be elected. Turned out that the trouble was completely unnecessary, since nobody wanted McG anyway. (At that time I was a hippieshit commie who agreed with McG about most things, but I couldn't bring myself to vote for McG. He seemed ineffectual, lacked leadership skills.)
(2) The obits are playing a fairly recent clip of McG saying that he should have been president, that he would have been a much better president, etc. Wildly overestimating himself.
What was McG's actual crowning achievement? Setting up a world school lunch program under the auspices of the UN, Alger Hiss's crowning achievement. Hmm. Let's examine its wonderful success.
This NPR feature a few months ago gives us an idea of how well McG's crowning achievement worked in India:
At a government-run public middle school in Bangalore, the blackboard's cracking, the textbooks are tattered and most of the students are barefoot. But with all those challenges, the biggest obstacle that teachers face in keeping kids in school is hunger. Many students show up at school having had nothing to eat for breakfast. On mornings one student comes to school hungry, the thought of school makes her break down, she says. "When I had to get on the bus, I would start crying," says K. Suchitra, 13. Suchitra is an unusually talented student, says her teacher, Sheelavati Shakti. She shows a strong aptitude for music and dance, and is strong academically. But when she joined this school a year ago, Suchitra looked unhealthy, Shakti says. Her skin was discolored, but she didn't have an infection; she was just malnourished. Suchitra's life has recently been turned around, however. An ambitious school lunch program now supplies kids at her middle school with a nutritious, freshly cooked meal. On days she comes to school hungry, she knows she can eat at school. The lunch program that provides meals to Suchitra's school currently feeds 1.3 million children across India, making it one of the largest school lunch programs in the world.Well, at least that's good. McGovern's efforts are feeding kids who weren't fed before.
It was initially begun more than a decade ago as part of the religious outreach of a Hindu group known as ISKCON, better known in the West as the Hare Krishna movement.Whoops! Hold it! That's not the UN! That's a religious movement, which is the exact opposite of everything Alger Hiss's crowning achievement stands for! No! No! Exactly not! This cannot be! We must [carbon-neutrally] dispose of this awful food tainted by religion! Better to be malnourished and weak than to be religious! Okay, so McG's crowning achievement obviously didn't happen. He did have a beautifully high opinion of himself, though. I guess that counts for something. ¶ 2:32 PM
