A few posts ago I remarked that the world had gotten funny without my being able to laugh. I wrote, “The subjects have become so fantastic they are almost unreal. It’s like a horror movie where everybody is inexplicably funny. Maybe I should go have a beer.” The NY Post reports that a UN interpreter may need two six packs to recover his sanity after trying to interpret for Khadafy.
After struggling to turn Khadafy’s insane ramblings at the UN into English for 75 minutes, the Libyan dictator’s personal interpreter got lost in translation. “I just can’t take it any more,” Khadafy’s interpreter shouted into the live microphone – in Arabic.
At that point, the U.N.’s Arabic section chief, Rasha Ajalyaqeen, took over and translated the final 20 minutes of the speech. “His interpreter just collapsed – this is the first time I have seen this in 25 years,” another U.N. Arabic interpreter told The Post.
I’m afraid that as statesmen go, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
Cooling her heels somewhere offstage is Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State from whom nothing has been heard recently. There’s Vice-President Joe Biden and of course Barack Obama. In Britain there is Gordon Brown. And almost in as sad a condition are the Republicans. One can can only hope that some international crisis does not break out forcing the world to rely on the skills our great leaders to steer us through, or else we too, like the Arabic interpreter, will be headed for the liquor store, to buy or loot from its ruins depending on the circumstances.
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