GMA gave a great speech, but Laura stole the show

PARIS – You’ve got to admit it. There’s nothing more potent than the drawing power of love – or hate.

Our President, GMA, delivered a rousing and inspiring keynote address in the morning to enthusiastic applause. La Presidenta pressed all the right buttons; her earnestness – plus her pretty pertness – won every heart.

The Italian President, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, who followed her to speak on behalf of the industrialized countries, was equally, if not more, forceful. Ciampi’s flowery Italian was supplemented by one of the best translator’s I’ve ever heard. His interpreter actually improved the Italian President’s speech, giving each nuanced phrase cadence and power.

He, too, garnered much applause, plus a universal nodding of heads (others were nodding for other reasons, accompanied by the occasional snore). Viva Ciampi – nonetheless!

Alas, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization’s wallahs made the mistake of scheduling America’s First Lady, Mrs. Laura Bush, that very same Monday afternoon. Laura wasn’t due to deliver any keynote or significant address, but like the Greeks in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, she came bearing gifts. Laura, don't get me wrong, is a very fine lady, and attempts to stay in the background while Gunslinging Dubya struts the stage.

This time, however, she had been dispatched on a mission by hubby. She was dispatched to Paris (that hostile capital) to charm the whiskers off the French – or at least confound them – and steal back the hearts of the members of the United Nations through their Paris-based agency, the 190-member-state UNESCO.

In this she partly succeeded, but why only partly? It wasn’t Laura Bush’s fault. She delivered a forthright and ringing speech, suffused with fine proposed initiatives, shining with sincerity. Her 17-member delegation, led by the US Secretary of Education, and including personalities from Harvard, the rest of academe, music and arts, provided too overwhelming a presence on the stage as she spoke. Some delegates – never pro-American or open-minded, to begin with – were simply astonished by the bullying tactics employed by that tight phalanx of American expeditioners, apparently out to beard the critics in their own den.

Whenever the First Lady said something significant or uttered a graceful turn of phrase, the American group lost not a second in bursting into applause – beating the 3,000 delegates in the audience to it. The affair deteriorated into a race as to who would applaud first, and the American delegates – to the man or woman – pre-empted everyone else on the floor by a beat or two. The time came when only the Americans were clapping boisterously, while the Europeans, Asians, Africans, and Chinese contented themselves with smiling vacuously.

Why wear out your palms when the Yanks were already doing the job for everybody? Yes, I clapped. The Filipino delegates clapped. Even the Peruvians, whose seats alphabetically are ranged to the left of us, were led by former UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar in clapping vigorously.

To my surprise, the Poles to our right (weren’t they America’s "allies" in the Iraq war and cadged all those juicy postwork contracts?) didn’t applaud at all. (I think, judging from their loud conversation carried out in conspiratorial Slavic decibels, they must have been planning some coup d'etat or another.

NONE of the Arab member-states clapped, and as two delegations were sitting behind us, I could hear some of them muttering imprecations not merely against the Great Satan, but against his woman. But I guess you can’t please everybody.

In sum, Laura delivered a no-nonsense, workaday speech. She spoke of the need to develop and educate the child, and reiterated that children everywhere were entitled, as their basic right, to an education and to the pulling back of the veil of ignorance. Since I wasn’t taking notes, I can’t tell more than what I consider the gist of what she said.

The First Lady came across well-scrubbed, attractive in demeanor and speech – and, if she sounded preachy in sequences like her husband, we attributed this to osmosis. Old Dubya, through the years, must have rubbed some of that Texan two-gun mentality onto her fair skin. She reminded everyone that, as a former public school teacher and librarian, she could appreciate many of the problems of children – and of women, too. She’s not being facetious about this. When this writer was privileged to be invited to a black-tie dinner in the White House a few months ago, it was Mrs. Bush who brought the matter up about how Montessori education was going in the Philippines. (I had told her that my wife, too, is a teacher). The Bushes, indeed, for all the brickbats they’re getting, are both warm and friendly – and this jaundiced journalist (knick me into a beer barrel if I’m naïve) found both of them sincere and, well, folksy.

Poor Dubya. Slithering he is today through a writhing pit of politically poisonous snakes, being sucked into the desert quicksands of Iraq, razzed about not having yet found Saddam Insane’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (the most effective Weapon of HIS Destruction is the Press), will need all of Laura’s understanding and support.

This she demonstrated so resoundingly last Monday afternoon in that jampacked session hall in the UNESCO’s headquarters on the Avenue de Fontenoy.

Let’s face it, she faced a hostile audience. UNESCO’s delegates, though the world body is now led by a friendly, forceful and even-handed Director General Koichiro Matsuura of Japan, it remains chockful of Muslims from various countries in its executive echelons and secretariat. Listening to all the Arabic, including Arabic song emanating from the rostrum the other day, interspersed with Arab-accented French, one could only guess at the continuing resentment with which the Americans will have to cope as they return to that organization for the first time in 19 years.

Ronald Reagan had left the UNESCO in a huff, incensed at the jibes of then Director General Amathar M’Bow, a Senegalese who had coopted the entire top apartment of the UNESCO headquarters building to be his tribal camp, while seeding the bureaucracy of UNESCO with not merely Africans of every dark philosophy, but Leftists and crackpots. M’Bow, who ruled with a sharp tongue and an iron hand sheathed in a velvet glove (probably made of softest leopard-skin), is long gone – but his vibrations linger on.

* * *

In any event, Laura Bush concluded her speech (it was splendid, but a trifle overlong, and somewhat defensive in segments of the Bush initiatives in Iraq and Afghanistan.) But heck. Who can begrudge her for standing by her man?

After the speech, half the delegates deserted the hall while the presiding President attempted fruitlessly to gavel the remaining members into resuming the boring part of the session. What happened is that more than half the assembly had followed the US First Lady to the garden, where – for the first time in 19 years – the American flag was hoisted to the top of its mast to rejoin the massed flags of the other 189 member-countries of UNESCO. Welcome back! was the general sentiment.

As Old Glory ascended the pole, mezzo soprano ("from my hometown of Midland", Laura had gushed!) Sarah Graham trillingly rendered The Star-Spangled Banner.

The same lady soprano had provided us post-dinner entertainment at the White House dinner held in honor of GMA. Graham had ended up her repertoire with a song, a hymn really, which she had run across in her travels through the American heartland.

It was called, she explained: Bless this house!

When her accompanist struck the opening chords, I was inundated with a flood of memories. It turned out to be the same hymn my late mother Peng used to sing for us when I was a small boy. Even the tinkle of the White House grand piano was reminiscent of hers. Graham asked the Lord to "bless this house", in that case the embattled White House, through sunshine and storm, through every sorrow and tribulation. The well-remembered words brought an embarrassing tear to my eye.

When I glanced furtively at President Bush, who was seated about six seats from me, I noticed that he, too, was trying to conceal a tear which had sprung unbidden to his own. The Roman epic poet Virgil, in his Aeneid, had his hero (who did the old Anchises bear from the burning walls of Troy) also shed a tear. Sung lacrymae rerum, the bard exclaimed – and that was his only explanation for which might be construed as a mark of weakness.

Tears are the universal bond that bring human beings together. When one has lost the power to weep, then humanity is lost. It said much of Bush that night he could weep. It says everything of Susan Graham and her prayer-song that they can inspire tears even among the brave.