The whore from Cartagena

Cartagena advertises its nightlife

 Update:  The Hate Squad found its voice. 



A whore from Cartagena damned near brought down the American government.  The GOP is trying to figure out a way to make that happen.  The story goes that when a U.S. Secret Service agent balked at paying a prostitute for her services, she refused to leave his hotel room until paid.  She stayed past the 7 a.m. curfew in the hotel, which sent security officers to the room to see why she was still there.  This led to a report to the U.S. embassy, which led to the story about the secret service people and some military personnel whoring around while they were supposed to be attending to Pres. Obama's security detail.  

Hillary shakes her booty in Cartagena

 The GOP in its fervor to discredit and defame Pres. Obama has not yet managed to make him a direct part of the scandal, but they will.  Ted Nugent and Rush Limbaugh are on the job, and neither has ever been restrained by intelligence, a sense of decency, or any compunction about bearing false witness.  The New York Post ran a picture of Hillary Clinton drinking a beer at Cafe Havana in Cartagena and captioned it "Swillary."  The defamation crew is hard at work. 

Dana Milbank in the Washington Post has perhaps the most incisive perspective on the whole event.  He writes:

It is precisely when federal workers go abroad that they should hold themselves to the lowest standards. We are, after all, the land of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Snooki. Debauchery is an American specialty. The president should be promoting the export of our culture.

...Maybe we should stop blaming the feds for being like the rest of us — it’s hardly surprising that bad actors and buffoons find their way into the public sector as well as the private — and think of other lessons to draw from the scandal, such as possible recruitment tools: Work for the government and get a complimentary upgrade to a hot-tub suite?

 I have little tolerance for people who are in positions of trust with matters of security who slough off.  But the organizational culture, whether corporate or governmental, has developed the notion that a perquisite of  service is the debauchery of which Milbank writes. Our corporations reward their performers with trips to Las Vegas, where they can perform in the way that the boys in Cartagena did and be assured that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. We have cultivated the notion that the best recognition of hard work is booze, drugs, and pussy.  The perpetrators of merit pay for teachers who claim to be borrowing an incentive from corporate life are ignoring what the de facto incentives are:  reward your top performers by encouraging them to debauche.

When it comes to gorgeous and irresistible ladies of the evening and noontime beaches, South America has developed a reputation for an aesthetic standard of debauchery that has no global rival.  Many years ago, a county agricultural extension agent escorted a bunch of farmers to Brazil to exchange ideas with South American farmers on food production.  Then they discovered the beaches of Rio de Janeiro. The farmers were hooked up with some corporate executives on the tour, who assumed that they should avail themselves of all the pleasures Rio had to offer, especially the gorgeous women they found surrounding them on the beaches.  The county agent confided to me that he would never again act as guide on a tour of South America because the combination of women and corporate executives posed too much peril in regard to the actual purpose of the tour.

The problem was that the corporate executives were telling the farmers that they, too, were businessmen and should act as such, which meant rewarding themselves with debauched behavior.  The county agent said the biggest threat to American agriculture as the province of families was the intrusion of the corporate value system.  In that value system, women and booze and bad behavior were flaunted as badges of success.

The whore of Cartagena has confronted Americans, as Dana Milbank suggests, with the realities of the value system of its ruling class.  The pretenses of moral superiority and democratic integrity have been stripped away and Americans have been given a glimpse of what foreigners see when Americans come to their lands.  

Of course, the GOP, led by people like George Romney, will stand up and condemn any attempts for apologizing for bad behavior as a betrayal of national pride.  Apologies aren't required.  It is Americans themselves who must confront with honesty what values and behavior Americans have put on display.  It is that behavior that the Islamic extremists have used against us, even though the Islamic suicide bombers and assassins have often availed themselves of the very debauchery they condemn.

And a whore shall teach us.

To many people both within and outside of America, it is not the land of the free and home of the brave.  It is land of George Romney, Bain Capital, Enron, Goldman Sachs, Paris Hilton, Snooki, and all the inspirations of reality television.  American exceptionalism is its capacity for the schizophrenic insistence that America has become something that it is not--as demonstrated by our secret service, our military, and our corporations.  

The whore from Cartagena offers us an opportunity for redemption.