Phthursday Musings: Model Times

When I was in college, I got talked into joining Model United Nations. I’m not even going to attempt to explain it in terms of the United Nations because I’ve never actually been there and, thinking back, I have no particular reason to believe that what we were doing bore any resemblance whatsoever to the real thing.

The only event we went to was the Midwest Model United Nations held every year at Union Station in St. Louis. There were others - there was a national one - but for whatever reason we only went to St. Louis. We’d be there for what I think was three nights but at this point details like that are kind of a blur.

The way it worked was, we had enough people in Model UN to fill out two complete delegations, which meant we were assigned two countries. I participated for three years, and wound up representing Japan twice, and then India. I forget what the other delegation was the last two years, but the first year it was Saudi Arabia, which becomes important for part of this story.

The way things were handled is that people were divided into committees which would pass resolutions and then at the end resolutions would be considered by the entire assembly. So each delegation of ours would be like 10 people spread across 6 committees and then we’d all be together in the General Assembly at the end.

I have a lot of side stories around the whole thing, many of them involving my committee partner from my first year there, who may well have been the most insane man I have ever known. Those are stories mostly best told in a form other than this one though. For the purposes of all this let’s call him Mr. Mop.

When we got there, well, how do I put it… we had no idea what the hell we were doing. We had surely met in advance to talk about something? In theory we knew something about what Japan thought about things? Japan was actually one of the easiest countries to represent because Japan in the 90s was all about peace and harmony and gave more money to various UN funds than anyone besides the US without also trying to run everything.

Well, we got there, and it turned out some people had shown up with pre-written resolutions, and there were some people in the room who were dead set on controlling things, regardless of which country they represented. These people were for some reason mostly from the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh and in particular I remember a guy representing Kuwait who pulled together a caucus of Middle Eastern countries and was somehow telling both the Iraqi and Iranian delegations what was what.

The experience was formative for me, not because I learned anything useful about the United Nations, but because I saw how people would walk into a room and try to take things over, whether it made any sense or not, whether they were full of shit or not. It was pure politics, with the UN just being some kind of weird backdrop for it all.

I mention that we only went to St. Louis. This is all we’d done for many years, because this is just how it worked. Our fearless leader, the very long time Model UN advisor, was the estimable Dr. Robert G. Leh, who went by Bob, which meant that his email address was [email protected], and boy howdy let me tell you, Dr. Leh was a character. I am completely serious: he actually taught a class called Small Arms Transfers.

At one point I’m in the committee room with my friend Pibble, who was also on the committee but part of the other delegation, and we see Dr. Leh in the corner of the room, and we go back there, and he’s smiling, and he sort of straightens up, and remember here, I’m representing Japan and my friend is representing Saudi Arabia, and Dr. Leh looks at me, and gestures at Pibble, and he just booms:

You know… you have to do what he says… he’s GOT your OOIILLLL!

As it so happened, nobody in the room managed to rope Japan into any kind of coherent bloc, so I did a lot of wandering around, and managed to suss out how to follow the modified Robert’s Rules around me, and managed to participate in a number of amendments, and I pulled off some weird thing at some point when I convinced Egypt to give Japan the floor, and in the end Mr. Mop and I were awarded a committee award. And the thing about this was that it was the first time in 17 years that anyone from IWU had won any award at Midwest Model United Nations. It was, at the time, all kind of bizarre, and in retrospect, I think it was even more bizarre than I recognized then.

Because of the award, I was made head delegate for the following year, and Japan won one of the delegation awards, and then the next year, India won both a committee award and a delegation award, and again, I learned a lot of politics, but not really international diplomacy, even if that’s what I thought it was at the time. What I learned was that I was perfectly comfortable using my own loud voice to stand in front of 50 people and say something with conviction that I couldn’t care less about, except that in the moment I apparently cared enough, and they would pay attention and act like I knew what I was doing, even if I wasn’t doing anything else except reading their own words back to them.

Along the way there was a lot of hilarity as one committee tried to forcibly change the name of the Russian Federation to Chechnya, and another committee tried to counteract the repeated charge that resolutions had no teeth by amending resolutions to explicitly note that these resolutions indeed have great big shredding teeth or some nonsense like that. It’s all the kind of stuff that at least one member of my household today would find ver ver unfunny.

It’s not just small-p politics that I picked up along the way though. There were these weird ways of talking about things that just kind of stuck with me, like how when Mobutu Sese Seko died in 1997 and Zaire morphed back into Democratic Republic of the Congo, everyone at Model UN seemed to be talking nonstop about DRC this, DRC that, DRC, DRC, DRC, and to this day I’m not sure that this is how anyone else actually talks about that country, but it’s how I talk about it.

This conveniently brings us to our Phthursday Flags. First, the DRC flag, adopted in 2006:

Blue is for peace, red is for the country’s martyrs, yellow is for the country’s wealth, and the star is for the future. All fair enough.

Before we go on, let’s stop and acknowledge, it gets confusing, because there are two large countries named Congo. The one we’re talking about here is the really big one right in the middle of Africa:

The line between DRC and its neighbor to the west - Republic of Congo - is, as you might have guessed, the Congo River. DRC is over three times bigger than Texas. It is BIG - the 11th largest country in the world by area.

The two things that leap out to me though are the diagonal line - not super common in national flags - and the particular shade of blue. Blues are usually darker (like on the American or British flags) or even lighter (like on the Argentine flag). This particular blue is approximated to #007fff and for those of you for whom that is completely meaningless, imagine turning the blue all the way up, and the green half the way up, and there you go. It’s a bold and bright color against which the red is particularly jarring. And you might see a lot more of it over the next several days, as DRC is in the World Cup, and opened with a draw against heaily favored Portugal, portending well for the Congolese to make it to the knockout rounds.

Ahh, but before the reversion to DRC, there was this:

The flag of Zaire during the Mobutu dictatorship was a true work of art, probably my all-time favorite national flag on purely aesthetic grounds. I understand why they moved on from it, I understand how loaded the history can get, but truly, this was unique, arresting, triumphant, and still so simple as to have only four colors, none of them white or blue. I can’t say enough about it.

Often when DRC enters the news cycle it’s because of something unfortunate - it is the country most closely associated with ebola, it borders a couple of the most violent places across the last three decades, and there is a lot of ongoing internal tension between ethnic groups. But one of the truly great things about the World Cup is how it is an opportunity for relatively obscure countries like DRC - and even more obscure ones like Cape Verde - to take center stage and put on a show for the rest of the world. It all makes me wish I hadn’t been so turned off all of the corruption and other bullshit of the World Cup and I could just enjoy the spectacle.

Seriously, I sat down, thinking to write of something, and I thought of seeing the DRC flag on the TV and seeing them score their goal, and that made me think of Model UN and all of the madness associated with that.

My senior year, because I was 21, I wound up driving my delegation down from Bloomington to St. Louis in a conversion van. I had never driven anything anywhere near that big before and am pretty sure I should not have been doing such a thing.

I did not however run out of gas… like we did on the way back to Bloomington my sophomore year. No committee award could forgive us then for wasting the vision of the fuel gauge. (I think Jim Morrison said that.)

Counting those three trips, I think I’ve been to St. Louis 14 times. This includes two concerts (Fragile Porcelain Mice / Hum in 1997, Built to Spill in 2005), two Cardinals game (at two different incarnations of Busch Stadium), two trips up the Arch, and one protest outside of a presidential debate. I’ve had Thai food, soul food, and fondue in St. Louis. It is one of the great American cities and let nobody tell you otherwise.

We can’t talk St. Louis without talking the Bottle Rockets, can we? Can you believe this:

Sincerely though I had no thought of writing about Model United Nations or anything else four hours ago. It’s not something I often think about and in throwing all this together it seems like such an odd time, such a strange thing to have participated in. I hope my kid gets bunches of opportunities to participate in strange things like that. And hey, I hope all kids do, that’s kind of what this country and world should be about, going out and sharing crazy experiences with random people from Oskhosh or wherever and being given an award for it all and doing what he said because he’s got your oil.