A visa ban on US officials? CNN would kill us

We spend billions on these and dozens of other foreign service officials in the US capital.

The question is: What job description have we given these high-living officials?

How often — if ever — do they brief President Kibaki, Premier Odinga and VP Musyoka on the lowdown collected on the US military, police, governors, industrial chiefs, churches, educational system, etc?

How many of our envoys can write a book such as Kevin Phillips’ The American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the politics of deceit in the House of Bush or Amy Goodman’s The exception to the rulers: exposing oily politicians, war profiteers and the media that love them or, on this side, William Attwood’s contemptuous The Reds and the Blacks or Smith Hempstone’s libellous Rogue Ambassador?

We — who are merely amateur information seekers — know a great deal about the quadrangular traffic of corruption between the US administration, industry, security forces and atomic agencies.

Yet this corporate decomposition – the oily rulers and the media who adore them — is what sits in daily and damning judgment of the rest of admittedly erring mankind.

The question is: How much do our diplomats in DC and New York City really know about what is going on in the White House, in the State Department, in the Pentagon, in the Trade Department, in the Treasury, at the CIA’s Langley headquarters and a million other vital establishments?

One barrier standing in our envoys’ way, as impassable as the Elephant of Ignorance of which Okot p’Bitek speaks in his Song of Lawino — is, the absence of curiosity — the remarkable intellectual indolence — which characterises the educated consumer classes of all Third World countries.

Yet it would be unfair to blame our envoys absolutely.

Western disrespect for Third World opinion was one of the points that Moustapha Masmoudi of Tunisia raised when he acted as the chief spokesman during the official Third World demand through Unesco of a New International Information Order.

According to the custodians of the reigning world information structure, it is simply improper for the envoy of a Third World government to subject the Western capital to which he is accredited to daily sermons about democracy, human rights and accountability.

Yet in the US itself there are daily reports on venal official links with industry, police rapacity, graft, brutality and racism, similar practices in the judiciary, a Congress permanently held to ransom by the lobby system, human-rights abuse — both at home and abroad (especially in Latin America and the Middle East), and so on.

On all these things and many more, Kenya is a child compared with all the so-called established democracies, especially the Anglo-Saxon ones.

Kenya’s case may look more spectacular only in the crudity and shamelessness with which officials steal from the poor, commit tribalism, etc.

As Amy Goodman points out, the corporate media in London, Paris, DC and other Western capitals simply dote on their oil and nuclear dynasts.