Wampum

Roman Holiday

Just before going off to Rome I caught Richard Perle doing a sit-down on CBC. He was flogging some Clansey-esque Sum-of-all-Beards book, and managed to opine that France was pursuing a hostile policy, the details of which were sort of droll. I don't think anyone should actually give Perle money, let alone pay for the potboiler hash of mumble and muddle he's riding the publisher's circuit with this cycle, but someone should let the idiot know what a € looks like.

I spent my first day in English, pushing a "straw vote" by the ICANN registrars present at the Rome meeting, with a civil evening spent by all dining at the oldest extant hospital in Europe, a few hundred meters from St. Peters. I spent the next four days working (or socializing) in French, and it was as the three of us -- an Italian formerly living in Paris, now in Vienna, a Frenchman living in Tokyo, and myself -- were walking past some random monument that the Frenchman (en-exile) pointed out that the halo over the head of some Saint Amie des Pigeons or another was a circle of stars ... and casually made the throw-away reference.

It hit me like the seagull that whacked Tippi Hedren motoring across Bodega Bay. What used to be Christian Europe is now European Europe, and Richard Perle is planning for a future that was close to its sell-by date when I lived in Bruxelles (and London and Munich) in the mid-1980s. Every Indian breathing wants tribal license plates. The new European license plates with the circle of stars are as numerous as the old, pre-Europe plates. Its not just diplos and the jet-set now, its the Vespa Audry Hepburn scooted about on. Its on the money. Its on the publicity. Its on the tele. Its on the heads of Saints and Angles.

To round out my week I spent my last day working in German with Germans, Swiss, and Austrians.

For those that care about such things, ICANN decided to let Verisign Registry run the Internet, which is about as surprising as ... the directionality of time. It also decided that it need not disclose to curious me and my What I Know about the .IQ delegation project, or anyone else for that matter, what it plans to do with the .iq ccTLD.

I'll be chatting next with the UN network weenies. ICANN has reached its sell-by date as a regulator of the domain name industry, and endorsing the idea that one nation state may properly deny another nation state of its namespace is as silly as walking away from the international law system. Oddly, that is where Richard Perle came in. He described the North Atlantic as a region of the earth governed by law, and the rest, not, and the task of our time ©, to extend the gift of law to the lawless.

Postscript: Richard Perle is the architect of the Anglo-American militarized adventures in South West Asia. The driver of the bus is ... blind. On the bright-side, a first-grade class at Riverton school has passed an excellent session of show-and-tell, and now know all about the € coinage of European Europe.

Posted by at March 9, 2004 12:56 PM | TrackBack