I’m bored with writing dead-end novels. Bored of sterile postexistentialist meanderings. Bored of being a catcher in the rye catching nothing. I need to find the new utopia.
It seems increasingly clear to me that the terrorists were mistaken in their target. Why didn’t they attack the United Nations buildings on First Avenue between 42nd and 48th Streets? Because it’s an international zone? But the organization has clearly failed in its mission. The UN is really to blame for wars, injustice, and inequality. It allows nations to believe that justice exists when it’s never enforced. Target your Boeings on thinga-majig. The world needs an effective government, an international army capable of imposing order. The Blue Berets in Yugoslavia? Nothing more than unarmed soldiers paid to watch massacres without turning a hair. The United Nations was discredited the moment it appointed Libya president of the Commission for Human Rights. This bureaucratic, sclerotic, corrupt, and impotent organization needs to be reformed. The UN was founded on the ruins of the League of Nations; what are we going to build on the ruins of the UN? Why not global democracy of the type called for in the speeches of Garry Davis, founder of the World Citizens Movement in 1948 (with the support of Albert Camus, André Breton, and Albert Einstein)? There is a solution to the horrors of terrorism and ecological catastrophe: a global republic governed by an international parliament elected by universal suffrage. I dream of abolishing nations. I would love not to have a country. John Lennon droned “Imagine there’s no countries.” Could this be why New York assassinated him?
In the UN sculpture garden, I take a photo of a statue of St George slaying a dragon which looks uncannily like the fuselage of an airplane. Numerous TV outside-broadcast trucks make it difficult to see. Entitled Good Defeats Evil, this massive sculpture was a gift to the United Nations from the USSR in 1990. It is sculpted from the remains of two missiles, one Soviet, one American. “Good Defeats Evil:” it is a battle that rages in each of us every day and presently throughout the world. In this square building, the members of the Security Council are gathered to vote on a resolution about the war in Iraq. At a press conference last night, President Bush said something rather fine: “Since September Eleventh, our home is a battlefield.”
The weird melting pot which works in New York should serve as an example: a world without frontiers must be possible since it’s been tried and tested successfully on this tiny island. The results are dirty, complicated, dangerous, and noisy, but the system works: it is possible to live with people of all races and origins, from all over the world: it’s feasible, it can be done. Look at Sarajevo.
I’ve met Troy Davis a number of times in Paris. My first impression was of a tall, lanky man exhausted by the mission conferred on him by his father. Nevertheless, he seems very methodical: he lugs his briefcase round countless countries. The first time I met him, he was looking for money from Pierre Bergé. I found him less entertaining the second time, since he was looking for money from me. Troy Davis is permanently broke: he spends all his money on airline tickets since he quit his job to dedicate himself to the cause of World Democracy. He had a plan for a “Protest for World Democracy.” I remember putting him in touch with Jean-Paul Enthoven, mostly in an attempt to be rid of him. After that, we communicated mostly by email. He wanted to hit on my brother for money, he bugged me until I gave him Thierry Ardisson’s cell number…As soon as he found out I was going to be a publisher, he returned to the fray with his book project. To be honest, he was starting to get on my tits, him and his World Democracy. Even so, though I racked my brains I couldn’t think of any other post-September 11 utopia.