Shanghai Shock

The Shanghai World Expo 2010 opened this past Saturday, for those distracted by all the horrible hard news stories to notice.

But here's the real Shanghai surprise - the U.S. is represented!

After several years of turning a blind eye to the international expositions, the United States has returned to the world's fair scene with a pavilion at the Shanghai fair. Despite some sloppy planning by the Bush administration - the same folks who brought you the Katrina emergency response - Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was able to use her influence and get the U.S. pavilion in place with Jose Villarreal, U.S. Commissioner General to World Expo Shanghai 2010, running the show. After the embarrassment of being unrepresented at the Hannover world's fair in Germany a decade ago, it's good to the U.S. back on the world's fair scene.

Or is it?

According to the Huffington Post's Bob Jacobson, it might have been better had we not bothered. Although the Shanghai World Expo promotes a more sustainable and gratifying urban living pattern and a happier healthier lifestyle as a vision for the future, the United States - a country not known for quality urban planning or healthy living patterns - has constructed a pavilion that critics have said looks more like a suburban shopping mall designed to sell worthless junk.

The Bush administration pretty much set U.S. participation in Shanghai on the wrong course by outsourcing its duties to private parties, creating what's called the "Blackwater effect" in diplomacy - let the corporate suits handle it. Bush defended his policy by citing a law forbidding the use of public funds to finance American world's fair pavilions, a law that apparently did not exist. By the time the Obama administration took office, the Chinese were getting impatient with our poor planning and pussyfooting, and Secretary of State Clinton moved to secure private funding to ensure that the U.S. pavilion got back on track, assuming it ever was on track in the first place. By the time Villarreal was appointed, much of that money had already been spent, giving him little if any control over authority in his post.

The result? We have a pavilion at the world's fair that huffs and puffs with unimaginative grandiosity celebrating the benefits of hypercapitalism and rampant commercialism. In short, a true reflection of the United States.

(Oh yeah, the U.S. pavilion the 1992 world's fair in Seville, Spain, was similarly written off as slipshod, so there's a precedent.)

Any exposition extolling the virtues of a sustainable quality of life is completely out of touch with the American character, which is all about conspicuous consumption and purposeless existence. We've spent the past sixty years going to malls for recreational shopping, living in soulless suburban housing, and getting fat on fried food. Some of us are trying to maintain that way of life against the odds by resisting mass transit projects, regional urban planning, climate change legislation, and other Big Government initiatives. Bob Jacobson's article - a link to which is here - argues that much should be done to prevent such an embarrassment at the next big world's fair so that the American people get the kind of pavilion we deserve, but I suspect we already have.

At least we don't have to humiliate ourselves on our own soil. Thanks to Epcot, American international expositions are a relic of the past. There hasn't been a fair here since 1984, when the Louisiana World Expo in New Orleans celebrated the theme of fresh water as a source of life.

How cruelly ironic that New Orleans has since been crippled by the rain waters of Hurricane Katrina.

Note: In an earlier post several years ago on this blog, I erroneously referred to the 2000 world's fair in Germany as taking place in Berlin instead of Hannover. I regret the error.