Opinion: Sudden devastating freaks of nature are humbling. Or they should be. But these days world affairs are like one of those old Broadway "catalogue songs" - great long laundry lists of examples that all go to prove the same point - that You're The Top or These Foolish Things Remind Me Of You.
So pretty much whatever happens anywhere on the planet all goes to prove the same central point - the iniquity of America.
You'd think an unprecedented tsunami in a region that's never been a US sphere of influence would be hard to pin on the Great Satan. And, to be fair to the global rent-a-quote crowd, for an hour or two they were stunned into silence. But it wasn't long before they were back singing the same old song: Disaffected young Muslim men in Saudi Arabia, devastated coastal villages in Sri Lanka. These Foolish Things Remind Me Of U-S-A. You really need Cole Porter: You're The Pits With Your Massive Armies You're The Pits And You Cause Tsunamis.
Jan Egeland, that Norwegian fellow who's the UN humanitarian honcho, got the ball rolling with a few general remarks about the "stinginess" of certain great powers we could mention.
Got that? Those tightwad Yanks aren't doing enough.
But whoa, hang on. It turns out those pushy Yanks are doing way too much, at least according to Clare Short. President Bush roused her ire by announcing that Washington would be co-ordinating its disaster relief with Australia, India and Japan - and to Clare that had the whiff of another "coalition of the willing" about it.
"I think this initiative from America to set up four countries claiming to co-ordinate sounds like yet another attempt to undermine the UN," she told the BBC.
"Only really the UN can do that job. It is the only body that has the moral authority." Moral authority?
When you've got 100,000 dead and many more homeless, "moral authority" isn't really the most urgent requirement. Logistical capability is.
Right now the folks running the C-130s into Indonesia and Sri Lanka are the Yanks and the Aussies.
The folks issuing press releases are the UN - in Sri Lanka: "UNFPA is carrying out reproductive health assessments".
But Ms Short has usefully clarified what it means when the world says "America" isn't "giving" enough "aid".
It means the government isn't giving enough money to Jan Egeland's UN office. That's the only "giving" that counts. The fact that Pfizer has given $35 million, which is more than most western governments have chipped in, doesn't mean anything.
The fact that Amazon.com's customers donated over $6 million in 48 hours doesn't count.
The two naval groups and the fleet of planes ferrying supplies into Banda Aceh round the clock are of no consequence.
What Jan Egeland means when he talks of "stinginess" is that Americans aren't ponying up enough taxpayers' bucks to his departmental budget. That's the only measure of global compassion that matters.
As it happens, the US pays 40 per cent of Mr Egeland's budget. But, even if the budget was tripled and the US paid 70 per cent of it, it still wouldn't be enough. Aside from its "moral authority", the justification for doing everything through the UN is that you need one central co-ordinating authority - that a thousand ad hoc organisations and volunteers swarming the territory would just stumble over each other and be wasteful and inefficient. Yet, despite the fact that Egeland's office has a permanent bureaucracy dedicated solely to humanitarian relief work, a week after the disaster it doesn't seem to have done anything other than fly in some experts to assess the situation.
Reporters on the ground have noted the lack of activity in Colombo and Sumatra.
The water and food and medical supplies are coming from an improvised Aussie-American shuttle service. That's what you need for global compassion: an operational infrastructure for long-distance emergencies - or, in a word, a military.
If you don't have a functioning military, it doesn't matter how caring you profess to be. Take my own country, Canada. We have this thing called DART - the Disaster Assistance Response Team, a 200-man military unit created precisely for these kinds of situations. By all accounts, they're very good, highly trained professionals. But Ottawa has no means of transportation to get them to the Indian Ocean.
Indeed, it's doubtful whether it could get them to the remoter parts of Canada. The reality is you require a big modern well-equipped military, not just for invading countries and dropping bombs on foreigners but for all the touchy-feely peacekeepy stuff, too.
It's easy to be wise after the event, to say, oh, well, the Indian Ocean should have had a tsunami warning system like the Pacific does.
I don't blame the Maldives for not making that a budgetary priority. But it's hard not to feel something went wrong somewhere when you read the bulletin issued by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre 15 minutes after the earthquake: "This bulletin is for all areas of the Pacific basin except Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, California. This earthquake is located outside the Pacific. No destructive tsunami threat exists." At that point, the tsunami was still an hour away from Thailand, and several hours away from Somalia.
But whoever issued that bulletin either never thought to call anyone in the Indian Ocean, or had no one in his Rolodex to call.
Do you remember the early scene in last year's hilarious eco-comedy The Day After Tomorrow? A handful of British scientists are holed up in Scotland when they notice the temperatures are dropping rapidly on some of their buoys in the North Atlantic, and they call Dennis Quaid in Washington, because he's got top billing and thus gets to save the planet while they're just a bunch of limey supporting actors who get frozen to death in the early scenes.
State-of-the-art buoys measuring temperature and water levels don't cost that much, nor would a chain of monitoring offices. If you're going to have a permanent UN bureaucracy, that would seem to be the perfect role for a transnational body. But, after 60 years, the neocolonial viceroys of Big Humanitarianism would rather maintain the developing countries as permanently helpless children and lecture the advanced world on what its tax rates should be. If Clare Short's right and Bush is intentionally bypassing the UN, good for him.