A braided leather whip, a sniper rifle, six jars of fertiliser and a copy of the Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook were among the presents foreign leaders have given United States President George W Bush. They are clearly trying to tell him something.
The inventory of official gifts from 2004, published this week by the State Department, reads like the wish list of a paranoid survivalist.
Bush received a startling array of weapons, including assorted daggers and a machete from Gabon. He got the braided whip with a wooden handle from the Hungarian prime minister. The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, a gift from the Sultan of Brunei, has tips on how to use some of these implements in a tight spot.
The paperback also explains how to wrestle with an alligator, escape from a mountain lion and take a punch. But the small arsenal of guns presented by Jordan’s King Abdullah, including a $10 000 sniper rifle, would presumably render much of that advice unnecessary.
The king also gave Bush six jars of ”various fertilisers”. It sounds like the sort of present likely to cause offence when coming from a mother-in-law or sibling. But according to the Jordanian embassy, the jars contained neither manure nor the sort of chemicals that can be turned into home-made bombs, but rather an array of fertile volcanic soils found around the country.
In each instance listed by the State Department, the acceptance of the gift is justified by the phrase ”non-acceptance would cause embarrassment to donor and US government”. But acceptance clearly has its own embarrassments.
Bush was reminded of his problems with language by a vocabulary-expanding game called Forgotten English, from Brunei.
It is apparent that many foreign dignitaries do not do much research before buying gifts. Bush, a reformed drunk, was given a cellarful of wine over the course of 2004.
Officials are only allowed to keep gifts worth less than $305 after they leave office. Others are occasionally displayed to show the US’s warm ties with the rest of the world.
But despite standing shoulder to shoulder around the world in 2004, Bush got nothing from Britain’s Tony Blair, for Christmas or his birthday. — Â