In keeping with the Clinton administration's rigorously non-judgmental foreign policy, the State Department announced last week that it was retiring the term "rouge states" as an official designation for such behaviorally challenged nations as Iraq, Libya, and North Korea. Like, who's to say who's a rogue anymore, anyway -- you know? Henceforth, said department spokesman Richard Boucher, nations that sort of have a tendency once in a while to sometimes do some things that maybe are kind of troubling to us will be known as "states of concern."
Mickey Kaus, CEO of the dot-com empire Kausfiles.com, rightly noted the limpness of the new State Department designation. Thumbing through his thesaurus, Kaus offered several alternatives: "impish states," for example, or "mischief-loving states." THE SCRAPBOOK, however, sees more promise in extending the new "states of . . . " formulation. Really poor countries, for instance, might become "states of despair." A country with crumbling infrastructure could be a "state of disrepair." Nations with strong psychoanalytic traditions -- well, Austria -- might be "states of mind." And disaster-prone countries? "States of emergency."
If nothing else, it would be fun to watch spokesman Boucher wrestle with these new locutions. Just last week, according to the Washington Times, he said the United States -- a "state of grace," as we like to think of it -- would respond forcefully "if we see states of concern that continue to be of concern because they are not willing to deal with some of the issues we are concerned about."