The first verse of this International Artists track (penned by the Bee Gees) remains the most interesting: singer once received an “invitation” to come to the “United Nations,” but “that was when I was somebody.” Being somebody in the international community involves a temporal recognition/leveling: one cannot participate so long as one remains “in my own time.” There are no singularities in the family of nations, and no figures not judged present (i.e., precisely co-temporal with the “modern” and the “civilized”; cf., Justice William Johnson’s concurrence in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia [1831]).

 

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