It's true, the Indian businessman who successfully bid on the glasses and other personal items from James Otis, a self-proclaimed "pacifist".
But the problem with Mr. Otis, and others in this country like him, is that although he claims to respect India, he refused to honor their sovereignty by fundamentally recognizing that his act of putting them up for auction was a cultural, if not ethical and moral violation.
Why is it a violation? Imagine if some Indian, or, gasp, Chinese person owned some memorabilia of Abraham Lincoln's. Can you imagine the uproar, the American national outrage? And then, imagine if this foreign national said, "Well, I'll give these over to your government to display in the Smithsonian, but only if you agree to raise your national spending on Welfare Programs, especially for single parent households."
Imagine that. Can't do it? Well, that's exactly what Mr. Otis did. Since when did we allow someone from another country who possessed cultural icons from our country hold those items hostage until we changed our domestic policies? Never? Right.
So where do Americans think it's alright to coerce other countries that they should change their policies or they'll go right on doing the wrong thing and sell off/auction off their cultural icons?
Oh, right, Western Europeans and Euro-Americans like James Otis, and Mr. Berge, Yves Saint Laurent's partner.
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