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something is happening and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?
A couple of essays in today's newspapers struck me as being of more than just ephemeral interest to what's left of the American body politic during the rump end of perhaps the country's most disastrous of all presidencies, and while the remaining candidates for that high office -- with a single, glowing exception -- trade policies that are of complete irrelevance to the challenges facing us in the 21st century.
The first essay, adapted from his own forthcoming book by Parag Khanna, is a long and remarkably lucid outline of the new geopolitics, a demonstration of the way in which the USA's current foreign policies are doomed to failure not through any particular incompetence but simply because successive Administrations have clung, like the RIAA, to a defunct business model long after the stage during which it was merely foolish so to do.
The piece, which appeared in the New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/magazine/27world-t.html?th&emc=th, is called "Waving Goodbye to Hegemony", a rather flip title -- shame on the NYT's subeditors! -- that disguises the portent of the content.
The second article appears in the Los Angeles Times at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-naomi27jan27,0,3813752.story?track=ntothtml, is called "Why the Right Loves a Disaster" (another of these stupidly glib titles!), and is, like so many op-eds at the moment, by Naomi Klein, author of the recent book The Shock Doctrine. Klein points out that the only time those economic and social doctrines that together could loosely be called "neocon" are ever able to achieve any degree of implementation is in the wake of some disaster or other -- usually an economic disaster, but just as feasibly a catastrophe like 9/11 or a war (think post-WWI Germany for a combination of both). At such a time people are too fraught to examine the ideologically driven economic/social doctrine or recognize it for the tripe it is, so before they know quite what's going on it's been completely implemented -- which is, of course, a fresh disaster all on its own.
Taking the theses of these two pieces together, we have the imminent spectacle of misguided economic and social policies being applied in the context of a worldview that was valid at the end of the last century but is now of strictly historical interest. And most of us, me included, spend most of our time fiddling as the tinder of this inferno sparks.
The first essay, adapted from his own forthcoming book by Parag Khanna, is a long and remarkably lucid outline of the new geopolitics, a demonstration of the way in which the USA's current foreign policies are doomed to failure not through any particular incompetence but simply because successive Administrations have clung, like the RIAA, to a defunct business model long after the stage during which it was merely foolish so to do.
The piece, which appeared in the New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/magazine/27world-t.html?th&emc=th, is called "Waving Goodbye to Hegemony", a rather flip title -- shame on the NYT's subeditors! -- that disguises the portent of the content.
The second article appears in the Los Angeles Times at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-naomi27jan27,0,3813752.story?track=ntothtml, is called "Why the Right Loves a Disaster" (another of these stupidly glib titles!), and is, like so many op-eds at the moment, by Naomi Klein, author of the recent book The Shock Doctrine. Klein points out that the only time those economic and social doctrines that together could loosely be called "neocon" are ever able to achieve any degree of implementation is in the wake of some disaster or other -- usually an economic disaster, but just as feasibly a catastrophe like 9/11 or a war (think post-WWI Germany for a combination of both). At such a time people are too fraught to examine the ideologically driven economic/social doctrine or recognize it for the tripe it is, so before they know quite what's going on it's been completely implemented -- which is, of course, a fresh disaster all on its own.
Taking the theses of these two pieces together, we have the imminent spectacle of misguided economic and social policies being applied in the context of a worldview that was valid at the end of the last century but is now of strictly historical interest. And most of us, me included, spend most of our time fiddling as the tinder of this inferno sparks.