The Roundness of Time

By David Simmons

The trouble with timelines is that time is not linear but circular. That’s why we have news cycles and boom-and-bust cycles, and why history repeats itself. What goes around comes around.

Progress is the unbending of time, the often fleeting escape from the vicious cycle that is the natural order of things. It almost never happens by accident, but takes a lot of effort and co-operation, which is why progressive movements such as democracy and poverty reduction are so hard to keep from curving off track.

Innovation is a tool humans have used since the invention of language and the greatest circle of them all, the wheel, to progress technologically. It took thousands of years for technology to progress in a major way, but like all things, without tremendous effort, it too becomes little more than a circular argument.

The first technological marvel I can remember getting excited about was the “flicker”. That’s what my parents called flashing car turn signals. Our first Volkswagen Beetle had semaphore turn signals that popped out of the B-pillar, but our brand-new 1957 model had real flickers, just like “grown-up” North American cars.

But the flicker was soon to be superseded on my excitement scale, because this was the 1950s, when time was in the early stages of an unprecedented spurt of linearity. That same year, the Soviets launched Sputnik 1, and I would stand in our yard in the evening and watch in awe as it tracked across the sky. It was the birth of the space age, and we thought it would change our lives.

But much smaller innovations around the same time, which didn’t make the headlines or heat up the Cold War, turned out to be much greater world-changers. Even as the Russians fired their rocket into space, full of sound and fury, a few bespectacled scientists somewhere quietly invented the first computer languages, and in 1958, the integrated circuit.

The thread that has run through the often circuitous, sometimes marvellously progressive timeline of human development is the one thing that really makes us different from all the other animals, the mastery of complex communication. That technology reached an apex with the printing press and the newspaper. Back in the 1950s, of course, we all knew that the newspaper was dead. Sure, it had survived newsreels and radio, but there was no way it would survive television.

We got our first TV in the early 1960s. Dad worked for a hardware store that was the town’s distributor of Electrohome, then Canada’s primary maker of state-of-the-art entertainment gizmos like stereophonic record players housed in beautiful wooden cabinets. Because of his employee discount, we were able to get both a stereophonic record player and a “portable” television set. It was called portable because it wasn’t housed in a beautiful wooden cabinet, and it had a handle on top for carrying purposes. But I don’t remember seeing anyone actually carry it alone.

At first we could only get one channel, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation affiliate in Kelowna, a city about 70 miles (we hadn’t heard of the metric system yet) south of our village in British Columbia. Dad would rush home from work to watch the 15-minute news broadcast. I liked Saturdays, because the Bugs Bunny Show preceded Hockey Night in Canada. That was when the National Hockey League had only six teams; I lost interest in later years when it expanded and became too much work to keep track of.

But funnily enough, by the early 1980s, television had still not managed to kill off the newspaper. And so I became a print journalist. Still am, even though the people who know about such things have said the Internet will make the newspaper a thing of the past, as television and radio and movie newsreels didn’t before.

But although newspapers today look a lot like they did when I got started writing for them and later editing them, or even how they looked in the late 1950s when I first learned to read them (though mostly the funnies), the way we make them has changed in ways no one could predict 30 years ago.

And yet the changes, in a way, have been circular.

When I started in the business, newspapers were only just starting to use computers in a big way. The first paper I worked at for any length of time used a big computer to assist in the typesetting, but the stories themselves were written and edited on typewriters in noisy newsrooms.

Fast-forward to 2012, and I’m sitting all alone in my room in my boxer shorts, a cold beverage at the side, in Bangkok, editing stories for a newspaper in Hong Kong, 1,700 kilometres away. One of the stories is about the Chinese government doubling the trading range of the yuan versus the US dollar. I tap out the headline on my MacBook Pro, and send it at the speed of light. The next morning, I’m watching BBC World on my flat-screen TV, beamed to me from far overhead by a descendant of Sputnik, and there, on the newscast’s wrap of the day’s headlines from around the world, is my headline, about the yuan.

It had come full circle.

The McDonald's at the End of the World

By David Simmons

There’s not much evidence any more of the many battles fought around Megiddo Hill in northern Israel, most recently in 1918 between the British forces of General Edmund Allenby and the dying Ottoman Empire. Still, it was a worthy inspiration for the author of the Book of Revelation, who used its Greek name – Armageddon, from the Hebrew Har (Mount) Megiddo – to describe Earth’s coming final battle.

The hill – having grown up surrounded by genuine mountains in British Columbia, I wouldn’t call any of the geographic protrusions in Palestine “mounts” – overlooks the Jezreel Valley, popular among warmongers ancient and modern for its broad, flat expanse near a pass on an important trade route. The first recorded major Battle of Armageddon was in the 15th century BC, between the Canaanites and the forces of Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose III.

More important to the author of Revelation, possibly, was Megiddo’s proximity to the birthplace of monotheism, whose three main faiths have been central to many of the world’s bloodiest wars, and have made the New Testament writer’s prediction of a true “war to end all wars” seem increasingly likely during the course of the 20th and 21st centuries AD.

It’s unlikely Thutmose’s beef with the Canaanites had anything to do with religion. It was an imperialist struggle; the point was to shore up Egypt’s hegemony in the Middle East, not to impose Egypt’s gods on its residents and certainly not, as the Israelites did later, to punish the Canaanites for being “heathens”. The Israelite kingdom was immersed in its monotheistic religion, which by its founding nature is utterly intolerant of rival belief systems – the Second Commandment is “You shall have no other gods before me.” Thus the Old Testament is strewn with blood.

Reformers over the centuries have tried to purge Judaism and its offshoots of their warlike nature, with dubious success. Jesus of Nazareth – a town about 18 kilometres from Megiddo – was one of the most important of these figures. But instead of reforming his religion he got himself killed by the imperialist Romans, and his followers started a whole new faith that eventually fell into the same warlike mode as its Judaic forebears. This was exacerbated by a third monotheism, Islam, which despite its name deriving from the Arabic root slm that also gives rise to saalam (“peace”, cognate Hebrew shalom), has always resisted serious efforts to divest it of intolerance and violence.

Recently British Prime Minister David Cameron, on a visit to the world’s most populous Muslim nation, held that country up as an example of how Islam could stand side by side with democracy, and “offer an alternative to the dead-end choice of dictatorship or extremism”. Indeed, urban Indonesians largely reject the violence and intolerance of their religion, but who really are the “extremists”? There is seething anger among that country’s devout fundamentalists. And in Bali in 2002 they lashed out in defence of the intolerance they cherish, and which is rejected by so-called moderates, who to them are the real radicals.

This dichotomy exists throughout Southeast Asia, and not just in the five countries of that region that have embraced Abrahamic faiths (Islam in Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei and Roman Catholicism in the Philippines and East Timor). In all cases the predominant religions here were imported, yet they have adapted, and been adapted, to conform with the ancient cultures that predate them. Thai Buddhism includes aspects of primitive animism and superstition that would likely get Siddhartha Gautama’s head a-shakin’, and the love of life and sexuality prevalent in Indonesia and the Philippines are constant frustrations for their clerics.

Back in their birthplace in the Middle East, though, the philosophical roots of the Abrahamic monotheisms are alive and well. Given this history, nothing would seem more likely to bring on Armageddon than throwing all three of these faiths into the same Jezreel Valley. And yet that is what has happened.

The main catalyst was the establishment of the State of Israel, a pocket of Jews deliberately inserted by Christians in the middle of a pack of Muslims, who were already fighting among themselves because of their own religious disagreements, primarily the rift between Sunnis and Shiites. Israel should have collapsed days after it began – and there is historical evidence that the British, the former occupiers of Palestine and the main enemies of Zionism in the mid-20^th century, dearly hoped it would. But the incompetence of the Arab dictatorships succeeded in shoring up Western support for the fledgling state, particularly in the newly powerful United States. That state of affairs exists to this day.

Nowadays the West has largely abandoned religion, which has opened the door to a widespread hope for global peace. However, not enough people have entered that door, and secularism has in turn given rise to rampant consumerism that must be fuelled by petroleum – much of which lies in the sands of Muslim-dominated countries of the Mideast. The result is twofold: Western nations meddle in the Middle East in the name of energy security, while their overarching secularism makes them ignorant of the religious forces in that region they inevitably have to deal with.

Currently the microcosm of this ugly picture is not so much Israel but Syria, a short jog east of Megiddo. Like most of the countries of the region, Syria did not arise naturally but was drawn on a map by occupying Christians, in this case the French. It is primarily a mixture of Sunni and Shiite, with significant minorities of other faiths, or sects of the main ones. The most important sect, because of its political power – and not because of its numbers, who are relatively few – is the Alawi, a branch of the Shia. The Assad clan that has ruled Syria since 1970 is Alawite.

Syria is also closely allied with the most powerful non-Arab state in the region, which is also predominantly Shiite: Iran. Meanwhile the powerful Arab states are predominantly Sunni monarchies and dictatorships, mostly with strong links to the US. As the US is also the most loyal and lucrative supporter of Israel, despised by Sunni and Shiite alike, yet another seed of end-of-times conflict is sown.

Over the past couple of years we have seen yet another poison thrown into the mix, the collapse of Western capitalism. In all imperial downfalls, the most dangerous time is not the ultimate demise itself but the interim period when the emperor still thinks he wears clothes, and lashes out indiscriminately in what he refuses to recognize as his own death throes. His decisions are inane, such as the European suicidal ban on Iranian oil imports, which the emperor’s propagandists tell the little people is aimed at ending Iran’s unproven nuclear-weapons program but is in fact all about the hegemony of the petrodollar.

Secular Westerners look at the blood currently pouring on to the streets of Homs and cry for a new crusade, to rescue the innocent from the evil Alawites. But even if they were properly informed by their media of the complex nature of the Syrian civil war, they would likely remain largely ignorant of the motives driving the foreign interests in that country: the hugely powerful empires of Europe-America, China and Russia battling – diplomatically, for now – for the spoils of the larger region.

One could go to Megiddo to educate oneself, but it probably wouldn’t help much. I went there in the early 1980s; I doubt much has changed since then, though I don’t think the McDonald’s pictured above was there yet. Unlike much of the rest of the Middle East, Israel is a modern quasi-Euro-American state, and it’s easy not to see the Horsemen of the Apocalypse lurking in the wings.

Dead Kids: A Purpose Served

By David Simmons

After a deranged gunman killed three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse, France, on March 19, Israeli President Shimon Peres rightly said: “There is no greater sin than the murder of a boy or a girl.

“This is the most heinous crime. To wake up in the morning and murder children in cold blood is proof of the killer’s inhumanity and insanity.”

In an interview aired by the British Broadcasting Corp, he added: “What purpose can it serve?”

But the fact is that killing children does indeed often serve a purpose. Rarely, as in the Toulouse case, is the killing deliberate and direct – rather, dead children are statistics of that hateful reality, “collateral damage”.

There is no need to dwell on the fact that Peres’ own country is deeply guilty in this regard because of its brutal occupation of the Gaza Strip in particular but also the West Bank. Israel is not alone in such crimes – far from it. Indiscriminate missile, bomb and nowadays drone attacks kill children all the time. At least such deaths are quick; but the Food and Agriculture Organization reported in 1995 that 567,000 Iraqis under the age of five had died as a result of sanctions imposed against Saddam Hussein. Famously, Madeleine Albright said on 60 Minutes in 1996, when asked if this sacrifice was worthwhile: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.” Albright was US ambassador to the United Nations at the time.

Again, this is not news. The tragedy of children being maimed and killed by wars, both the shooting kind and the more subtle versions like the decade-long sanctions against Iraq and the current ones against Iran, are well documented. But in terms of sheer numbers, even these casualties pale in comparison with those due to poverty.

Recently the United Nations Children’s Fund conducted a study on child poverty in East Asia and the Pacific, including my adopted country, Thailand, and four others in Southeast Asia: Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines and Vietnam. Mongolia and Vanuatu were also included.

“The study results show that, of the 93 million children who live in these seven countries, approximately 54% experience poverty, as measured by deprivation of basic needs,” UNICEF reported. “In 2006, approximately 36% of children suffered severe deprivation in at least one of the seven dimensions identified as relevant for child poverty (food, water, shelter, sanitation, health, education and information) and approximately 14% suffered from severe deprivation in multiple dimensions. In the group of countries with the highest rates of child poverty (Cambodia, Lao PDR and Mongolia), approximately 83% of children were severely deprived in at least one dimension.”

You don’t need statistics to see that within this region, Thailand has made better progress against poverty than many of its neighbours; a bit of travel can provide the evidence. It can’t be denied that a lot of this is due to globalization. Many of the jobs that have been shifted away from developed countries in search of profit at the expense of working people in Europe and North America have certainly improved the standard of living in places like Thailand. But the fact that ordinary Thais have benefited more from this shift than their counterparts in neighbouring Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and the Philippines must be attributed to a large degree to government.

Thailand is now the “Detroit of East Asia”, a manufacturing centre for automotive giants Toyota, Honda, Ford, General Motors and others. Of course comparatively low wage costs are the main reason these multinationals came here, but intelligent management combined with reasonably well-enforced labour laws have ensured that Thai workers in this industry have gained a reputation for quality and reliability. As a result, although the automotive industry was hit extremely hard by the flood disaster of late 2011, with several factories inundated and supply chains disrupted for months, all of the major companies have opted not to relocate to less flood-prone (and lower-paying) countries. The same is true to a lesser extent of the electronics industry; Thailand is a major global supplier, for example, of computer hard-disk drives.

Despite the country’s successes, however, the Thai right wing led by the Chamber of Commerce fights tooth and nail against every attempt of the government to improve people’s well-being. Even though its own studies show that long-term economic growth will depend on a gradual shift away from export dependency toward domestic consumption, which would depend on increased disposable income among the majority of the populace, the Chamber and its cohorts are waging a huge battle against the current government’s policy to increase the minimum daily wage to 300 baht, about C$10. It’s the same song and dance played worldwide against such efforts – higher wages will “cost jobs”.

To give substance to that mantra, the garment industry, infamous for its exploitation of disadvantaged people in Asia and Latin America, has begun moving to more welcoming ground. To its great joy, Thailand’s effort to fight the income gap – still one of the highest in the region – has coincided with the “opening up” of Myanmar right next door. Even by the shabby standards of war-torn Cambodia and communist Laos, decades of oppression and mismanagement by Myanmar’s military junta have made that country desperate for any kind of investment, and the exploiters are being welcomed with open arms.

In March, six major Thailand-based garment manufacturers announced they were setting up shop in Myanmar. The newspaper I work for, whose business section is a reliable cheerleader for Thailand’s right wing, reported this in a “told you so” tone. I was tempted to insert some balance into the story, but exercising laudable restraint (and covering my own butt), I only added a sentence explaining that the government’s wage policy was aimed at improving the standard of living and addressing the wealth gap. I also headlined the story “Garment firms flee to low-wage Burma”, which made it into print.

So mega-corporations are using their wealth and clout to hold back progress in the fight against poverty, while UNICEF reports that “nearly 8 million children died in 2010 before reaching the age of five – most from pneumonia, diarrhea or birth complications. In urban areas, high concentrations of poverty combine with inadequate services to drive up child mortality.”

To borrow Shimon Peres’ words in the wake of the Toulouse atrocity, “What purpose can this serve?” The obvious purpose is to fill the hypermarkets of the rich countries with cheap “apparel” and other goods, and to fatten the profits of the corporate giants. As for the children who don’t get the medicines they need as a result or, in the longer term, cannot access the education they need to escape the cycle of poverty and misery – well, apparently “we think the price is worth it”.

Don't Get No Respect

By David Simmons

Time Out Hong Kong recently published a very long article on the five multi-billionaires who own the city, and how that happened. It begins, “There was a time when few people in Hong Kong begrudged the city’s property tycoons. Most citizens respected their disproportionate share of luck and the determined way they had taken advantage of the system. Some even saw them as heroes with superlative acumen. But that was then and this is now.”

It adds: “Whatever the reasons, a new, received public wisdom came into being: Hong Kong property developers are evil, cheating, greedy devils.”

The article spells out in depressing detail how this tiny cabal, with the collusion of the city government and – more recently – Beijing control every aspect of life. Their greed is boundless, their manipulation of the system relentless, resulting in the artificial inflation of the costs of housing, food and nearly everything else, financial oppression of the most vulnerable, and stifling of the entrepreneurial spirit and genuine innovation that once brought wealth to ordinary people, and thereby holding back the economy itself. And all for no purpose but to shovel even more money into bank accounts of tycoons who already have more lucre than all the gods of Olympus (before that particular mountain became part of the euro zone).

Yes, well, we know all this; Hong Kong has always been a microcosm, the logical extreme, of unfettered capitalism. What I wanted to read about was how Hongkongers are rising up, in the spirit of Mohamed Bouazizi, against the “greedy devils”.

Alas, not much in the Time Out piece about that. For, we are reminded, “it takes a lot to get a massive crowd of Hongkongers on the streets. Marching with banners down Hennessy Road is one thing, but controlling a symbolic location with, say, 150,000 irate citizens demanding a change in government policy seems to happen only once in a blue moon.

“And yet ...” hmm, and yet ... here it comes: “And yet it could still happen again if the winds change.”

If the winds change? Do they ever?

As a matter of fact they do. Not in Hong Kong, maybe, but at nearly precisely the same time that article was published, thousands of kilometres away in little-known County Laois, Ireland, a deputy sheriff and his police escorts arrived at a home whose owner had missed some payments. Just another repossession, no different from thousands and thousands of them taking place every day across Europe and North America. Except this time, the citizens said no. 

And the deputy and his escorts went away.

There’s nothing new about repossessions. When we want something for which we don’t have enough ready cash, we borrow some from the bank, and agree to pay it back over a certain period of time, plus a little extra called interest for the privilege of having the use of the bank’s cash. If we renege on that agreement, the bank repossesses whatever it was we spent its money on. It’s a pretty good system, actually, and has worked well for all involved for centuries in one form or another.

But in recent years such simple transactions weren’t good enough for the big banks, and they got mixed up in what is known as casino banking, gambling with other people’s (our) money on “complex financial instruments”, and then, when the money ran out, they stole it through subprime mortgages and other devices, and when that ran out too, they just pretended it was there, and in that rare case when a so-called regulator called in the bet, the big banks said, oh, we don’t know where that money went, hope that’s all right. And it is.

So why isn’t it OK for some little working guy to miss a few payments on his house in County Laois? That’s what he and his friends asked the deputy sheriff. In Spain right now, they’re asking very similar questions. In Athens, they’ve pretty much stopped asking questions, and they’re burning the place down. They think that’s a more promising course of action than Mohamed Bouazizi’s, who burned himself down. That jury is still out; Tunisia now has a nominal democracy instead of a dictatorship, while in Greece it’s the other way around.

Like the tycoons upon whom Hong Kong was built, bankers used to command respect. So did priests, and inventors, and composers, and judges, and even policemen, a few politicians, one or two journalists. A lot of the people in all of those categories still do deserve respect, but it seems the rotten apples are getting more plentiful, or at least more rancid. The big banks are run by felons who reward themselves with multimillion-dollar bonuses while sabotaging the very system their institutions were built on. The Catholic Church looks the other way while its priests molest little kids, artists lobby politicians to stifle the Internet lest they lose a few royalty dollars to “intellectual property violations”, as we journalists are paid not to question authority but to bow to it, to collect our paycheques quietly while never offending an advertiser, to stand by meekly as the drumbeat for war rises in yet another cacophonic crescendo.

Meanwhile the rising ranks of unemployed youth ask, why should we listen to you? Why should we obey you? You follow no rules, you pay no penalties, so why should we? Why should we make our mortgage payments on time; you’d only lose the money and pretend you don’t know what happened to it in the rare case that anyone even asks. If someone actually hires us, why should we do their bidding? Those locomotive-plant workers in London, Ontario, lived by the adage of a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, until Caterpillar, one of the most profitable multinationals on the planet, after accepting a king’s ransom in tax incentives, bulldozed them into the unemployment lines. 

The people we respect are those who give more than they take, and in the past such people very often were religious leaders, employers, even bankers. The formula for this has always been clear. Two thousand years ago a wise teacher said, “For everyone to whom much is given, of him shall much be required.”

That’s the law – not one made by a court, or a legislature, or in a sermon on a mount, but a statement of fact, deduced from observation or scientific analysis, like the law of gravity.

Mess with it, and the inevitable consequence is collapse.

So, What’s New?

By David Simmons

The same week that Steve Jobs died, I watched for the first time Inside Job, the Oscar-winning documentary on the systemic corruption that led to the 2008 meltdown. Jobs’ story and that of the organized criminals who control most of the world’s economy seem to stand in stark contrast, yet both are stories of innovation.

The word “innovation”, derived from the Latin verb novare, “to make new”, has a positive connotation. Yet the financial sector has helped perpetuate the global cycle of violence, misery and injustice through highly innovative means such as complex derivatives, bundling of bad loans into so-called assets that later turn toxic, and “creative bookkeeping” – all assisted by politicians too crooked or too stupid to protect the common man and woman from the resulting thievery and concentration of wealth among a tiny minority.

And then there’s Jobs, whose technological marvels redirected the evolution of computing, the driver or facilitator of almost everything modern man does. And yet he too – or at least his Apple Inc – was an integral part of the inside job.

Let’s first debunk the theory embraced by the anti-Apple crusaders that Jobs was not an innovator, since his most successful products were not true inventions but merely cannily marketed versions of existing tools. The same charge could be made against every so-called inventor since the wheel, the spear, the stone hammer, the first fire-maker and the first story-teller (who gave birth to “intellectual property”).

“Invention” is another Latin word derived from a phrase with the sense “bring into being”; throughout history, innovations have been brought about by building on the work of forebears, who built on the work of their forebears.

In fact, such now-commonplace tools as graphical interfaces and computer mice, and the very concept of the personal computer, were either invented or popularized by Apple. The iPod may indeed be “only” a better Walkman, but the operative word is “better”, as the Mercedes S-Class is better than Karl Benz’s 1885 Motorwagen of which it is a direct descendant.

Still, there is a very dark side to the Apple story. The saga of Foxconn and other exploitative enterprises in Asia is well known. Apple’s wealth, now greater than the economies of some entire countries, is built on the backs of what amounts to slave labour, at least by the – admittedly fast-deteriorating – standards of the developed nations that benefit from it. The Jobs cult excuses him of responsibility for this, saying he was at the top of a huge organization, too far away from the sweat and tears of Shenzhen to do anything about it, if he even knew. Such an excuse offered by Signor Francesco Schettino of the late Costa Concordia will likely not take him into calm seas.

But what about the tear stains on the otherwise gleaming aluminum case of the iMac on which I write these words, or the other two Apple devices in my home? For unlike the Jon Corzines and Jamie Dimons and Bernie Madoffs of the financial “industry” (did Al Capone ever call himself an “industrialist”? Probably), Jobs did not simply steal his vast wealth from old ladies’ pension plans; we “consumers” willingly gave it to him.

There is no point fretting about this. Humans are animals, and though we like to think we have evolved far from the jungle, we still prey on those less fortunate than us, and are preyed on by those above us. We will do anything to prolong the survival and enhance the quality of life of ourselves and our families; the migrant workers diving to their deaths off the roof of Foxconn are collateral damage in this process.

So we are trapped in a system of situational ethics, or malleable morality. The ruling elite no longer even pretends to subscribe to the kind of moral code most ordinary working people do, and this trickles down through society, robbing younger generations of their hope for future progress, or even of enjoying the perks their parents did, in a more enlightened and egalitarian age.

Fewer and fewer seem to bother swimming against this tide. I see this every day in my workplace; the newspaper industry, at least in my experience, used to be far more joyful because everyone from the senior editors to the copy runners took pride in their part of the “daily miracle” of publishing the paper. Where I work now, the few of us who still care about quality journalism are frustrated by the majority who don’t.

But then, like most of my colleagues, I’m not an innovator. I’m a consumer of innovations, and their victim – part of the 99%.

Given the legacy of modern innovators, maybe that’s just as well. For as a wise king wrote three or four millennia ago, “There is nothing new under the sun.”

State of the Eulogy

By David Simmons

“America is back,” Barack Obama proclaimed in his State of the Union address on January 24. But it’s only back doing what it does best, starting wars and rumours of wars.

The US president spoke of “the enduring power of our moral example”. Earlier in January, three men who had experienced that moral example first-hand stood together in a joint nose-thumbing at the superpower, the self-proclaimed leader of the free world, bastion of capitalism and democracy. The occasion was the swearing-in of Daniel Ortega to a third term as president of Nicaragua, a tiny country that – led by Ortega’s Sandinistas – was one of the first in the Western Hemisphere since the Cuban revolution to break the shackles of US-client dictatorship and enforced poverty, and paid dearly for its affront with the mining of its harbours and debilitating attacks on its people, its infrastructure and even its schools by the Contra terrorists trained and funded by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Back then, Washington was mostly worried about the spread of Sandinista-style land reform throughout Latin America, cutting into the profits of US corporations and, worse, driving up the price of bananas and incurring the wrath of the American housewife. Nowadays, it’s all about oil, which is where the other two men accompanying Ortega in January come in – Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Ten years ago Chavez, the socialist president of one of the United States’ major oil suppliers, was overthrown in a coup d’état after he tried to bolster government control of the state oil company, PDVSA. Washington immediately applauded the coup and threw its support behind the new pro-US government. Before the George W Bush administration could get the corks out of the celebratory champagne bottles, the new pro-US government had collapsed, and Chavez went on to institute major social reforms and mock Bush in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly. “The devil came here yesterday,” he said. “And it smells of sulphur still today.”

But the US campaign against the nation of the third man on the stage, Ahmadinejad, has been far more ferocious and drawn-out than those against Nicaragua and Venezuela. As with Nicaragua, Cuba and a few others, Iran brought American wrath upon itself by overthrowing a US-backed (and installed to some extent, in partnership with Britain) dictator, the Shah. Foolishly, the new theocracy squandered the support it may otherwise have enjoyed from other nations weary of US hegemony by taking over America’s embassy in Tehran and holding its occupants hostage for more than a year. In retaliation, Washington backed and partly funded one of the bloodiest conflicts the Middle East has ever seen, the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War.

What has happened since in that unhappy arena is well known and need not be dwelt on here; Iran’s mortal enemy Saddam Hussein was helpfully overthrown by the Americans, leaving an unstable but pro-Tehran Shiite regime in charge. As America’s most loyal allies in the Middle East, the Sunni dictatorships in Arabia, wallowed in corruption and Israel continued to soak up billions of dollars in military aid to brutalize the Palestinians, Iran’s influence and terrorist activity intensified.

Today, of course, we have the looming spectre of yet another war in the region justified by the objection of the world’s most militarized and most heavily nuclear-armed nation to Iran’s alleged “weapons of mass destruction”. Washington’s lapdogs in Brussels, in a move bound to worsen their already parlous economic situation, have banned European Union members from buying Iranian oil. The US has also led an attack on the Iranian central bank, pushing the clerics who run the regime even harder against the wall.

“Through the power of our diplomacy,” Obama declared, “a world that was once divided about how to deal with Iran’s nuclear program now stands as one.” Well, except for Russia. And China and its ASEAN client states. And probably India, and possibly Japan and South Korea, the latter two of which depend on Iranian oil and are more concerned about the genuine nuclear threat in North Korea than the imagined one in far-off Iran. And then there’s Turkey, which stands ready to serve as a middleman for Iranian oil flowing into defiant (or simply desperate, like Greece) European states. And such deals, because of the sabotage against the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran, will likely be transacted in gold, yen, maybe yuan – anything but the US dollar and the increasingly irrelevant euro.

The rise of China’s global control is the most important and far-reaching event of our time, but it is not the only consequence of failed US economic, foreign and military policy. Despite the dirty wars of the Reagan era, Ortega, Chavez and people very much like them – not necessarily philosophic soul-mates, but united against servitude to Washington and Wall Street – have prevailed in Central and South America. In East Asia, US-backed strongmen like Suharto, Syngman Rhee and Chiang Kai-Shek are gone, their autocratic regimes replaced by home-grown political systems that, with widely varying sincerity and success, attempt to put their people’s needs first. In North Africa, pro-US tyrants have been replaced by Islamists related in spirit if not (yet) in deed to the fanatic criminals of September 2001.

With all this in mind, Obama’s address, despite his characteristic eloquence, sounded like a eulogy, singing the praises of a corpse. I take no comfort in this. I am a Canadian, defined as an American with long johns, health care and the letter zed. I’ve lived high on the US-led system of fattening the West at the expense of the rest of the world, and I have enjoyed the genuine freedoms that democracy brings, however corrupt it becomes. So I don’t look forward to a world led by the Chinese Communist Party.

The United States of America and we its allies had the power to make things otherwise. We now prepare to reap the whirlwind of our failure to do so.

Thoroughly modern Dragon

By David Simmons

Normally I put no stock in astrology, but a convergence of events, some may say a syzygy, has stirred my interest.

Monday, January 23, is the first day of the Chinese Year of the Dragon, associated with the element water. I was born in a Year of the Dragon that also was associated with the element water.

More important, January 23 is also my wife’s birthday, and she was born in 1964 – also a Year of the Dragon.

Not having thought about any of this before, I started doing some research on Dragons, particularly on what astrologers say about two of us under one roof, which on the face of it sounds pretty incendiary.

According to the US Bridal Guide, “It takes someone with thick skin who is easy-going to be a Dragon’s partner, because, despite their sentimental characters, they can be moody and insensitive. Many people will want to run when the Dragon’s temper is provoked.”

On two Dragons marrying, the Guide adds only: “If you learn to share the spotlight, you can accomplish anything together.”

This “sharing the spotlight” caveat is derived from the Dragon’s reputation as an imperialist. “A symbol of good fortune and sign of intense power, the Oriental Dragon is regarded as a divine beast – the reverse of the malicious monster that Westerners felt necessary to find and slay. In Eastern philosophy, the Dragon is said to be a deliverer of good fortune and a master of authority. Therefore, those people born in Dragon years are to be honoured and respected....

“Dragons are the free spirits of the Zodiac. [Conformity] is a Dragon’s curse. Rules and regulations are made for other people. Restrictions blow out the creative spark that is ready to flame into life. Dragons must be free and uninhibited ....

“Because they are confident, fearless in the face of challenge, they are almost inevitably successful. Dragons usually make it to the top.” (Pause for laughter here.)

“However ... too much enthusiasm can leave them tired and unfulfilled ... Dragons’ generous personalities give them the ability to attract friends, but they can be rather solitary people at heart. A Dragon’s self-sufficiency can mean that he or she has no need for close bonds with other people.”

This description demonstrates both why horoscopes are so popular and why they are nonsense. It walks a tightrope between specificity and vagueness, so we can fall into the net on either side, depending on whether or not we agree this is part of our actual personality. Naturally, we take comfort from the good bits, lending credence to the horoscope, while dismissing the bad stuff as evidence of how it misses the mark.

To its credit, this particular guide doesn’t pull many punches on the Dragon’s flaws: “Dragons are egotistical and love to be the centre of attention. Modesty is not one of his assets. Add to that the Dragon temper and you have a bossy, dominating and authoritative being. They hate solicited advice and can be hopelessly tactless and insensitive to their lovers.”

Nasty stuff. Ah, but there’s hope – my element is water, remember. “Water has a calming effect on the Dragon’s fearless temperament. Water allows the Dragon to redirect [his] enthusiasm, and makes him more perceptive of others. These Dragons are better equipped to take a step back to re-evaluate a situation because they understand the art of patience and do not desire the spotlight like other Dragons. Therefore, they make smart decisions and are able to see eye-to-eye with other people. However [drat, always a ‘however] their actions can go wrong if they do not research or if they do not finish one project before starting another.”

Of further intrigue is the attempt to mix Eastern and Western astrology, resulting in my case in the “Leonine Dragon”. According to the Guide, “The Lion is King of the Western zodiac and the Dragon is the sign of the Emperor. Leo Dragons have an innate sense of royalty; thus they are born leaders. They are flashy and like to show off, but their kindness and zest for life make them fascinating.”

Well, let’s face it, this Leo Dragon has no “innate sense of royalty”. A leader I am not, and no one is easier to elbow out of a queue.

The fascination modern educated people have with astrology is, like the description of Earth itself in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “mostly harmless”. It’s fun but nearly no one takes it to the bank.

This was not so in ancient times, or even today in primitive societies. Modern skepticism dismisses the possibility of the “arrangement” of stars and planets zillions of light-years away as viewed from our tiny planet having any effect on any individual. But the night sky was and is something of great wonder, and a source of mysticism, even religion.

Urban humans have little concept of this wonder, as our cities pollute the sky with light and smoke. Yet the brilliance of the night sky that we see when we make a rare foray into the countryside, especially a desert, was a constant in the lives of our ancestors.

Many of us have been awed by such phenomena as meteors and aurorae. Once when I was on a flight across the Pacific, the pilot dimmed the cabin lights so we could watch a comet soaring majestically through the sky.

But even without these embellishments, a clear night is a beautiful and fascinating display. I know little astronomy and can locate and identify only the Big and Little Dippers (and consequently Polaris, which has come in handy once or twice) and Orion. Yet I vividly remember camping out in the middle of the Arabian Desert, lying on top of a Chevrolet Suburban (to avoid camel spiders) as that cosmic river, the Milky Way, seemed close enough to touch, until its silent flow carried me into sleep. Imagine, then, how that sky affected the ancients who saw just as vividly lions and dragons, and reached out for their power and guidance in what was often a frightening and dangerous world.

Today our fascination with the cosmos, though more reality-based perhaps, is no less overwhelming. Now we know that those tiny points of light are in fact gigantic balls of nuclear fire, and that there are even more wondrous objects out there that we can’t even see, let alone fully understand. In fact starlight itself is in most cases only a glimmer of a time before we and possibly even our planet were born, having taken thousands of years to reach us; the stars we “see” may even have died long ago.

Another mixed blessing of our modern age, the Internet, debunked at least part of the syzygy I mentioned in the lede, and which by this time you will have looked up if I remembered to put in the link. A little research revealed that my wife is in fact not a fellow Dragon but a Rabbit. Though 1964 (or 2507 according to the Thai calendar) was a Year of the Dragon, the Lunar New Year was actually in February, a couple of weeks after her birth. In any case I think the animal year traditionally starts in mid-February, some time after New Year’s Day, which I believe is on the first new moon after the winter solstice.

But it doesn’t really matter; neither of us has ever been particularly starry-eyed, and our failure over the years to gain much fluency in each other’s languages has mitigated occasional urges for fiery battles. So I close with the hope that the Year of the Dragon will be a happy one for anyone who read down this far, and even for those who didn’t.