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COMMENTARY
September 21, 2011
Observer status
Welcome to the autumn. The equinox is not until Friday, so that we still have a slight plurality of light, but there are meteorological signs of the darkling season."Afflicted autumn and adored, you die when hurricanes batter the roses," etc. If the reader will indulge me another moment, I should like to impart more of Donald Revell's magnificent translation of Guillaume Apollinaire's sublime autumnal ode, "as in the deepest sky" the poet discerns the hawks gliding, "over naiads and over dwarfs who never loved." "In distant woodlands, rutting deer have roared. ... "How much I love o season your clamour. The apples falling to the earth; the wind and forest weeping their tears in autumn leaf by leaf. The leaves, trampled; a train, passing; life, disposed of." A reminder that, while politics can be fun, they are also a distraction from the important tasks in life, such as botanical illustration and singing madrigals. A reminder that, whatever we vote or do, our generation will be remembered for its sanctities and sacrifices, and its works of art. (Because, even in this world, time rescues beauty from the sludge.) And that, for all our immense consumption, our generation is on track to be much less memorable than, say, Giotto's, or Petrarch's. * Have you noticed that whenever U.S. President Barack Obama has something to say about the economy, the Dow Jones skids a few hundred points? Of course, there are plenty of other economic indicators, pointed toward the pits, so his (dwindling) allies may supply any number of excuses. According to the International Monetary Fund (and what do they know?) it's not just America. The whole western world is in for "weak growth" through 2012, with foreseeable chances of catastrophe. They have sharply lowered their growth projections for about 20 western countries, but continue to hope for some others, such as China, India, and Brazil. (Generally speaking, what's going down is here, and what's coming up is elsewhere.) In the middle of a week in which a genuine international crisis is unfolding, around Israel/Palestine, portending war, western attention has drifted, and in particular, the attention of the U.S. But the U.S. is (or was) the only hyperpower we have (or had), and the absence of American policing is apparent in almost every development on the world stage. At a moment when the Palestinian Authority is about to declare complete sovereignty at the United Nations - a trigger if ever one was - the U.S. has effectively shrunk to observer status. (And, meanwhile, Yemen and other states, from Libya to Pakistan, are Somalifying.) So far as I see, this is going to get worse. My facetious allusion to Obama's "jobs act" above - characterized by his opposition as, tax the job creators and play at class war - was to some point. Not only is the U.S. toying with significant further acts of economic self-immolation. More immediately, it is descending into a season of political confrontation, the like of which we, the living, have not before seen. The election of 2012 promises to be a horror: a pyrrhic clash between two parties that can acknowledge almost nothing in common. And in Europe, there is no bottom to the debt crisis. The bankruptcy of Greece and other countries will, almost certainly, eat not only the euro (upon which all the continent's economic arrangements now depend), but also destroy every government that attempts to deal with it. The politicians are behaving like frightened children, and when one like Angela Merkel tries to be adult, she is quickly taken down. On both sides of the Atlantic we endure the death throes of Nanny State. As Charles Krauthammer patiently explained Friday, yes, social security was a Ponzi scheme, which only worked because it was mandatory; so that now it is collapsing from constant expansion in the face of demographic realities. He noted, that when Roosevelt's scheme began, in 1940, there were 160 wage earners for every senior receiving benefit. Today there are three. Again, my interest is not in the demography. (It may be destiny, but all trends are reversible.) Rather, I am interested in the immediate fallout, as the vast flocks of passenger pigeons come home to roost. And as I have myself explained in this space, passim: the first parts of the U.S. government to be slashed, as almost every other western government, will be defence and agencies of public order. Which is to say, the truly essential functions of national governments. And this because the outcry against the slashing of entitlements is so much louder; and elected politicians respond chiefly to noise. We the people, just or unjust, are also reduced to a kind of observer status as this darkness encroaches. But let us look at the bright side. It is never too late to take up watercolour, or singing in choirs. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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