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COMMENTARY
July 9, 2008
G-whiz
You just have to laugh: when leaders of the G8, meeting in Hokkaido to solve the world food crisis, step off the plane to tuck into a six-course “working lunch,” followed by dinner with 18 dishes in eight courses with five wines. (I must rely on press reports, having failed to Google the menus.)Prime Minister Brown of Britain was fresh from telling his fellow nationals, and indeed all the earthlings, to “Stop wasting food!” One wonders if he, in particular, wasted any. Did he -- did George Bush, did “Harpo” -- leave any white asparagus on their plates? Ignore their caviar, for instance? Sniff at the truffle soup? Did they finish the champagne? The burgundy? The sake? And if so, were they standing afterwards, or had they to be carried back to their rooms? Politicians should be weighed before and after each pronouncement on the world food crisis. Perhaps they surreptitiously shovelled some of their leftovers into a bento box, and had it sent over to the poor African dictators, who had come to the G8 with their list of aid demands, but weren’t invited to the first-world dinner. One pictures them round the corner, wolfing down their hakata ramen, their onions and bean sprouts, with the local proles. Then the courier arrives with the crab bisque. There is little, even in the wonderland of international power politics, quite as fatuous as the G8, when the world’s leaders meet, as they have been doing since 1973, to solve everyone’s domestic problems in an informal, results-oriented atmosphere. Thirty-five years later, they’re still dealing with the oil crisis. They can create problems, they can compound problems, they can expand problems, and they can, through the extraordinary “outreach” of their bureaucracies, systematically undermine the people’s efforts to cope with these problems -- but they cannot solve anything. The fault lies in an “imperfect” nature, which does not respond to the fairy-weave of the politician’s wand, or to the incantations of the tribal shaman for that matter. By toil alone is the harvest realized; by toil, the bread is baked; by toil is it bought and sold. Governments can appropriate wealth, but the notion that they can somehow create it, or even reapportion it with any degree of foresight, is one of the great stupid ideas. Journalists -- attracted to power as the moth to the flame -- are especially susceptible to the illusion that politicians have the ability to fix things; and to the converse, equally superstitious idea, that their failure to fix connotes a bad will. Should there be drought, the shaman commands rain. But it is not his fault if the rain does not fall. He surely wants it to fall. Of course, eventually the rain does fall, whenupon the shaman takes the credit. But until it does, he is put to the trouble of identifying and demonizing all the mysterious forces that subvert the efficacy of his spells; and to finding the scapegoats who must atone for the rain’s failure. And if the rain takes a long time to fall, there must necessarily be a lot of scapegoats. For it’s no life being an ex-shaman. Getting back to Toyako, Hokkaido -- the pretty little town now trampled under vast G8 entourages, plus those of 15 other sovereign nations, 10 major international organizations, and the usual welter of NGOs -- come to feed at the great portable trough, which dispenses billions. In addition to the world food crisis, and the world oil crisis, our astral lords are tackling the perpetual African crisis, and most urgently, the imaginary global warming crisis -- which, unlike the real crises, seems to offer unlimited scope for the expansion of government bureaucracy -- which will in turn enhance the food, oil, and African crises. Notwithstanding, the climate crisis is already suffering its own crisis, as the planet’s average temperature continues to ignore predictions and fall, and the race is on to get new bureaucracies in place before the credibility of “global warming” itself collapses irretrievably. Indeed, the apparatchiks were up all Monday night drafting another absolutely meaningless promise, to cut the world’s carbon emissions in half by 2050 -- without even the pretense of explaining who cuts what. Should my reader live another 42 years, will he remember what was done for him in 2008? (Think back to what happened in 1966 -- the year of the first Star Trek episode -- to get your answer.) Suppose they held a G8 summit and nobody came? Suppose, more reasonably, even one global leader -- Stephen Harper of Canada for instance -- called the bluff, and refused to attend, because it was a terrible waste of time, money, and carbon fuels. Or suppose some other dutifully attended, but told the truth: “I came to bask in the klieg lights. And for the sushi. And so that my wife could get a really good look at the latest Mrs Sarkozy.”rn David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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