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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
September 21, 2008
Get on with it
When a newspaper so characteristically restrained as the Financial Times, of London, runs headlines like, “Panic grips credit markets,” we can be sure that madness is in the air.It has been a week of anxiety on many levels. Those who, like me, make it their business to follow world news, will have noticed more than the credit markets going wild. We have Russians proposing to declare sovereignty over most of the Arctic Ocean, and sending nuclear bombers to Venezuela to revive Cold War brinksmanship; Pakistani troops ordered to fire on our allied soldiers in Afghanistan if they cross the border in hot pursuit; a fresh embassy bombing in Yemen, and other signs of an Al Qaeda revival throughout the Arabian region; more threats of Armageddon from Iran; North Korea passing again beyond the pale. At the heart of the free world, we have an American election campaign, in which standards of civility have been abandoned by both camps; and two huge, national angry factions that cannot abide one another. It is among the nastiest elections I have ever seen. And this is not to mention the background noise, of issues like “global warming.” To my mind the scares have already been obviated by hard evidence of a planetary cooling trend (alas itself destructive, should it continue), but the fallout from belief in global warming has become substantial and worrying. In the past week we read, for instance, a report in the U.K. (Prof. Ian Fells et al.) suggesting plausibly that Britain’s electrical power infrastructure is approaching collapse from government hesitation to renew it. So-called “renewable” energy sources are sweet to think about, but cannot possibly supply the volume of affordable raw power needed to sustain the economy on which we depend for our livelihoods, and are anyway not available on short notice. In this, Britain is perhaps a typical Western country. Everywhere governments are losing their will to do things that are necessary, for fear of ideological flak. We need only look at the chaos in Texas, from Hurricane Ike, to understand what may happen throughout the West as the chickens of “global warming” come home to roost. The most sophisticated communications and computer systems go down with the power, and many other things besides. Coastal Texas is proving uninhabitable through the near future -- and the want of electricity from a storm-trashed infrastructure is the biggest single cause. For in order to fix anything, we need power. Imagine what happens when the power runs short, and there are years to wait before the infrastructure can be renewed. People know this on one level, deny it on another. We have trouble heaped up, but we have had heaps of trouble before. Speaking to a Canadian banker this last week -- a wonderfully sober woman -- I was pleased to be reminded that panic can be contained. Canada herself is often thought to be unexciting, but it is the unexcitable quality that still feeds my pride in this country. The lady was complaining about the way the media had mixed apples and oranges in reporting the financial “meltdown.” She was contemptuous of the panic, while allowing that panic in itself can wreak terrible damage. Our Canadian banks are solid -- yet she hears questions, even from financial reporters who ought to know better, showing no understanding of where the sub-prime-mortgage-inspired chaos begins and ends. Not Canada alone, but the English-speaking peoples flourished through the course of the last few centuries from a cultural inability to be carried away. We recall the wartime accounts of the British under aerial attack, getting up each morning to go calmly about the business of clearing the latest mess. We recall the way in which our own parents and grandparents stolidly proceeded through the Great Depression. And we may wonder, practically, if the same qualities are still in us -- or if, rather, we have lost our sang-froid. Politicians cannot help us when times get very rough. The people themselves must be equal to the challenge. We must be ready to do our part, without whining; without indulging self-pity, or engaging in the excitable sport of choosing scapegoats. The attitude must be that of my admired banker friend: “This has happened. We must deal with it.” And deal with it in the knowledge that there are no more “quick fixes” now, than there ever were. It is the belief in quick fixes that created the problems. The world, to those who have any wisdom, is a place that repays diligent labour, when it gives any repayment at all; and routinely punishes those who shirk -- together with everyone around them. For sure, people on both Left and Right have been idiots. I am beginning to think, for instance, that there is some truth in the allegation that “free market fundamentalism” has played an important part in the financial crisis, just as “environmental fundamentalism” has seeded the looming energy crisis. But it doesn’t matter, once the crisis is upon us. Our job is to pick up the pieces, and move on. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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