Politics

The Paved Road to Progress

Jeremy Gaines

In the late afternoon, the sun is low, and without the earlier glare things are now easier to see without my eyeballs scorching and bunching up. From the car I spot a line of women and girls queuing at a borehole under some trees, each of them with a yellow plastic canister. They are patiently waiting to take their turns in getting water for the evening.

Here in the Ethiopian countryside, as in other African countries, the women seem to be the beasts of burden. Like those I have seen carrying baskets, wicker panniers, bales of fodder, stacks of wood, claypots or babies on their backs. Most of them have no shoes. Over the last hundred kilometres the number I have seen walking solitarily or in twos or threes, single file, along the road, strap over their head or a rope across their upper chests to keep the load in place, has exceeded anything else. One long procession of women at work. Like the equally endless lines of eucalyptus trees, sucking the water from the ground and denying the short conifers and palms the same. Without trees, no life. Without water no life.

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An Alternative for Germany

Jeremy Gaines

There was a time when the Greens were called the Alternatives in Germany. But now there is an alternative to the alternatives that, what a great stroke of imaginativeness, calls itself the “Alternative for Germany”, the AfD. So, unless it’s like two negatives making a positive, meaning that the new alternative is only the opposite of the green alternatives and therefore re-Establishment, and therefore nothing new, it bears trying to find out what the alternative is. To paint things in the right colors: The Greens were an alternative in left field. Remember, green = yellow and blue, the colors the German Liberals used to be made of. Well, the Liberals are of course now completely blue, as they have disappeared. Possibly, because they were so yellow and insisted on proclaiming the ‘fun society’ instead of politics). Leaving the parliamentary majority with the centrist Blacks (conservatives) and weak reds (Social Democrats). One might be forgiven guessing the alternative now must be on the right, to the right of the right – which, if one went full circle would be back on the Left. Yes, this being alternative thing can be quite confusing.

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The Self-Fulfilling Prophets

Jeremy Gaines Leave a comment

It was a grand afternoon in the early fall of 1991, the air crispening with incoming autumn, the sun sharply bright on Pennsylvania Ave., when Col, Condy, Dick, Don and Paul all sat down for tea in one of the innumerable wooden-paneled offices with the thick leather club chairs and old-worldly feel with which we are so familiar from the West Wing and Houses of Cards delivered to our own living rooms. This particular office boasts ottomans, befitting the occasion. As invited for the afternoon chinwag were Bernie and Sam, helicoptered in for the occasion from Boston and Princeton respectively. It fell to Condy as the spring chick among the poker-faced men of steel to play mother and pour out the best first flush from the Turkish Black Sea into the wafer-tin cups of china with their golden handles and rims. Dick grabbed the silver tongs, added three sugar cubes, took a ginger biscuit in his Texan paw and dunked it in the syrupy brew, before opening proceedings. In so doing, he simply set the agenda for the next two decades: “Colin may be my senior, but since I sent out the invites, let me be so presumptuous and say why we’re gathered here today. Hardly a surprise, but in my opinion it’s a matter of our national security, of how we defend our real interests in the world. And of course it’s a matter of how we don’t get ourselves in the same position as the peanut-shucker did in Iran. We’ve paid out billions since 1980 on stabilizing Saddam and whittling away at the muftis’ power; we’re now spared further spending on busting any more Russian balls in Europe, so it’s high time to think what we need to next. And I’ve invited you two distinguished professors here because I’m fed up of opening the paper and reading the crap that RAND’s little fake-Jap gushes on the end of history. Just because we won the one war we shouldn’t be overlooking the next one. That’s greenhorn academics for you. Not like you guys. So…”

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Post-mortem

Jeremy Gaines

for Alain

Chronologically and as regards popularity, first came post-modernism. Which is apposite, for it heralded a whole splat of ‘post’-movements that saw or see themselves as representative of contemporary society, which is, after all, the affluent society. Ever since the 1970s, that society has been typified by the shift out of the traditional mode of production that revolved around heavy industry, into what many have called a “post-industrial” economy. That was the first ‘post’ and it marked a social transition, as henceforth the service sector started to play an ever larger role – and industrial production was something done elsewhere. The term ‘post-industrial’ society is a bit of a misnomer, as here the ‘post’ actually means that post has to be sent to other parts of the world with the data for the industrial production there, for example in China.

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