My oracular faculties are such that I generally limit my opinions to things that are happening now or which have happened already. The result is that I am often blindsided by enormous events that come as a complete surprise to me.
Which is the more difficult challenge: seeing things coming in advance, or knowing that existing things are about to be eliminated?
For an example of the second challenge, I never expected to live to see the collapse of the Soviet Union in my lifetime. I knew that the day would come, but I was ball-parking the date at something like fifty to one hundred years after the actual event. It happened quickly too, when it happened.
Often the things that are coming are masked by larger, seemingly more important events. For example...
Going to the moon was nice, but the real surprise there was the miniaturization of all electronic devices, most notably computers. Up through the 1950s, computers were as big as houses, shrinking only to the size of cargo-vans by the early 1960s. It's been a rapid, amazing ride since then. I'll spare you the details, because they are too squalid. The whole thing has become an unbelievable waste of potential, both machine potential and human potential. All of us now have a computer in our pockets that serves as a vast library of facts and history, a device enabling instant, worldwide communication, and apps for the extent of which you must ask a younger person for an explanation. People use them mostly for exchanging obscure messages containing only photographs and/ or emojis, listening to music, and watching brief, weird videos that are intended to be entertaining.
That's a chain of events that began with JFK's “going to the moon” speech, and has left us in our present decadent situation, culturally and politically.
My first few commercial airplane rides were on equipment that had been designed and prototyped during World War II, driven by propellers, which were powered by piston engines that had been on the drawing boards since before World War II. Ah, the comforting hum of four Pratt and Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp engines on a Douglas DC-6. The thrill of trusting your life to four Wright R-3350-23 Duplex Cyclone radials on a Lockheed Constellation! It was easy to see the jets coming. Jets quickly replaced all of those old relics by about 1960. The only really shocking thing about that bit of progress is that it now takes twice as long to get from Los Angeles to New York as it did in 1970. Efficiency, you know, and deregulation. Now you must stop once or twice, get off the plane, and wait between two and four hours to catch another plane. And people hardly complain at all! That's the amazing bit. We really are like cattle. Aim us at some food and water when we need it, and tell us where to go. Moooooo!
The changes are coming ever faster and more furiously.
RIP, Globalization
I really did not see the end of the fifty-year trend of globalization coming. Sixty years ago, if you were watching TV in America, it was on an Admiral TV, or a Sylvania TV, or a Zenith TV. If you were watching TV in Germany, you were watching a Blaupunkt TV, or a Grundig TV. Cars, the same. Also refrigerators, stoves, washing machines, etc. All domestically produced, everywhere. Then, at first, more things were coming from Japan, and by now, everything is made in China. My Panasonic refrigerator and washing machine, and my Mitsubishi air-conditioners, were all made in China. This, in spite of the fact that both companies are Japanese.
All of that was working very well for everybody there for a long time. America, and everywhere else, was getting good products at good prices (made in China), the Chinese were employing all of their available workers, the foreign companies were enjoying the cheap Chinese labor. It was great. Most of the shoes in the world are now made in China or one of a few smaller countries where labor is cheap. Same with shirts, pants, underwear, everything. It's hard to find anything in an American Walmart that was made in America. Your smart phone contains sub-assemblies and raw materials from multiple countries. Your new car carries a famous old British name, but it was designed in Switzerland and made in a factory in Brazil that is owned by a Korean company. All of this was making most countries, most corporations, and many individuals unspeakably rich, and the average Joe didn't worry about it as long as the big-screen TVs remained cheap and very, very nice.
Then, of course, everyone had to go and fuck it up.
China is now leading the march away from globalization. Oh, for the good old days of that wonderful version of Chinese communism driven by the vision of men like Dung Xiaoping, and Cho En Lai. Those men, and others that followed them for twenty or thirty years, lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty and connected China to the entire world through commerce. They also, very hush-hush, used soft-power to expand China's influence around the world and bind developing countries to China by the careful application of debt. They were quietly on their way to taking over the entire world.
They were not angels, those old Commies, but look around! There are no angels, and there never have been any angels! The game is, of course, self-interest. The people that we remember as great heroes are those leaders who applied self-interest in ways that raised no dust and got no one killed!
The new Chinese leaders prefer to shoulder their way to the center of the room and shit on the carpet. They are not making any friends with this approach. If total control of every citizen, at all times, requires the country going it alone in the world, then fuck globalization. Let's start a war!
And Russia? Oye, vey ist mir!
I remember as a boy seeing articles about the USSR in magazines like Life, Look, and the National Geographic. I remember feeling great sympathy for the average people walking down the streets of Moscow, or Novosibirsk or something, wearing shitty clothes, never smiling or looking around, just grinding out their long walk to somewhere, wearing grim expressions and looking at their feet. When I became a teenager, I read more about the Russian people. I discovered that with their family and friends, behind closed doors, they were actually quite animated and friendly. I read jokes about the Soviets, Russian jokes, written by Russians and intended for the Russian audience, and in the jokes I discovered real respect for the Russian people and the deep hope that their burden would be lifted someday. So imagine my joy at the demise of the USSR!
You could see it, too, in the photos of Russian people. They were in the streets, laughing and hugging each other. They seemed to feel a great sense of relief. That feeling did not last very long. By now, they are back under the heel of a new brand of authoritarian bullshit. New bottles; old wine. Their smiles are fading.
Russia is also choosing to disconnect itself from the web of commercial interaction that was globalization. This is especially puzzling, because Russia has nothing to sell but natural resources, and nowhere to sell it but elsewhere. Oh, they also sell weapons, also “elsewhere.” They are poster-children for globalization, so what do they do? Piss off the entire world. They've already started their war.
War is a lot like the old “Cinnamon Challenge” that made the rounds on social media a few years ago. The rules are simple: just eat a heaping teaspoon of powdered cinnamon and successfully swallow it. Videos of the resulting eruptions and screams became viral on YouTube. There was general laughter, and mockery of those who had attempted it. War, like the Cinnamon Challenge, looks easy enough in advance, but turns wildly to the dark side of experience almost immediately.
And Now What?
I admitted at the outset that I am no oracle. My crystal ball is permanently in the shop. If, as seems possible, both China and Russia opt for hegemonic power in their immediate areas, we could see the rise of more local groups forming either alliances or areas of coercive exploitation. What happens to India, Brazil, Turkiye, and Iran? Can Europe keep itself together and remain democratic? Cracks are forming there. As usual, America is well placed geographically to face these new challenges.
It was Bismark that said, back in the 1880s or so, that “America is geographically beloved of God. It is surrounded on the north and south by large, weak countries, and on the east and the west by fish.”
In the words of the highly underrated social observer, Rodney King, “why can't we all just get along?”
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