In simple terms...

We invented parliamentary democracy and never has the need been greater for us to show the world how it can and must operate. 

The urgency is compounded by the fact that populist movements which function as if their politicians were delegates not representatives are springing up everywhere and the technocratic un-charisma of the EU confuses people into thinking that British political values are somehow best served by Brexit.

And the immediate problem is that parliament not only needs to act, it needs to articulate why it is acting in a way that the divided nation can digest. A lack of obvious leadership is very much part of this crisis.

The 'Bad Friday' Agreement?

As I understand it, the Good Friday Agreement stipulated that there would be no border between the Republic and the Province and that even those who were deeply opposed to the concept of a united Ireland could apply to the government south of the border for a passport - as they are now doing so in droves.

What if a similar agreement was set up between EU-independent UK and a UK-independent Scotland? 

We could call it the Bad Friday agreement in honour of how many of us felt on the 24th. 

Against our will

If, instead of a referendum, the government had put up a suitably idiot-proof website inviting anyone who wished to give up their EU citizenship to use an online form to do so, how many of the dimwits who voted Leave on the 23rd would have taken them up on the offer?

The two answers on last week’s referendum voting slip - Leave and Remain - were surely qualitatively different from a legal perspective.

One involved the possibility of voluntarily surrendering one’s citizenship, the other involved the possibility of having it taken away AGAINST one’s will, in effect by force. (Something for which there are few precedents.) 

The 'will' of the people on each side of this debate was never going to be something you could express as two portions of a pie-chart. 

The Scots clearly get this, as do many ex-pats who were not even given the chance to participate in this farcical plebiscite. 

The Scottish government considers that the Remain majority north of the border gives their argument particular moral force, but in fact every member of the 48% minority has it as well, and they also have a strength in numbers beyond existing geopolitical boundaries. 

Angry minority

The other obvious difference between the 52% and the 48% is that many of the latter are now angrier (and getting steadily more so) about being dragged out of the EU than many of the 52% ever were about being part of it before the referendum was called. The political ramifications of this are significant. It does not take an angry majority of 50.1% to upset an entire political system.

Friends, Britons Countrymen...

BoJo is not quite the man of principle that Shakespeare made Marcus Junius Brutus out to be, but he was similarly drawn into an existing conspiracy to give it wider appeal and a modicum of intellectual respectability.

Brutus failed to capitalise on what he saw a necessary act of political carnage, and Boris may now be on a similar trajectory.

Perhaps what the UK now needs is its own Marcus Antonius to show up at the funeral of Britiain's economic future and remind everyone there that we did once consider it valuable, and that those who did it in should be driven out forthwith. 

When inaction is the gutsy option...

Any national leader worth the name (and who has read his or her Machiavelli) will know that Parliament can and should find a way to ignore the result of this referendum, because most of the Brexiters are too old to come out on the street and protest.

Dead cat bounce...

Or perhaps all we've done is have a sneak peek inside the box, and will now shut the lid in the hope that the wave function will somehow un-collapse?

Schrödinger's Brexit

We had to open the box to find out that the cat was dead...

Sorry Nigel...

It now appears that Thursday's referendum wasn't about EU membership after all. More than 14m people scratched a mark on a piece of paper in a historical bit of direct democracy that was actually about...

1) An unofficial Tory party leadership contest

2) An unofficial independence referendum for provincial England (and the place next door with Gareth Bale and lots of sheep)

3) A protest against government cuts


4) Er...Muslims.

So we don't need to trigger Article 50 at all, because it's surely not relevant to any of the above.

(PS: I forgot to mention the NHS. Somehow it's ALWAYS about the bloody NHS.)

The Brexiters

One can look at the age profile of LEAVE voters optimistically, but mortality won't solve this problem any time soon. 

There's a demographic within our society that the system doesn't really need, and it should be basically self-sustaining for a while yet. 

And they are quite probably going to be harder to re-integrate than those marginalised children of immigrants who run off to join ISIS, and possibly also bigger threat to our political culture in the long run. 

How did we get here? 

When industrialisation first started delivering the good and the bad things we habitually associate it with, the ignorant were not such a headache. Peasants could be converted into factory workers; some even provided with a basic education and formed into the newspaper-reading sort. 

Pan out a bit and one could see that the system depended on slavery and colonial exploitation, but this was less visible to the workers beavering away within the nation state and they felt proud of their role in it. When the empire came to and end, they helped create a new kind of state which they could be even prouder of, because it promised to care for them. 

These days our increasingly globalised version of capitalism is coming to depend primarily  - in the developed world at least - on a base of what a friend of mine likes to call 'knowledge workers'. It no longer has the same economic incentive to care for the relatively uneducated. 

This is not a society in which the knowledge-challenged will ever be able to feel comfortable. Most of the jobs they used to do are being outsourced abroad or in-sourced to rapidly incoming foreigners...some of which are not even ignorant, just highly motivated. Capital and commodities now move freely and humanity wants to as well. 

Yesterday's vote just invalidated the deal Cameron did with his European peers on free movement within the EU. Renegotiating our relationship with the single market could take several years and in the meantime an immigration free-for-all is likely as the LEAVE campaign(s) made, albeit vague, commitments to preserve the status of the UK's EU residents before the drawbridge is finally pulled up. And a collapsed Pound makes our island additionally attractive to Johnny Foreigner in all his most bargain basement manifestations. Not quite what the (comparatively) ignorant were voting for. 

Many clearly hanker nostalgically after the moment around the middle of the last century when their collective sense of pride and involvement was at its apogee: when darker people knew their place, even if they had been granted indepedence and a new role in the Commonwealth. They'd surely love to turn the clock back. But our societies march on, albeit with them very much on board still as a dangerous, potential pathogen. 

England and Wales in particular, minus perhaps London which may eventually break away, look set to become a sort of offshore floating sanctuary for the white van clan. 

The Labour Party in Britain has been trying to compassion them into submission - If only we can show we still care, they won't smash the whole place up out of frustration. 

But take a look what's happening across the Atlantic where the compassion approach ran out of steam a generation or so ago. 

The Right's approach had been to take this manipulable mass at face value and co-opt them into a political culture which barefacedly involved selling turkeys on the idea that, to borrow from Monty Python, it's Christmas every day in heaven.  

But suddently Christmas wasn't so great and the sudden fissures in this cosy arrangement were exploited by populists - those who would make the heavenly Christmas great again, for turkeys. 

The ignorant have twigged that the Right considers them their perennial dupes, but still appear to find this preferable to the attitude of many of those courting them on the Left who can barely disguise the multiple ways that they find the modern proletariat depressingly repulsive. 

This is in part because, from the perspective of leftist intellectual nostalgia, this current demographic is no match for the generation that they seem to model themselves on. Those that built the NHS are disappearing fast and being steadily replaced by those that just moan and gripe about it. (Those that won the World Cup in '66...)

And for every person who has genuinely experienced hardship as a result of undefunded and over-demanded services there are surely several who just adopt the rhetoric that is presented to them in the media-sphere to mask their own xenophobia and all round annoyance with the direction the new world order is taking. 

Most seem to long for a time and a place that they never experienced directly, when those born into lower cultural conditions strove, often successfully, to transcend these native limitations and remake the world according to a positive set of open-minded and collective values. 

It might not have really ever existed outside of some sort of class memory, and at this moment in history seems beyond the capabilities of closed-minded low-brows to re-constitute. 

Winsome / Losesome

Thanks to the tireless work of cross channel cameramen not only do we have a sense of which European nations have the most winsome female fans, we can also appreciate which ones have brought the greatest number of male fans unable to grasp the difference between the lens that is capturing them and the screen where their image appears...

A free pass in the blame game...

Let's face it, rarely do British politicians have such a clearcut opportuity for dodging responsibility for a recession as this Brexit now presents them with.

Boris even (sort of) apologised in advance for the coming downturn, but must have sensed too that a sizeable part of the blame could eventually be shifted onto white van man...and the heat thus taken off the bankers, hedge fund managers, property speculators and the rest of the usual suspects. 

Better still if the economic pain can be blamed on a further contraction in the Eurozone, as most Brexiters won't immediately twig that that would be their fault too. 

While there may be a practical argument for a government by leading independence-fantasists after Article 50 is invoked, the Tories could further benefit from this unique hand-washing opportunity by electing someone like Theresa May as their new leader...

The developing YOUR fault, not our fault positioning should be fun to follow...

Outcomes

Ignorance and stupidity are not simply the cause of bad political outcomes, they are part of them - this is a dynamic, self-reinforcing process.

Brexit

Could it happen? It’s a bit like asking if the Donald might be America’s next President. Logic, common sense, human decency etc. surely dictate that it it couldn’t, and shouldn’t, but at this particular moment in the history of western capitalism, it just might. 

The polls currently suggest a three point lead for the LEAVErs. It’s not clear how seriously these should be taken three weeks before the referendum. 

It is clear however that voting intentions are starkly split along generational lines. The young tend to want to remain and the ageing and aged, by and large, want out. 

There’s no sign as yet that the population as a whole is as engaged as Scotland was. Whichever campaign is better at tempering voter apathy will have a serious advantage. 

What will probably happen is that many will enjoy the thrill of change for change’s sake right up to the final days, when fear of it will abruptly kick back in and the status quo will seemingly survive, almost miraculously; by 52%-48% in all probability. 

The professional chatterers need a drama, preferably a very tense one, and so one can expect that the polls funded by major media players will point to a knife-edge conclusion right up to the 23rd. The financial markets will lurch this way and that as the journos gleefully pull their strings. 

From a speculative investor’s perspective there are probably more gains and losses to be made this month either side of the referendum than at any other stage of 2016. Consequently much of the relevant ‘news’ output at this time will be informed by reprehensibly cynical motives. 

My own generation could be said to sit roughly on the dividing line here (when not actually on the fence!). We can see how things are going and it is frankly very hard to keep one’s glass half full. What we once imagined the EU might become has been subverted by the technocratic, democracy-diminishing ‘new world order’ and when we talk of reforming it from within, we surely know that this is probably little short of a pious platitude. But the young at least have that (occasionally) adorable illusion that they have it in their power to make the world a better place. 

Listening to my old friends talking about London, about what it appears to have become and is becoming ever more so with each passing day,  I can sympathise with their frustration and sense of alienation from a city they once believed their own. The UK's capital has become the ultimate playground of the globalised world, and whether you are a Russian oligarch, a Bulgarian barista or a Middle Eastern refugee, you will feel the gravitational pull of the great people magnet. Longer term inmates feel that the migrants, rich and poor, come to chew the place up, spit it out and then move on somewhere else. 

I get to go back once or twice a year and each time feel more and more like a rather detached tourist, though there are still some startling interludes when I am thrilled and repelled in equal measure. 

I’m not sure how I’d feel about living there now. The recent passing of my mother has further amplified the sense of disconnection. Out in the country the enfeebled fantasy of ‘middle England’ is easier to hold up, and it is of course in these greener patches that UKIP finds many of its recruits. 

Only yesterday I was talking to my father about the state of Marks & Spencer as a business - for generations perhaps the most iconic retail presence on the British high street. Their clothing range, that for so long offered unique value to consumers based on low rents and quality local manufacturers, cannot now compete with businesses like Primark which are grounded in far flung sweatshops. 

Capitalism is engaged in a relentless process of globalisation and the middle orders of the G7 nation states are being severely squeezed. Elsewhere, relatively-excluded humanity sees commodities moving almost without friction across borders and wants to do the same. For billions of people, national frontiers look like a flimsy story told to gullible children. The internet, free markets, freedumb in general, have all disintermediated so many walled gardens within our societies, why not the very walls around them? 

Trump and Sanders are both tapping into our collective discombobulation at this state of affairs. I think the populist position that it is somehow reversible, is probably a lie, or at least a very shaky hypothesis. The Donald and several key members of the LEAVE campaign in Britain are using barely-condonable, xenophobic discourse to draw people into their proposition and (probably futile) policy response. 

Much has been made this week of Nigel Farage’s remarks that staying in the EU will increase the number of attacks on women. It’s as if he and others on his wavelength are suggesting that continental Europe is basically a lost cause and has already in effect been overrun by the fuzzy-wuzzies, so all we can now do is pull up the drawbridge. Before Farage had to insinuate that Bulgarians and Romanians were not quite like us, but the recent, alarming surge in migration from the further fringes has allowed him to be bolder in his rhetoric. Many will surely go in to vote thoroughly confused about the issues of inter-EU mobility and that of the ‘swarm’ from the likes of Syria and Iraq. 

The left shows scorn and dismay, but there are some painful truths being touched upon here that they don’t want to face. Take for example the recent mass abuse of women in Cologne by gangs of reportedly North African/middle-eastern migrants and the systematic abuse of young white teenage girls in Yorkshire by men of predominantly Pakistani origin. 

The Slovenian intellectual Slavoj Žižek compares these events to the 'Great Cat Massacre’ in 18th century France, in which a substantial group of apprentices suddenly rose up and killed all the kitties belonging to their masters. It is said they did this as a form of carnivalesque rejection of dominant bourgeois values: they lived alongside, almost within affluent French society and yet felt excluded, somehow lesser than those treasured felines. 

So when the liberal-left suggests that the molesters of Cologne are simply ignorant of how seriously we take our values and need to be — gently — educated about women’s rights and so on, Žižek thinks they have misunderstood the situation completely. The abusers know very well what our values are and they have periodically clubbed together to show their contempt for them in a very deliberate and systematic way, such that the message could not be any clearer. Yet they are like the apprentices. Once the orgiastic carnival of frustration and repressed envy peters out, they may not have given up entirely on the hope of being masters tand living by the mainstream values themselves one day. 

Anyway, only yesterday I saw Stephen Hawking making the point that time travel backwards is much less likely than time travel in a future-bound direction. So, in spite of all this — and in spite of trying to stay true to my own pessimistic outlook  — I can see no circumstances in which an attempt to go backwards is going to work out better than confronting what the future holds and trying to deal with it using the largest collaborative groups at our disposal. 

Trump's need to find out what is going on...

If religions are, as Slavoj Žižek suggests, subjectifications of human predicaments, then just about any could serve as a medium for the expression cruelty based on repressed envy, violent nihilism and all round self-righteous vengefulness. 

In this respect there is surely nothing special about Islam. Yet while it is certainly possible to make use of Christianity as the basis of a wholesale rejection of modernity (viz all the Mennonites in these parts), it would also be fair to say that in general this is one branch of monotheism that has made a series of accommodations with modernity over quite an extended period and that makes it a nichier option for this sort of lifestyle / all round bolshy attitude. Indeed, from the perspective of someone who thinks of their outlook as primarily non-western, Christianity can easily appear to be complicit with western mores and the global capitalist system as a whole. 

And while it is certainly possible to characterise Christianity as, in some senses still an ‘eastern’ religion and Islam as in some senses, right from the outset, a ‘western’ one, the opposite is the more straightforward mainstream approach to this. 

This is why someone living inside the west, yet experiencing this at least partially as an outsider, Islam is the more likely supernatural justification for the sort of love-hate relationship with modern emancipatory values that occasionally verges into violent rejection. 

But religion is really just the medium here. The underlying cause is the modern western system and the way it fails to be properly inclusive. 

So Trump’s plan, based on further explicit exclusion, would really represent a codification of the problem, and not anything resembling a solution. 

The Outsider Proxy

Outsiders play the role of handy, yet misleading surrogates for the most divisive contentions between insiders. What we like or dislike about outsiders is usually a safe indicator of what we like or dislike about ourselves. 

In Norway, Anders Breivik appeared to get this, for instead of targeting the intruders, he targeted those who be believed would show them favour. 

A significant threat to our globalised capitalist societies today comes less from the way human beings are attempting to roam as freely as commodities, and more from our collective response to this phenomenon.

Canis Familiaris

There are around 1 billion dogs in the world and roughly 85% of these are street or 'village' dogs. According to new scientific research by Raymond and Lorna Coppinger, those belonging to this latter class of canines are remarkably similar in shape and size the world over, and natural selection has turned them into near perfect scavengers whose proper niche is living alongside humans, not with them as pets.

Yet one of the first things you see when you live in the developing world is the obsession many ex-pats from wealthier countries themselves develop about converting these street dogs into their 'forever friends'.

There can be no doubt that many of these individuals are genuine animal lovers and I sympathise with their motives on many levels, but I can also detect yet another symptom of prevaling gringo attitudes which I find more than a little galling: the old white man’s burden of importing and imposing civilised standards on the manifest chaos of incomplete modernity.

Some of these self-styled rescuers come across as borderline misanthropes who appear to prioritise assistance for furries because the human realities of this land actually repel them. (At the next level up from cats and dogs one finds indigenous children — a demographic which attracts truly disproportionate levels of gringo goodwill in Guatemala, compared to say, their parents, or indeed the dirt poor non-indigenes of the plains.)

Just the other day I was reading with great amusement an exchange on a local ex-pat forum about a street dog adopted by a hostel in Antigua. (Viz pic below.) 

The establishment had picked up the dog, dubbed her Manchita, vaccinated and spayed her and she now lives inside the hostel — which crucially keeps its doors open 7am to 10pm, so Manchita continues to wander out to explore nearby streets.

As a result, she keeps getting re-rescued by those who can't quite grasp that a dog might want to live a bit more like a cat. Manchita even has a collar, but that doesn’t seem to interrupt the cycle.

Some of the comments suggest acerbically that not only is Manchita in urgent need of re-education, so too are her new owners.

Mochi is the only one of our dogs that ever lived on the streets, and we can honestly say that it was she who adopted us, for Mochi began following us every evening and gradually shouldered her way into our house.

Unlike the other three she has retained the basic instincts of the highly-adapted scrounger. Some of her best tricks, like securely holding down plates (or indeed more complicated receptacles) while she eats from them, have since been picked up by our other two bitches. She has also held onto the slightly more irksome accomplishment of digging trenches to lie in when she gets a bit overheated, and thankfully Cherry and Yuki are still behind the curve on this. It’s hard for us to know if she grew up feral or spent her formative years as a house dog, but we are inclined to the latter view.

She used to have a beau called Trompas. Trompas had owners, but was left outside most of the time and assumed the role of guardian of our avenue, a position that comes with both rights and duties.

Most of the residents fed Trompas and many felt a great affection for him. When his owners moved to another area, he escaped and returned within days. Later on, an abortive attempt to formally ‘foster’ him by a third party resulted in his disappearance and presumed demise.

Since then there have been several incumbents in the role that Trompas carried out to such great effect. The last two have had distinct fates: one was shot dead by the bored security guard of a local gated community, the other was adopted after a successful Facebook appeal. The vacancy never lasts long. It’s as if there’s an understudy waiting in the wings.

Moribund

The Panama Papers have uncorked the geyser of middle class indignation. 

For much of its modern history Capitalism delivered prosperity and development and the only people getting a really raw deal were the workers. And, as a rule, the middle classes affected not to notice too much. 

There was a transition phase in the late twentieth century when even the proletariat seemed to be getting some of the benefits. Times were good. 

There had always been a super-rich elite driving the process, but until recently at least, the middle classes have been very much along for the ride. 

But then as the last century drew to a close the world's economy globalised rapidly, largely in response to technological change, and the middle classes have suddenly found themselves in the same boat as the hoi polloi. 

There are calls for local, national solutions to this problem. Some of these are well-meaning and some of these are...well, from Donald Trump. 

But this is a global problem - just like climate change - and local solutions simply won't cut it. 

The ethical critique as currently presented by the floundering bourgoisie is hypocritical at best. 

And it fails to recognise that just because the free of mind and free of wealth are oozing apart from the traditional nation state, does not mean these leaks can easily be caulked by legislation from within these moribund structures.

Utopian project

It was a little depressing to witness Niall Ferguson opinionating on the Syraqistan again in the Sunday Times this week - 'it takes a network to defeat a network'. 

Not quite as depressing as when politicians tag the space as 'evil' - eschatological narrative ahoy! - but this notion that it's really only a technical problem that clever people could solve given half the chance, is in many ways just as absurd. 

That he concluded with the suggestion that EU might be an appropriate network with which to counter the Islamic state only brought us closer to the real crux of the problem. 

ISIS is the stand-out utopian project in the world today. As such it has the power to enthuse - and confuse - individuals who feel disconnected from the national identities into which they were born. The EU on the other hand...

Gone in an instant...

Trust, as we all know, takes a long time to build, but can be forfeited in an instant. 

Unfortunately, I have been placed in a situation this week where, with one or two exceptions, I am no longer able to trust almost any member of my own family. 

Now, I am privileged to be connected via social media with several of the younger members of my wife's clan: bright, talented individuals whose trust I value very much. 

There are number of ways I could violate that trust, but consider this particular possibility. 

I take it upon myself to copy some material of a comparatively sensitive nature — a post, a picture or a comment — and then show it out of context to another member of the family, one of an older generation who is conspicuously not in the least au fait with these technologies and their basic ground rules.  

The wider consequences and damage done by this might be unforseeable, but on own my side at least, thoroughly predictable.

— I would be immediately un-friended

— The person I had thus betrayed would probably call me names like 'backstabbing scumbag'...and I'd be getting off lightly! 

— I would start to consider myself extremely fortunate if they ever spoke to me again. 

This all depends of course that I have been prepared to do what Guatemala's jailed former president calls 'show face' — in other words, acknowledge that in the act of breaking a family member's trust, one cannot really hold another family member to safeguarding the confidence that preserves one's anonymity. 

On closer scrutiny...

It’s almost too easy to point out the failings of Trump, Cruz, Sanders and Clinton as candidates for the world’s top job. But this time round the collective unsuitability of all of those who are standing has drawn our attention in more closely and I cannot be alone in having discerned that the system itself is somehow more execrable that even the Donald in full flow. 



It might not be so easy to put into words - to send up on a satirical sketch that has all them east-coasters in stitches - but the longer this process goes on under such heightened levels of scrutiny, more and more Americans are surely going to realise just how defective and fraudulent their two party democratic simulcrum has become. And the painful irony of this is that it makes a populist presidency more likely.

Cowspiracy

Highmindedness can be admirable. But highmindedness from a position of relative privilege that wants to become a 'movement' is a potential source for concern. 

Just how many people in the world would need to voluntarily turn to veganism for global sustainability to be achieved? If it were to succeed, how would such a movement avoid both conflicts externally and then coercion internally? 

The movie didn't volunteer an answer. It turned seriously preachy towards the end and its determination to talk about food strictly in terms of biological science ultimately smacked of philistinism. Dairy products as baby cow expansion juice...

I could go around telling everyone that we had chosen to remain childless for the good of the planet, and preach this as the sort of thing that all highminded folk from roughly my own demographic should follow. But, in the words of Rudolf Abel, would it help? 

Even in China, where there is a cultural bias towards surrendering individual choice for the good of the collective, state coercion was ultimately required and ultimately proved only passably effective. There were also unexpected adverse consequences to ponder. 

There always are - back in the 80s the outside interferers bemoaned Guatemala's high infant mortality rate. Problem solved. Now they decry the mortality rate from the crime wave created by a generation of grown-up unwanted children that the economy cannot adequately provide for. 

The history of the world's great international movements of highminded ethical change are not encourageing. Monotheistic faith revisions have fallen short of the 50% mark and there are indications that the voluntary nature of such commitments soon segue into systems of coercion and castigation. 

Change for change's sake

Millennials around the world are clearly disgusted with centrist politics, where one party's fundamental approach can hardly be distinguished from the next. It's just that they are too young to remember just how unpleasant the alternative tended to be. We now have electorates increasingly made up of people yearning for change for change's sake. The only difference is that this time they are by and large going to go about it without any firm ideological commitments...

No-brainer decision time

In order to avoid the nightmare populist and the ex-President's wife, Guatemala had to elect the clown. For the US the choice is more limited because the clown and nightmare populist come as part of the same package...

Greed is...

The standard contemporary political blame-game tells us that in our modern economies financial crashes occur due to ‘excessive greed’. Yet is important to understand that in some senses the meltdowns take place when people become individually LESS greedy. 

In really simplified terms...

During the good times an elite group of capital-rich individuals assume risks that most people either don’t want to assume or cannot assume. By and large they will rationally anticipate substantial returns provided that the risks don’t get the better of them between now and pay-day. 

Fast forward to the weeks or months before meltdown and the investing pack has expanded considerably. One might even say ‘democratised’ if one were inclined to be charitable. 

Collectively this group is now chasing a smaller reward, because the risks appear to have diminished. But whether we are talking about banks selling mortgages or private investors after their own little chunk of the tech boom bonanza, many of the people parting with their cash know that ‘sure thing’ investments are usually significantly over-priced. And many try to artificially re-create the original higher risk/higher reward conditions they missed out on via debt and other forms of ‘leverage’. 

Yet overall, they are individually at least chasing a more modest return than those who ‘bought cheap’ and can thus expect to clean up. So, which group is truly the greedier? Intuitively we are I think drawn to the wrong answer to this question — which is why the nuances of the term ‘greed’ are perhaps better suited to religious ethics than high finance. 

I had personal experience of a parallel phenomenon in the early 90s, when I was one of a small group of individuals who exited their career paths by way of the turning marked information superhighway. 

At the time very few people had heard of the Interwebs, let alone understood their transformative tendencies, but we were already true believers prepared to invest our projected future earnings in developing the medium’s potential. We correctly anticipated wave after wave of hazard ahead, but also a considerable return if we could find a way to weather them — so in that sense we were compelled by greed of the ‘long’ kind. 

As the Millennium approached our industry started to look very different, its personnel base now largely comprising frantic Johnny-come-latelies with options (often dubious) rather than equity in their pockets. And the mood of aggregated avarice was now palpable. These people were chasing the last crumbs and — mostly — knew it. The maelstrom of untethered desire that they kicked up drove the market over a precipice. 

The screenplay for Oscar-winning film 'The Big Short' demonstrated an implicit understanding of the topsy-turvy pre-crash world where mavericks inside the financial system could be taking on the ‘right’ kind of long positions, but based on shorting the system as a whole. And that this is happening because the ‘systemic’ problem is that the system has somehow come to be made up of dumb, irrational, bottom-feeders. 

Now, the fact that bottom-feeders are the essence of the problem does not a stirring political soundbite make. But our society’s most disreputable representatives of the type can be handily aggregated into something any populist politician can really get their teeth into: a ‘bank’ or, better still, ‘Wall Street’. 

These are not loose-associations of high-flying entrepreneurs but monolithic institutions which effectively dominate such a significant portion of our economic output that they can afford to reward even their least effective bottom-feeders in ways that anyone outside this milieux tends to find obscene. 

Such is the collective bargaining position of powerful, irrational greed in our society. There is no other sector other than finance where this kind of desperation and dumbness is so strongly incentivised by disproportionate returns. 'Curbing' this kind of greed will be no easy political task, because it has insinuated itself deeply into the natural habitat of the 'good', economically-beneficial sort of greed. 

The rise of the poorly-educated

Trump’s celebration of the ‘poorly-educated’ as the smartest demographic in the land takes us right to the heart of the problem in modern society. 

Elite status didn’t used to be such a clear cognate of extreme wealth, even in the US. Social hierarchies used to support cultural hierarchies and these, unlike the former, surely have some innate value.

The elites of birth and power - political and economic - were heretofore more obviously complemented by a cultural elite which acted as a conduit between various areas of knowledge and achievement, permitting them to communicate between themselves and thus allowing society as a whole to benefit from the ideas which could only emerge as a result of this associative process. 

This predominantly talented and educated group effectively determined how much intellectual and aesthetic value ought to be dictated by money alone, but like other forms of regulation, it has since been largely overrun by ‘rational’ market forces and standards and priorities have thus started to drift all over the place.

It should hardly surprise us that former Mexican president Vicente Fox was today recoiling before the billionaire candidate’s ‘poverty of ideas’, when simply pursuing your own baser instincts now counts as some sort of grand intellectual journey. 

Winning!

The last convulsion within capitalism was caused by America's 'un-performing' debt. The one just getting under way will largely be the result of China's, which has been estimated to be $5 trillion or 22% of all loans and equivalent to half that nation's economic output. It is also five times the not inconsiderable $1 trillion of toxic debt around Europe. 

Since the crash of 2008 the Chinese banking sector has grown its assets from $9 trillion to around $30 trillion, so nobody will have to wait this time for Wall Street to over-extend itself once again. 

The bad news from all this is that when the stock market crashes in election years the US almost inevitably changes administration - so President Trump here we come. If only because he does the whole 'winning' shtick better than Charlie Sheen...

Bug in the system

I was recently watching a political panel discussion on one of the US cable news networks when, by way of aside, one of the guests launched into a bombastic tirade about the statue of Oliver Cromwell outside the Palace of Westminster. 'Fascist dictator, blah blah...' 

Just like many students at Oxford University he had fallen into the fallacy of thinking that the man and the statue of the man are precisely the same thing. The statue outside Parliament is surely not of the historical Lord Protector as such, but of the man as he was re-imagined by the Victorians. 

Yet Americans have good reason to fixate themselves on this rather dark personage from English history. Trump's ascendancy appears to signify the culmination of an alarming recent drift towards fascism on the starboard side of American politics - but listen closely to the rhetoric of the Christian right and you will start to hear the same backhanded pleas for tyranny behind all those chest-thumping adjurations of freedom that long ago accompanied the rise of Cromwell. It’s the original, ineradicable bug in the puritan prototype. 

Two kinds of unbeliever...

A good deal of seemingly judicious anti-Islamic opinion is little more than bigotry dressed up as secular high-mindedness of one sort or another.

One should be aware however that there is a certain kind of secular outlook that maintains itself by feeding off the more traditional, ‘primitive’ sort of religious devotion.

It’s as if there were essentially two ways to be an unbeliever: the more self-contained or introverted way, and the more outward-facing way, that constantly plays off other people’s metaphysical wrong-headedness.

Islam — along with good ol’ gun-totin’, evolution-denying Pentacostalism in the US — has made itself available as the perfect foil for this sort of sparring just as the traditional religious outlook in western Europe has disintegrated into untold wishy-washy kinds of near-agnosticism that the more earnest kind of atheist finds it hard to get his or her teeth into.

I’m not sure that there are many purely self-contained unbelievers out there. I strive to be one myself, but it’s undoubtedly hard not to feel just a bit provoked by the resurgent irrationalism and militant ignorance out there in the ether today.

On the other hand, it is all too easy to postpone the contemplation of the deeper, darker implications of a godless universe by instead spending one’s time blaspheming against multiple faith traditions.

It should possibly come as no surprise that Europe’s most visibly secular nations — France, Denmark etc. — have become the channels of Europe’s most overtly xenophobic currents.

What is getting lost in all this is the comprehension that the ‘ignorance’ of someone who is already at multiple disadvantages including relative poverty and discrimination is frankly an embarrassingly soft target, and that rational unbelievers have something of a duty to prioritise going after the sort of dumbness for which there is hardly any excuse.

Great noshspots of Central America #1: The Coctelería Cajun

Located in what is essentially the armpit of the Yucatán in more ways than one, Ciudad del Carmen is perhaps not over-brimming with highlights for the casual visitor, but this ever-buzzing restaurant is undoubtedly one of them. 

The thing is that the Gulf coast of the peninsula is know to serve up the finest seafood anywhere in this region - especially shrimp - and there's possibly only one other joint in Campeche where I would perhaps prefer to partake of it. (For another day...)

The Coctelería Cajun is traditional, basic and very popular; the apparent cheapness of the decor and associated ambience ought not to deter. Wooden tables and chairs are crammed into a walled off front yard with an especially high turnover between midday and the late afternoon. 

A few caveats vis-a-vis my earlier, rather disparaging remarks about the location. The Isla del Carmen sits on the beautful Laguna de Términos just shy of the point where the peninsula bleeds into Tabasco. It is linked by an undulating causeway to Isla Aguada to the north, which is indeed a perfect place to take in the charms of the more unspoiled stretches of Yucatán coastline. 

The city itself has a compact historical casco with some fine pastel-painted casonas worthy of the state capital itself. 

Kate del Castillo....

The Mexican soap star is really circling the drain now...

What strikes me about this particular 'celebrity' interview - possibly the most ill-conceived attempt to intervene in the discourse by a person other than an actual public intellectual since Jane Fonda's visit to North Vietnam - was that none of the three named protagonists had a good enough reason to take the implied risks, possibly because they simply hadn't thought them through. An article in Rolling Stone magazine was certainly not sufficient cause, on paper at least.

Fonda could at least more easily couch her presumption in humanitarian terms even as she, as Penn has now done, blithely dis-respected all those who put their lives on the line against a national foe.

All three were undoubtedly successful in their existing fields, but surely had a significant itch to be something more. El Chapo might have had the hots for Kate, but was clearly also smitten with the ability of her character to live a life of apparent legitimacy amongst the sheikhs and oligarchs of Marbella. 

Ironically, while the capo craved her existence, del Castillo now seems set to end up with his...

A compromised ideal

The ideas many of us in the West share about personal autonomy, democratic government, private property etc. that fall under the wider banner of liberalism emerged under the aegis of the Christian Reformation and were given a very significant leg-up by the rapid expansions of capitalism and colonialism.

We hold many of these ideas very dear, and imagine that the world would be a better place should they one day be adopted universally...and yet, sadly, there is just no getting away from the fact that they are irrevocably entangled with both the distortions of religion and the ascendancy of a certain type of wealthy elite.

This has never really prevented us from doggedly pursuing the oxymoronic dream of a purer pluralism.

The local archetype

I say this not without a modicum of self-reproach and retro-repentance, but it's quite incredible how almost every male ex-pat I come across (and then, duly avoid) in this town, is some sort of narcissistic middle-aged man-child...

A few words on fundamentalism

Fundamentalism is an outlook that habitually fuses religious and worldly motivations, so we should be extremely cautious before taking the self-justifications of any fundamentalist at face value. 

Just because the Paris attackers claimed to be acting in the interests of their faith should not blind us to the fact that a purely religious interpretation of what they did is perhaps the least plausible. 

Relevant thinkers in our own political back-story such as Hobbes and Harrington looked upon the partisan fanatics of their own days and understood that much of their assertion of divine sanction was most often a mere cloak for barely-sublimated earthly objectives. 

On this day that Americans cast a rose-tinted glance back at their fundamentalist founding fathers, let us remember that the great irony of Puritanism was that in seeking to impose a fixed and intolerant vision on society, it created just the right amount of abject chaos that pluralism and tolerance were able to take shape, largely inadvertently, and to be accepted as important elements of social cohesion. 

Up until this point the only known solution to the largely negative impact of competing worldviews in post-medieval Europe had been autocratic rule. Nobody really pushed freedom of conscience as a political programme until it became rather a fact of life by default. In banning dancing, music and the like, the Puritans were in some senses Talibanesque, but they were beset by so many theological contortions, that they ended up with little option other than grudging mutual acceptance. 

In a week in which the British Parliament gets ready to vote on whether bombing should be part of the long-term solution to fundamentalism in the middle east, it should be noted that in many instances totalist systems are inherently self-degrading. It's just a shame that the Nazi metaphor continues to trump all those others, where all the pluralists had to do really was sit and wait. 

Anyway, it's a matter of record tat out of the intolerance of the men and women who sat down to munch on the first Thanksgiving turkey, there would emerge a current within western thinking where noncomformism and dissent could mean something more like common sense than customised delusion and bloodymindedness.  

Of course, in much of America it still means...

Homeland, Season 5

Many aspects of popular culture in the English-speaking world today appear to have been crafted to erect an invisible wall keeping us locked within our localised realities. Even the travel shows appear to whispering 'stay at home' subliminally. 

Some people have quipped that Homeland has the wrong title for a show now seemingly set anywhere but the terra firma of mainstream American life. But that would be to miss the clear underlying, reverse-psychology payload of a show that wants its viewers to understand that in foreign parts only the US embassy and its associated compounds are secure - and as as we saw in Season 4 back in the 'hell-hole' that is Karachi, sometimes not even them. 

This time out Carrie has been visiting Beirut, one of the most sophisticated and cosmopolitan urban environments around the Mediterranean, here depicted as marginally less attractive as a weekend break destination than say Kabul or Mogadishu. Along the way even Berlin has been receiving obliquely some of that Stephen Fry in Central America treatment. 

In this sense 'Homeland' represents the full about-turn within the modern espionage genre, for which distant locations always used to be 'exotic' and 'exciting', but now these adjectives seem to habitually carry the hidden suffix 'dangerous' in parentheses. 

I'm looking forward to 007's forthcoming jolly in Mexico City, because the Bond franchise is still grounded in its ancient 'anywhere but dreary London' premise, and still doesn't quite push the message that a license to kill is probably a prerequisite for any form of travel to the Latin America or the Middle East.

Pausing for pity

Otto looked utterly exhausted as he left the court today, his voice strained. He claims he could easily have escaped into exile, but has chosen to face the music.

It's hard not to feel sorry for him — and his abandoned dog —in spite of everything. The spectacle of the mighty fallen is always somewhat disturbing.

I don't think I could ever muster the same kind of compassion for that gangster and clown Manuel Baldizón. 

I think Otto more or less believes the self-image he has consistently projected - as a man of honour. He must have thrown all the bad stuff into a little box at the back of his psyche.

Whatever happens now he's royally screwed. Even if he can convince a judge that the conspiracy was going on all around him and he really had no active part in it, they will get him for 1982 now. He'll be the surrogate Rios Montt in no time at all. 

And then there's Gerardi, and any other skeletons they find in his cupboard now that he has been deprived of immunity.

He's fully stretched out on the public altar of sacrifice and it really doesn't matter what he did or didn't do, because he has become a living symbol of the past 60 years that has to be ritually purified from the body politic.

The media have started to address him as 'General' once again...

What's next?

The levels of contagion to the north and south will be fascinating to observe.

Mexico had a convoluted revolution which began before WWI and ultimately resulted in a long-lasting one party system that in its latter phases paid lip-service to democratic values and practices, but was widely referred to elsewhere as 'the perfect dictatorship'. 

It is almost twice as wealthy as Guatemala with a well-resourced state and the levels of public-sector larceny perpetrated by the outgoing regime here might not cause such an unsightly dent up there. 

Yet Peña Nieto's public persona has something of the Baldetti about it...

To the south El Salvador and Honduras have many of the same problems, often in an even more pronounced state, but they appear to have already missed the boat in terms of confronting them as a united pueblo. There is now an entrenched polarity in their political discourse between populists and those in favour of more transparent system, as in Venezuela.

The same could happen here if Baldizón 'cause' is allowed to prosper. And yet, worryingly, all kinds of unpleasantness could also yet tarnish Guatemala's spring if the strict letter of the law is observed and his Líder party debarred from the election with just three days to go.

The protest movement clearly has great momentum and is unlikely to be thinking in terms of this kind of practical compromise right now.

Thank you Roxana!

Guatemala was fortunate in its ex-President's choice of running mate. Her obvious doltishness and blatant disregard for even the most basic of veneers, turned what would otherwise have seemed like those all-too-familiar and disregarded grievances about corruption into something that diverse sectors of Guatemala could really get their teeth into — and more importantly generate further awareness through a combination of youthful outrage and mordant satire on social media. 

Linea 1 y Linea 2

With all this talk of corruptos and corruptores we need to be keep an eye on some important distinctions. 

If I am head of state and a businessman pays me a backhander in return for an important contract, the private sector side of this deal could be characterised as the corrupter. But if as head of state, I establish a system whereby businessmen of all sorts can get a discount on duties, I become the primary corrupter.

In the first instance the businessman pays a premium to secure a contract and the politician pockets the premium. Only in certain hybrid cases - such as lake Amatitlán - is there a significant social cost to this sort of graft. 

But when the government itself is set up as a scam, the social cost operates on a multiplier as schools want for books, hospitals lack medicines etc.

Of course there are all sorts of criminals in Guatemala, some very well organised and deeply entrenched in the commercial sector. But there is a very significant category distinction between theft and treason, which is reflected in the criminal penalties which apply. 

Otto acted as a traitor. His actions subverted the rule of law, plundered public resources from the state and led, not-so-indirectly, to actual deaths. 

He was not just the hapless mayordomo of the real capos who have now sacrificed him. He was the head of state. To suggest otherwise is to pander to his own self-serving rhetoric about the corruptores around government. 

What hope can anyone have for improving this society if the chief executive is not on board with the project in both thought and action?

Table Talk

Prince Phillip once famously observed that the Chinese will eat anything that has four legs as long as it isn't a table. This little witticism sprung to mind this morning when a Japanese friend messaged me with the seemingly innocuous question 'Is there anything you don't eat?'

However, given that the last time we shared a table together (no, not that way...) was when he led me into Shinjuku's 'Piss Alley' for some horse sashimi — surely at least in part a bate the Brit exercise — I might have to prepare a shortlist of non-comestible quadrupeds for all such enquiries in future...

Don't dismiss the consensus narrative

Perceptions and narratives are very important to the course of history. If one simply complains that the beliefs of historical actors are a poor facsimile of reality, one is missing the chance to fully understand their impact on events in real time. They inform the discourse, and in doing so, shape the landscape of possible actions.

Right now a narrative has formed around the meaning of this week's events in Guatemala. It goes a bit like this...

The country has come full circle since 1954. Back in the early 50s it was a beacon of political possibility for the whole of Latin America, with newly-established systems of public health and education. But then the US intervened to remove the democratically-elected, reform-minded government and a protracted civil conflict ensued in which perceptions of possibility were often violently constrained.

Now Guatemalans have made it back, after 60 difficult years, to roughly where they were before. Once more a beacon of hope for the region, this nation remains a far from a completed project, but its citizens are once again free to pursue a better future.

Hearts of Darkness

I read an article last night that suggested that all ordinary middle class Americans who moan about the death of Cecil the lion and are not either veggies or vegans, or at least completely disgusted by the mere thought of battery-caged chicken, are actually complete and utter hypocrites. Rather tellingly, this opinion piece was on an investment website targeting rich white men. 

This is misdirection, pure and simple. This issue at hand would perhaps be more easy to comprehend and reject if there were no unfortunate, 'much loved' animal involved. 

Think about the movie Hostel - an extreme vision of how men with money behave outside their normal territorial/legal boundaries. And consider how hard it has been to dispel the suspicion that the deaths of hundreds of women in and around Ciudad Juárez are the grisly consequence of some sick sport undertaken by men who have grown just a bit tired of golf. 

As an example from lower down the spectrum one could point to the gringos one regularly sees here in Antigua driving around fully intoxicated. It's as if they feel that the norms of law-abiding behaviour somehow don't apply. And one suspects that this is unfortunately the main reason that many American men choose to reside south of the border. (One of the first American ex-pats to spend a chunk of his younger years in Antigua Guatemala - Gore Vidal - did not set the very best example to those who followed. Think Lord Byron in Albania.) 

INGUAT could even target these people with an ad campaign: "Come on down and experience that same exhilarating feeling of untouchable privilege that back home only the 1% can tap into..."