Heading west

Today was my mother's 76th birthday. While I waited for her to get ready to go out for dinner I browsed a copy of the Evening Standard from August 18, 1955. It was in remarkably good condition. She kept it because it has a prominent piece about her winning a big public fashion competition in Eastbourne the day before. It also had a poignant piece about the precocious academic achievements of the 13 year-old Sheridan Morley who died last month.

"Don't be too glamorous," a boyfriend had once advised her on the phone before picking her up. The memory makes her chuckle now.

I'd just finished watching the last episode of Cambridge Spies this afternoon before setting off. When the subject came up over dinner she told me that she used to know Kim Philby 's wife. In the mini-series Philby is played by Toby Stephens, apparently an acquaitance of mine back in the days when I was learning multiplication. I do remember a kiddy party held at his mother's home in Chelsea, because when my own mother picked me up she got lost and we ended up on the Robin Hood roundabout near Kingstgon. Maggie Smith lived just off the west end of King's Road and we lived at its inception next to St Peter's Church in Eaton Square. Both SW1. Getting home should have been a doddle.

One of the more interesting secondary figures in Cambridge Spies is James Jesus Angleton, now the subject of de Niro's The Good Shepherd. It is said that Graham Greene resigned from MI6 in order to avoid becoming embroiled in the unmasking of Philby, a personal friend of his.

Dubya's Eve

The mood in Guate is very tense. O tells us that embassy officials are being told what to do and where to go on a need-to-know basis. He is forbidden from using his mobile phone. The Palacio Nacional is closed and the Maya have started their Bush-hex vigils. If there is one country in the world where even the standard precautions may not be enough this is it. Clinton came to Antigua, stayed at the Posada del Angel and, as the photos on the pock-marked plaster walls still attest, patronised a good number of local businesses. Bush will be lucky, and brave, if he ever steps out of his limo. V saw a man with a welcoming banner for the President today: "No cansaremos hasta verle muerto, hijo de puta."

Podference

Had lunch today with Baksheesh at Imli, a really excellent new Indian-style tapas place on Wardour Street. Over the meal he showed me the business card of someone he'd just met in Ghana. This guy runs a firm called Podference that can convert a conference call into a podcast within a hour of the last "goodbye". They also have a system for hosting 'rolling' teleconferences where people can come and go as they please, with the whole discussion being delivered later as an edited audio file. Neat.

Amiblockedornot

Find out if your website is visible in China!
(Courtesy of the Pigeon Blog)

Doused in spiritual bleach

Indigenous organisations in Guatemala have announced that they intend to conduct purification ceremonies at Maya archaeological sites about to be befouled by the visit of the US President.

They will also be conducting on-going prayer vigils in Tecpán as a kind of real-time purge of the Bush hoodoo.

The director of Coordinadora Indígena y Campesina de Guatemala (CONIC), Juan Tiney, has explained how and why the clean-up will be conducted next Tuesday at Iximché, ancient capital of the Kakchiqueles:

"La presencia del señor Bush en un lugar como Iximché mancha la honra de ese sitio, por todas las muertes y dolor que ha sembrado en el mundo. Llegar a esas tierras santas atenta contra nuestra cultura" (Dubya's presence is a stain on the honour of this site, for all the pain and death that he has sown in this world. His arrival on these scared grounds is a kick in the nuts for our culture.)

"Fearsomely stinky"

Beats feeding the ducks in Regent's park.

"Dying is pointless"

Reality finally disappeared for Jean Baudrillard last Tuesday.

In a way it's a bit of a shame that at the time of his dematerialisation he is most remembered for that rather rarefied observation about the first Gulf War. For me it was the spit and sparkle of his theory fictions that will provide the coolest of the memories. He was, as I have said before, something of a proto-blogger, developing a form of fragmentary rhetoric that has undoubtedly influenced me personally. How can one not regret the passing of a writer who dared to suggest that:

"It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us in unintelligibility, to make it more unintelligible."

I can't wait to congratulate him

It's clearer to me now why V's brother has been sent out to Tecpán this week.

Dubya's PR team (perhaps on a tip off from USAID) have arranged for the Prez to to meet up there with Mayan lettuce-farmer Mariano Canu whose association, Labradores Mayas, produces 95,000 heads of lettuce a week, thanks in part to $325,000 worth of technical assistance from an aid programme. Canu told the AP that he intends to ask the President if they can start to export their produce to the US. Good luck to him.

An excerpt from Bush's speech on Monday:

"Here's an interesting story for you. Mariano Canu, he was an indigenous farmer in Guatemala whose land provided barely enough corn and beans to feed his family. He was scratching to get ahead. No one in his family had ever been to college. Most of the people in his village never got past the sixth grade. Mariano began tilling the fields at age seven. He had spent his life in grinding poverty, and it looked as though his children would suffer the same fate.

"Trade helped him a lot, and here's how. To take advantage of new opportunities, he organized an association of small farmers called Labradores Mayas. These farmers began growing vegetables that they can sell overseas, high-valued crops like lettuce and carrots and celery. They took out a loan. Capital matters. It's important to have capital available if we want our neighbors to be able to realize a better tomorrow. And they built an irrigation system with that loan. And soon they were selling their crops to large companies like Wal-Mart Central America. With the money Mariano has earned, he was able to send his son to college. Today Labradores is a thriving business that supports more than a thousand jobs in production and transportation and the marketing of internationally sold vegetables.

"One of the stops on my trip is going to be to see Mariano. I can't wait to congratulate him on not losing hope and faith. I also look forward to seeing a thriving enterprise that began with one dream. And it's in the interests of the United States to promote those dreams. People like Mariano are showing what the people of this region can accomplish when given a chance. By helping our neighbors build strong and vibrant economies, we increase the standard of living for all of us.

"You know, not far from the White House is a statue of the great liberator, Simon Bolivar..."

Luminous

Went with TC to check out Brian Eno's installation at Selfridges today.

"It uses multiple monitors to display a constantly evolving painting, generated from handmade images, randomly combined by computers, creating an ever-changing ‘painting’ consisting of hand-made elements that evolve into almost countless variations."

TC reckoned that the (77m) individual images were "not very grown up" (all a bit first year St Martin's college) and that the best thing about it was the sofas that you could literally collapse on. Of course, that's what the Viola room at the Tate Modern lacks. Sofas!

It reminded me of my efforts to try to perceive the shifting contours of the Atlantic as I overflew it last December. I discovered that you need to zoom in on localised textures in order to perceive the ocean's subtle motion. Pull back, and it's a seemingly static surface. All I needed was Eno's ambient gurgles on my iPod!

The better part of valour

Unsurprisingly, President Oscar Berger cancelled his confidence-building visit to El Salvador.

He had earlier bragged that he would travel across to San Salvador by road driving his own car in order to demonstrate how convinced he was that the route was safe, but in the end decided to indefinitely postpone the trip. It wouldn't do to be dead just before Dubya shows up, would it?

Nice sash isn't it? I once accidentally kocked over the Guatemalan flag in a branch of Banco Industrial and from the expressions on the faces of the people around me thought I'd be making my one phone call to Amnesty International.

Usenet

Just used Google Groups to locate my debut posting on Usenet from March 16, 1995.

I asked how the Aztecs made their chocolate and pulque drinks and had a set of interesting replies.

Frenchise operation

Abu Dhabi has paid France $520m for conceding the Louvre name for their 'universal' art museum due to open in 2010.

They have also thrown in a further $747m for art loans, special exhibitions and management advice, $32.5m for refurbishing a bit of the original in Paris, and have agreed to buy 40 Airbus aircraft of the kind that nobody else seems to want. (This is all in addition to the $10.4 billion worth of French armaments purchased over the past decade.)

A couple of years after this flying saucer touches down, Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will also open on Saadiyat Island, which sits opposite the main part of the city.

And so it begins...

Don't you just hate it when old men in pointy hats say that at the start of really crucial battles?

Anyway, Dubya is finally on his way. Personally I think the tour really ought to commence with him symbolically climbing over the wall he has erected along the border with Mexico.

His opening salvo will no doubt have left Chávez and the Bolivarians fulminating: a direct comparison between George Washington and Simón Bolívar in a speech delivered yesterday.

We had a rather unenlightening email today from our global IT manager prepping us for the scheduling chaos sure to result from the fact that the US and Canada are switching to daylight savings time earlier this year. The Mexicans are making a show of their petulance by not conforming.

This reminds me how the (unmarked) US air support for the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 arrived an hour late because George Bush senior and his CIA cronies in Guatemala City had failed to check whether Cuba was in a different time zone.

Cost of living

A quarter of the world's 30 cheapest places to live are in Latin America according to The Economist Intelligence Unit.

Guatemala City is the most expensive within this group however, 63rd in the list published yesterday, with Mexico City in 68th place.

Tokyo, displaced last year as the world's most expensive place to live by Oslo, has now been passed by Paris, Copenhagen and London as well. (Osaka is the only other non-European city in the top ten.)

People of Earth...

Scott Karp asks us 'Who's right about the social media revolution - the people or the revolutionaries?'

I studied the patterns behind revolutions for a whole term in my final year at Cambridge. The moment of disconnect between the mass population and the self-appointed agents of wholesale change is a near-omnipresent stage in these sort of upheavals.

We all remember those 70s sci-fi scenarios that assumed there would be a fixed timetable for throwing all of our antique furniture on the bonfire. The commonest mistake of all would-be revolutionaries is to assume that they can and should pulverise all the useful manifestations of the ancien regime. Whether its starting point is the Communist Manifesto or the Cluetrain Manifesto, revolutionaries mental faculties become tend to become hijacked by a semi-autonomous discourse that impairs their ability to perceive balance.

When the people − in whose name they believe they are pursuing such an exciting vocation − begin to drag their feet cloddishly, the revolutionary cadre typically responds by upping its use of the terminology of violence and death. Change or die, becomes the pervasive mantra.

Yet for those of us who prefer their change to be a tad more focussed, the superimposition of new forms onto the old is necessarily a phenomenon in need of careful, case-by-case management.

Now I can't claim to be loyal, long-term eyeball of USA Today, but I have been similarly underwhelmed by the makeover recently imposed on Britain's own The Times. At the moment it looks like a bad case of someone got Wordpress for Christmas.

Anti-social media?

It's ironic that an important part of the ethic behind what we call social media is itself anti-social in origin. One way of looking at the Net is as an elitist utopia that dynamically maintains itself in a fairly constant state of incipient failure: misanthropy posing as idealised popular democracy. Hardly surprising really, as the greatest popular democracy of them all regarded the majority of its inhabitants as something less than fully human.

The info-age elites have created one virtually-gated community after another only to see each of them overrun in turn by the marketers and the masses. And so they move on to the next big thing...

And as Michel Houellebecq has pointed out, our society's most absurdly ascendant elite, the one whose values are coming to override all others in our culture, is Youth. MySpace typifies this − hideous, but essentially the collective handiwork of the narrow (and callow) demographic that matters most to our civilisation.

The other half

According to George W. Bush's national security advisor Stephen Hadley, there are "a lot of false promises today" in Latin America. His jefe's forthcoming tour of the region would seem to indicate that he believes there might still be room for a few more.

Dubya has said that he will use his multi-stop tour to showcase "the other half of his agenda." (It's a shame that he has left this other 50% until the last 20% of his administration.)

"And I'm going to make this pledge," he added yesterday. "The goal of this great country, the goal of a country full of generous people, is an Americas where the dignity of every person is respected, where all find room at the table, and where opportunity reaches into every village and every home." Aww.

There's even wild talk of including workers' rights in future trade accords! This will all of course be welcome news to the thousands of Guatemalans that his government has begun to re-naturalise.

More pointedly perhaps, Hadley noted that "if governments make the right choices, they will have a partner in the United States."

This is the beginning then of the great counter-attack. In recent times the Washington Consensus has appeared restricted to a narrow range of ZIP codes in the DC area, as Caracas, La Paz, Quito, Buenos Aires (sort of) and Managua have aligned themselves with Havana in their enthusiastic repudiation of the Yanquis.

The Bush administration is indeed fortunate not to have 'lost' Latin America to an even greater extent whilst they were otherwise distracted by making a mess of the Middle East. Chávez, who has a counter-tour planned, has failed to fully exploit his regional opportunity over the past few years, and has experienced significant set-backs, most notably in Peru and Mexico. Securing cheap public transport for benefits scroungers in London won't rank as his greatest geopolitical achievement, and given the pivotal significance now of the pragmatic Lula, encouraging his cuate Evo to nationalise Brazilian-held energy assets in Bolivia will surely be deemed to have been a bit precipitate by future historians.

Yet La Menchu's recent declaration of her intent to stand for the Presidency in Guatemala will have served as a timely reminder that new fronts could yet be about to open in what El Pais yesterday dubbed The battle for Latin America. Bush arrives there on Sunday.

Campaña Negra

Senior local government officials in El Salvador are suggesting to the media that their constituents are still too terrified to contemplate visiting Guatemala for the forseeable future. Should keep the crowds down while I'm out there for Semana Santa!

It's ironic because when I first went to the region in the 80s it was the (short) chapter on El Salvador in Central America on a Shoestring that was most likely to deter potential visitors.

582,676 Salvadoreños came to Guatemala last year. That's 35 % of the total number of foreign visitors, in what was a record year for tourism.

Heading for the border

Javier Figueroa, the Police sub-director who resigned last Friday in the wake of the murder of the cops implicated in the killings of three Salvadorean politicians has now legged it to Costa Rica with his wife and children. He was one of two very senior officials in the PNC whose resignations were forced, apparently because authorities feared for the impartiality of their investigations into events at El Boquerón. It is now believed the four policemen were killed by inmates using weapons hidden in a DVD player, and not by an armed gang from outside as previously thought.

T - 6

"And if during the Latin American tour he starts on March 8th Mr Bush bumps into the odd demonstration, so what?" (The Economist 3/3)

By the time Bush reaches Guatemala next Sunday local demonstrators may already have exhausted themselves. Dozens of activists were outside the US Embassy in Guatemala City this weekend, putting on a noisy demonstration of the feelings of repudio that the US President inspires. Banners were waved calling him a 'terrorist' and an 'enemy of humanity'. There's another sizeable demonstration planned for next Saturday, the day before Dubya turns up. (Presumably not in Airforce One, which being a 747, is likely to overshoot the runway and end up in the barranco.)

V's brother has just secured a position on the staff at the American embassy (I helped him with his CV) Interesting times...

These crowds may be united in the conviction that Bush has no business in Guatemala, but in fact his little tour might just help to stimulate the agrarian economies of several sugar-growing nations. In his recent State of the Union speech Bush optimistically implied that the US would be producing most of the required 130 billion litres of ethanol from its own crops. (There is still a 54% duty on imported ethanol, and a powerful farming lobby to support it)

However, with the more friendly Latin American countries like Brazil and Colombia investing heavily in new ethanol plants, the Bushes (led by Jeb with his Interamerican Ethanol Commission) probably anticipate a way for them to whack several piñatas with the same stick: stimulating rural economies, stemming the tide of illegal immigrants, bolstering market-friendly democracies and limiting the disruptive opportunities available to Chávez and his Bolivarians.