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.