Wassup 2008, full version

And the added irony is that Cindy McCain is chair of Hensley & Co, one of Anheuser-Busch's biggest wholesalers.

(Thanks to Joel for this clip)

One week to go...

McCain-Palin is turning into a nightmare ticket for the GOP. One makes neo-liberal economic policy sound passé, the other makes it sound stupid. As for foreign policy, why is there any surprise that Al Q has endorsed them?

I had a quite terrible nightmare the other night. In it I'd been watching the upcoming election night coverage up to the point where the first swing state had been called for Obama, but had experienced a 2nd degree nodding off, only to wake up suddenly within this dream and find that McCain had been declared the surprise victor. As Obama made a sad farewell speech to an almost empty auditorium, my waking mind echoed to a single flailing enunciation: "noooooooooooooooooo....."

It echoed a painful lived experience. I remember drifting off late in the night back in November 2000 shortly after CNN had just declared the Sunshine State for Gore. The TV was still on as I dozed, and Gore's sudden reversal in fortune became a kind of phantasmagoric experience. I opened my eyes to news of Bush's apparent victory feeling that the world had somehow fallen asleep at the wheel and skidded off the road!

A quick hueva update

There are signs that the new season - the dry one that is - is finally under way. The last couple of mornings have been notable for the almost complete absence of humidity combined with a powerful breeze which has set the tall eucalyptus tree on the adjacent lot a creakin' most worryingly.

Last week the rainy season had a final hurrah with a memorable deluge which resulted in an overflowing of the Rio Pensativo (the thoughtful river!) to the south of our colonia, Panorama. The last third of the cobbled street which runs south of the main square was almost completely inundated with mud and we had a first hand report from an architect friend down there who found himself knee-deep in sticky, cocoa-coloured lodo at home that evening.

There's a whiff of coffee pulp in the air today.

De los Mayas al Polo Norte

"When I heard that all the ice at the Pole will have melted by 2012, I got goose-bumps," Guatemalan reporter and environmental campaigner Vida Amor de Paz told a compact audience at the Rainbow Cafe last week.

She'd come to La Antigua to preach about the impending global climate catastrophe, using what turned out to be a rather scratched up DVD copy of the documentary covering her trip to the North Pole in 2007.

Plan A had been to hitch a ride with a Russian ice-breaker, she explained, but when the owners pushed the embarcation date into the period of polar night, she had to turn to the scientists already at the Pole in an aged schooner called Tara.

This rather gnarly bunch responded negatively to her initial approaches, insinuating that she might be like those tiresome metiches from the Discovery Channel. But she sold them on the big idea behind her epic journey - that our man-made climate crisis today is an analogue of the one that brought Classic Maya civilisation to its knees, and that we would do well to take immediate heed of the Mayan 'cosmovision'; specifically the prophecies contained within the book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel.

This sacred text - written some 800 years after the Maya collapse commenced it has to be said; though De Paz in fact didn't - predicts a moderate sort of apocalypse for the astronomical milestone year of 2012: "A transformation of consciousness, after a 5000-year era of destruction."

Before setting off pa'l norte, she met up with Mayanists Richard Hansen and John Kermond who detailed the acceleration of ambition and excess which characterised the build-up to societal collapse in the ancient Mayan world. 1600 acres of forest had to be cleared in order to produce the plaster for a single pyramid at El Mirador, for example.

I have no problem with any of this, but I do think that her statement that the Maya had "lived in perfect harmony" with their environment for thousands of years is at best misleading, if not completely erroneous. Humans were a late arrival on this continent and there is considerable scientific evidence showing that their environmental impact from the outset - including mass extinctions - was typical of other major migrations of homo sapiens. But the myth of Native American 'sustainability' is a persistent one, and I can anyway see how it has provided with a handy narrative context for the moral tale being spun by many modern campaigners such as De Paz.

From the Petén she set off for Norway, where she was forced to wait at Longyearbyen until the team were sure that the ice at the Pole was thick enough for their Twin Otter to make a safe landing (1m).

Tara used to be called the Seamaster and belonged to NZ yachtsman-explorer Peter Blake, who was murdered by Amazonian pirates in 2001. It has been acquired by Etienne Bourgeois and continues Blake's legacy as the drifting home of the Tara-Damocles expedition, which has spent 2 years up in the Arctic pack-ice monitoring climate change.

De Paz found that facilities on the Tara were far more primitive than those advertised on the Russian ice-breaker. The toilet was a wooden hut positioned above a hole in the ice some 150m from the vessel...but at least there was sauna located aft.

The expedition cost $50,000 and was part funded by the Paul Mitchell haircare products company, who in return had their flag planted at the Pole next to the Guatemalan one that De Paz had also brought along with her. These formalities dealt with, De Paz settled into life on Tara, interviewing each crew member in turn, and filming their efforts to stave off the constant attacks from polar bears. (Their on-board chuchos were especially brave in this respect.)

The Arctic ice is melting so fast, her film claims, that the NW Passage is already viable in the summer months, and should it disappear completely, there would be an 80% increase in global heat levels, largely because the ocean absorbs the sun's energy while the ice reflects it. This is one statistic I'd like to check up on.

That the ice is thinning as never before is beyond question however. Today, a study by a team from UCL in London suggested that ice-thickness "plummeted" by as much as 49cm last winter, after a five-year period of comparative stability. The UCL data, which derives from satellite observations, predicts a final disappearance of the Arctic ice covering between 2030-2040 - a little later than convenient for the cosmovisionaries.

De los Mayas al Polo Norte will be shown on Canal 3 here in Guatemala at 8pm on November 24.

Quote of the Day

"In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn't seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place "in Paris, France" and winding up with a folksy 'I kid you not.' "
Christopher Hitchens, in Slate

Quote of the Day

"I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will."

Antonio Gramsci

TV viewing diary - The American Future

The first part of Schama's book-accompanying BBC series was full of promise; unfortunately parts 2 and 3 have disappointed.

Schama's method here is to use a number of second tier historical events and personages in order to make some restrained points about the counter-currents behind America's historical momentum...before cordially hinting at their relevance to the 2008 election. This he says is "the moment of truth election" which makes it so fascinating to watch.

The series kicked off with the story of John Wesley Powell, the one-armed old soldier who set about exploring the Colorado River in 1869, an experience which taught him that American expansionism would have to have limits. Weaning Americans off their sense of entitlement to near endless resources has proved immensely difficult, but Schama found signs of hope in the aggressive water management policies of Las Vegas (Lake Mead is at 50% capacity after 9 years of drought) and in the fact that neither Obama nor McCain pretend to keep things going along as blindly as they have been. 

In American War (part 2) Schama again set up an underlying intellectual conflict in American history: the contrasting views of Hamilton and Jefferson on the proper role of the military in their new kind of democratic state. Another binary opposition cropped up at the end of the nineteenth century when Teddy Roosevelt and Mark Twain clashed over the rather Iraq-like insurgency situation which arose after the American 'liberation' of the Philippines. 

Twain had originally thought it an immensely good idea to fight for 'another man's freedom', believing his nation's role in the Spanish-American War to be setting an admirable new precedent, but he quickly became disillusioned with the not-so-closet-imperialism that Roosevelt was soon openly endorsing. 

This story led to some rather weak conclusions about America's perennial examination of conscience every time its military is deployed in the name of protecting freedom in the outside world. It was however interesting to see a speech made by General Ricardo Sanchez (V Corps Commander of Coalition forces 2003-4) at a veterans reunion. Schama said he was expecting a call to arms, but instead what he heard was a call to vote - ultimately "more American". (And by implication a call to vote for Obama.) 

An unwillingness to get down and dirty with yet another of America's 'dirty' historical issues characterised part 3 - American Fervour. Schama promised he'd examine why evangelicals had gone from being champions of social egalitarianism into the most socially-conservative force in the country...but then didn't, at least not to any satisfactory extent. 

He drew some equivocal parallels between Americans' faith and their love of freedom, even finding a black Baptist pastor who professed a belief that Justice was an essentially theological issue. This time, he said, it's the Democrats who are making the "fervent call" to save America.

I've seen other programmes which suggest that there's something rather expedient about Barack Obama's religiosity, but Schama was clearly very keen to preserve the Democratic candidate's status in this narrative as the latest and greatest political exponent of Black church fervour in America.

All in all it's become a rather superficial historical contextualising of this particular "moment of truth" and one that is being undermined by its author's determination to remain polite (or at least only indirectly rude) at all times. 

And with the amount of footage devoted to the peripatetic historian doing - well,  not very much really -  it's hard to escape the conclusion that the whole series is something of a vanity piece. 

Schama and Stephen Fry might have swapped itineraries before setting off, as both have put in stops at Appalachian mining towns and at Arlington National Cemetery which, we learned, was deliberately carved out of the estate of Robert E. Lee. 

TV viewing diary - Stephen Fry in America

So far a bit like Borat...but with fewer cultural learnings. Was there ever a more superficial survey of the 50 states?

Fry seems most at home when he's an invited guest in the home of the wealthier, snobbier sort of American. Miami meanwhile is "a hole". 

I did like that quote from Gore Vidal - one time resident of La Antigua Guatemala - that the puritans came to America not so much to escape persecution, but in order to be able to practice it more freely! 

Other interesting factlets were the cost of owning a New York Yellow Cab - $600,000 - and that just 10% of cabbies in the Big Apple are native born these days.

And we both laughed out loud when a member of the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles gave as his rationale for rejecting one heartfelt plea for early release that "the only reason he stopped killing people is that he ran out of ammo."

TV viewing diary - Amazon with Bruce Parry

I've already sounded off a bit about Parry's seemingly rather partial presentation of the lifestyles and impact of indigenous groups living in the Amazon basin. But in truth the middle episodes of this series were excellent, with Parry's congenial and receptive nature ideally-suited to encounters with marginal, micegenated groups such as the enterprising yet illegal miners of Grota Rico and the Ribeirinhos of the Mamiraua reserve.

His willingness to show the sophisticated side of life in Manaus was also refreshing. You rarely come across any commentators on TV (or even in guide-books) who are prepared to engage with upper-middle class life in Latin America as anything other than essentially immoral and parasitical.

However, it was "timbeeer" again in the last episode in which Parry finally arrived on the Atlantic shoreline. "I'm nackered," he concluded, before delivering a string of platitudes about communities, both Amazonian and global. In the final analysis the great river belongs to neither in quite the same legalistic sense as it does to the government and people of Brazil, and the programme would have been improved by a bit more focus on that dimension.

I felt a bit sorry for the last bunch of indigenes whose hospitality the Beeb took full advantage of, because they'd obviously been misled into believing that a BBC2 audience in the UK could make a major difference to their relative position in the game of Amazonian interest groups.

TV viewing diary - GEM

GEM or Gringo en México is presented by Robert Alexander, a native of San Francisco who has perfected a form of comic Spanish intonation which is almost a match for that of Bruno, the maker of those gourmet paniteaus on Boulangerie.

The idea is that the irrepressably enthusiastic Robert serves as the viewers' guide to a set of peculiarly Mexican pleasures and pastimes. 

I've yet to make up my mind whether the problem with this format is that a little of Robert goes a long way...or indeed whether a little of Mexico goes a long way! 

Pillow biter

Por allí cuentan....

...that this fibreglass effigy of Ronald McDonald is possessed by a mischievous spirit.

Ronald used to recline on his bench out in the garden, but first a night security guard and then several unsuspecting patrons of Antigua's branch of the evil arches were left aghast when, having carelessly sat down beside him, they felt his stripey arms closing around their shoulders...

Other burger-munching chapines claim to have taken several photographs of themselves and their mates on Ronald's bench, only to later discover that the wicked clown had been assuming a number of different poses.

Perhaps in order to curtail the spread of such chismes, poor Ronald has been moved - bench and all - to the very front of the establishment. Note that there's a Caution Wet Floor notice in front of him to prevent anyone getting too close as well!

The simple life...

Is remarkably time-consuming.

I see this clearly in both the daily routines of my 81-year-old father down on the farm and the lifestyle I myself have found myself leading out here in Guatemala.

It's one of the reasons I found it hard to buy into J.G. Ballard's notion of the mental embalmment that inevitably follows retirement to the Costas. It may depend to a large extent on your overall state of mind, but I find it much harder to be bored in Antigua than I did sitting in an office for most of the day in London. Indeed, I'm with Stendahl when he claims in On Love that mental "ossification" is the common ailment of the self-styled business brains with their devotion to "positive and useful things".

I also recall reading about the sensitive souls at the end of the nineteenth century who gave up those bourgeois jobs and the respectability they so despised in order to lead a life of artistic contemplation - only to discover that their efforts to replace material security with pyschological fulfilment was ultimately compromised by the multifarious chores involved in keeping body and soul together.

Perhaps the most enjoyable thing about pursuing la boheme in Antigua is that one can lead a modestly alternative lifestyle without having to feel you have joined some sort of sub-culture. It helps not to be surrounded by shallow fuckwits too, for one can expend an awful lot of spiritual energy constantly positioning onself in opposition to them!

This recent adjustment to an 'outwardly plain yet inwardly rich' existence, has luckily not been forced on us by the sudden evaporation of our assets. We were indeed fortunate to offload our London home and to switch the proceeds into US currency at near enough to the top and bottom respectively of each of those markets, and it's mighty tempting now to revert to Sterling in order to consolidate an underlying gain of around 20%. (Perhaps a little risky though, because I remain convinced that the UK economy is likely to be the most seriously disrupted by the current process of global de-leveraging...though I hear that a loaf of bread in Zimbabwe now costs $500 billion in local money.)

Luck we have certainly had, but I have also been able to codify a few of the more important lessons that the past 12 months have afforded us:

- By all means belong to a herd, but never lose sight of where your individual interests begin and end. I used to work for a company whose business it is to define and to motivate micro-herds and it appeared to me that as a consequence, a truly scary number of its employees themselves end up trapped in the herd mentality.

- Be single-minded and decisive, but the best time for being it may not be now. In the metropolis there is an almost unavoidable bias against inertia, but sometimes doing nothing is simply the most rational thing to do. Opportunities are worth waiting for, and the urge to be steadfastly active can actually act as a brake on certain types of productivity. How many of the denizens of shiny glass towers can sit at their desks twiddling their thumbs and yet keep a clear conscience?

- Another dampener on the rationality of the commercial world is, counterintuitively of course...logic. There are several successful market-movers, such as George Soros, who are happy to admit that maths wasn't their strongest subject at school. How many gifted mathmos and statisticians are tying themselves up in expensive knots right now?

Quote of the Day

"In reality, the entire population of the world today could be housed in the state of Texas, in single-story, single-family houses – four people to a house – and with a typical yard around each home". Thomas Sowell, Economist

(There are 7,438,152,268,800 square feet in Texas, divided by the world's population of roughly 6,600,000,000, which equals 1,126 square feet per person - at a lower population density than the Bronx.)

Culture Crunch

I wonder whether we are set for a resurgence of end of the world scenarios - or at least prospective contemplation of future decay- in multiple art forms, such as fiction and cinema.

Colin Brush at the Penguin Books blog seems to be anticipating the coming zeitgeist by plugging one of the authors that most appealed to me in my early adolesence - John Wyndham.

"Last year, I read 'The Great Crash, 1929' by JK Galbraith. This, more than anything, reminds us that when the financial system catches a cold, it's a full-on Man Cold. That is, there is much loud moaning, plenty of snivelling self-pity, then comes the prolonged sulk. "

Bored of election pollsters' maps?

My old chum Maddie - a Miami-based realtor - has sent me this link to a set of dynamic maps of sub-prime mortgage hot spots across the US. You can drill down to zip code level. 

"Use this map to calculate the chances that your neighborhood will be the next destination of a foreclosure bus tour." says Maddie.

Quote of the Day

"When statesmen turn jobbers, the state may be jobb'd."

Daniel Defoe

Freefall Friday

Dr Doom is back. Speaking at the Hedge 2008 Conference in London, Nouriel Roubini advised delegates that: "We've reached a situation of sheer panic...there will be massive dumping of assets'' and "hundreds of hedge funds are going to go bust."

He further predicted that the deluge of hedge-fund margin calls will lead to a market shut-down.(Let's hope the conference wasn't on the top floor of a tall building!)

Meanwhile the interbank lending rate - LIBOR - actually went up last night, for the first time in 10 days.

OPEC instigated a production cut of 1.5m barrels effective November 1, 500,000 more than most expected, but the price of oil continued its downward plunge this morning regardless.

Russia says it may try to create some sort of national reserve in a desperate effort to unilaterally influence prices...but the Mexicans are meanwhile trying to increase production.

The fact is that OPEC producers are locked in a game of Prisoner's Dilemma with individual members under some pressure to cheat on quotas in order to shore up their national budgets. And lets face it, the governments of Venezuela, Nigeria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia etc aren't the sort you'd bet against pulling a fast one.

AIG says it might need more than the $122.8 billion it's already been given...

In 1929, hotel receptionists in New York used to ask guests checking in whether they had come to stay or to jump.

What I (tend to) believe (1)

I (tend to) believe that as well as being made up of a dynamic, relative system of discernible stuff, our cosmic habitat also encompasses a dynamic, relative system of discernible value. Crucially, I don't however believe that it requires an external guarantor - a being of perfect merit. 

These days I am more comfortable with being described as an atheist, but I'm aware that - especially out here - this will lead some people to conclude that I am either some sort of communist or indeed a general reprobate content to live outside any standard system of values : e.g. a very bad person, inwardly indecent, whatever outward impressions I might otherwise be giving. 

Back home people might conclude that I'm a follower of Professor Richard Dawkins, but although I sympathise with many of his criticisms of the religious outlook, I think it fallacious to consider the existence of an absolute being in terms of probability. (In short because the notion of probability only makes sense from inside the material cosmos, and even then means very different things at the micro and macro levels. Dawkins's biology - and hence also the philosophy he derives from it - is, to a large extent, trapped within the Physics of the nineteenth century. It's therefore disappointing that the humanist/atheist ad-campaign running on buses in the UK has had to be framed in language that reflects this pseudo-scientific metaphysical muddle...but then, Dawkins is at least partially paying for it.) 

I think the Professor might agree with me however when I say that one can attain certain soi-disant spiritual understandings from the act of experiencing religiously-inspired works of art such as Bach's B Minor Mass, without subscribing in any way to the fairy tales which underpin them. 

In my universe-view, everything is connected, such that nothing is either completely whole or entirely separate. Good and Evil are, I suspect, hard-wired into the system which drives this reality, but not Finality. The belief in a final judgment is in my opinion one of the many serious flaws within Christianity, for it creates an undercurrent of righteousness which drags many self-professed Christians away from their inclinations towards charitable deeds and compassion. 

And here's where I might also give probability a role - for it may well be probable that by actively participating ethically in this universe we sentient beings are in some way responding to a fundamental bias within its architecture, such that truly relativistic or even amoral behaviour is always going to be like trying to live your life by going up the down escalator - an available option certainly, but essentially ur doing it wrong if that's the way you choose to go about things.

There are many ideas within the teachings of Christianity that do appeal to me. St Augustine's notion of a coexistant yet separate City of God and City of Man, for example. But for me they do their coexisting and clashing in the here and now, as part of our dynamic reality and it is not possible to posit from this the existence of an eternal celestial reality in the hereafter.

I can also draw all the necessary metaphysical lessons from the fact that Jesus was a carpenter (again it is more probable that someone with his set of values would come from a comparatively modest background), without having to see this as part of a Divine plan, stipulated from beyond time and space, rather than simply one of those interesting yet contingent facts of history. 

Quote of the Day

"If we succumb to a dream world, then we'll wake up to a nightmare."

Jimmy Carter's 1980 Convention acceptance speech