Today’s Laundry

31 December 2009

Pingtung

Yesterday we drove along the coast, south towards Eluanbi. Narrowing quickly, the coastal plain thins down to a point where the mountainous backbone of Formosa slips into the South China Sea. Eventually the highway and the old, Japanese-built railway run nearly together, the latter ducking in and out of pitted concrete tunnels that I figure were built to protect from high seas, landslides and, perhaps, were intended to camouflage it from the air.

As you head south of Pingtung there are banana plantations and factories. Apart from the mountains to the East, just kilometers away but difficult to spot through the sea haze, the plain is as flat as a pool table.

We didn’t make it to Eluanbi – it’s not far but we stopped and took a nap on the coast just north of Kenting. When we woke it was time to drive back.

This morning we drove to Dongkang, the fishing port. The boats don’t get in until 2 pm so we had to settle for yesterday’s catch. However, since we were buying shellfish, prawns and the like, they were live anyway. Once bivalve, a greenish clam-like being, looked delicious and I’m told they are very good with basil and butter. They stick a stalk-ish appendage out of the shell and then spit at you. I will have my vengeance at our New Year’s Eve dinner tonight.

We reminisced as we drove, this route past cane, rice and corn fields, remembering mutual childhoods when the sugar-cane seller would sell a foot-long piece at a time, to Ting here in Taiwan and to me in Sonora (I still wonder where they grew it, certainly not in that desert!). You would chew the fibrous interior and the taste of that sweet juice is a memory that lingers, always there.

Later, back in the relative chaos of Pingtung (relative because it is nothing compared to the bigger cities), we stopped along the street at a bakery that produces marvelous fresh cheese bread and loaves filled with sultanas and nuts. How these people remain so slim is something that still baffles me. Perhaps it’s the water?

Schools were letting out and I think I was the only gwai-lo on the street so that every one of them wanted to shout ‘Happy New Year’ at me. Chinese teenagers seem so naïve compared to their Western homologues.

Ugly?

28 December 2009

Pingtung

On the surface our town here has all the charm of a strip mall. Scooters side-swipe cars and pedestrians with equal insouciance; public sidewalks are extensions of whatever commercial establishment that front them, providing extra display space for clothing racks, stacks of plastic utensils and bowls and bike and cycle parking. The kitchens of eating shops are often outside the premises, on the sidewalk, where it is cooler for the cooks in summer and where the frying and sautéing and stewing acts as a both a visual and olfactory advertisement of the pleasures to be had at the narrow, slightly dirty tables of the establishment. Mostly, too, they are right, those advertisements, the food is basic but flavorsome and prepared with a flair that comes from a combination of a millennia-old cultural fascination with cooking and eating and a need, born of scarcity, to use all of the fresh, edible ingredients that are available.

The bakeries produce soft, fresh pastries that are unrivalled except by the best croissants in Europe. But here they are made in bewildering variety, cheese, cinnamon, sausage, onion, fruit, cream ….

I am still on a crutch, just one now as my recovery from a broken leg proceeds, and limping across the streets is a challenge. I hobble across the intersection; no one intends to kill me and no one does; one old woman, plump and with crooked teeth that she’s proud to show, smiles at me as I hobble by, gunning the hand accelerator of her scooter. It’s a nice smile.

The 7-11 is gleaming and offers not just the usual mix of chips and beer and cigarettes but an aisle of fresh packaged food that is appetizing to look at and smells delicious. The clerk, seventy if he’s a day, enjoys selling me the English-language paper, speaking a combination of Mandarin and a version of English that is just enough for my scant Chinese that we can transact some business. Business done, we smile, wave and say ‘good-bye’ and ‘tsai-tsien’ – ‘see you again’. I hope we do.

Outside the bakery I sit and read the paper and sip at a cappuccino that is as good as any I’ve had in Italy.

Later. I still have the smile that the chubby lady on the scooter gave me this morning.

South of Cancer, North of Capricorn, East of Bengal

27 December 2009

Pingtung

The windows are open and the early evening breeze rustles at the curtains. In the empty lot behind our house there is insect call – chirping mostly. There are a few birds but the last of the butterflies has gone for the day. The grass was cut a couple of months ago but it has grown back and is now thigh high. There are a couple of renegade banana plants and a few trees, mimosas I think.

A fountain drips; the water masks most of the puttering of scooters a few streets away. For Taiwan the neighborhood is quiet, calm. Although the markets are still open and the food stalls are lighting up for the evening, the pace is slower on this Sunday. It may not yet be a day of rest for these industrious people but they are learning to make it a day at half-speed.

We are surrounded by our things – photos of Alex as a little girl, a picture of us on our wedding day, my books, candles, framed remembrances, the Encyclopedia.

There are smells, sounds, feelings that define what it is to be back here. Our house is in Pingtung, now virtually a suburb of Kaohsiung, second city of the island, a huge place. Thirty or more years ago I recall walking the streets around the old port, which was then still a dangerous place with sailors pitching out of bars and lost ex-pats playing dice and whoring. Container cranes have replaced swaggering Greeks and beer-soaked Yanks. The last of the hangers-on after the US closed the airbase are gone. There is a Costco, an Ikea, the Dream Mall (either the biggest or one of the biggest in Asia) and Starbucks and McDonald’s, there is even a modern metro whose lobby is ceilinged with stained glass.

I would stay at the Kingdom Hotel. The Ambassador, on the other side of the Love River, was more modern, plastic. The Kingdom was comfortable, smoky. Middle class Japanese businessmen and western expats on assignment stayed there. The bar was carpeted and traditional: stools, Taiwan beer on tap, bottled Guinness and Heineken. Sometimes you played ‘balut’ to see who bought the round – a game with five dice in a cup and a scoring system whose complexities increased in proportion to the amount of beer ingested.

Across the street from the Kingdom there was a ragged row of bars and cheap, Western-style restaurants. The bar girls spoke the hoarse English of bar girls everywhere in the Orient from Seoul to Saigon, raspy and strangely exotic. The customers at the Kingdom bar were a mix. The most interesting were often the Westerners, mostly Americans in Taiwan with the occasional Brit, who had come out years before, during the War or as engineers or commercial officers for one of the hongs and who had fallen down the black hole which can be Asia. Frequently they were well read and intelligent. Mostly they were lost and their stories were the stuff of fiction, wars and bright lights. I would drink with them, beer fuddled and seduced by their tales, into the early hours. Sometimes after hours of drinking and suddenly hungry, we would wander to a nearby night market and eat noodles and pork belly.

We were all, in a way, the off-spring of tea planters, opium traders, China Marines … even a few missionaries.

They call this half of the ring out here, the Asian edge of the Pacific, stretching from Jakarta through Singapore, Bangkok, Manila, Hong Kong, Taipei, Seoul, Osaka and, now, Shanghai and Shenzhen, the rim. It is the edge, still.

Today's Laundry

19 December 2009

Madrid

So Google has been fined about 400,000 euros for digitizing French language books. What idiots occupy these positions of responsibility in the French Government? Language, and literature, are, if not originally, open-source cultural tools, aren’t they? Yes, if you write something and copyright it, it’s yours for a time and you get to make money off it. Fair enough. What doesn’t make sense is for some narrow-minded linguistic chauvinist to participate further in the murder of a beautiful language. A hundred and fifty years ago – I was going to write ‘a hundred years ago’ but my asseveration wouldn’t have been true – French was pretty much on a par with English, a world language. Today you can speak it in France, at least in France outside of Paris where any attempt by a foreigner to communicate in the local lingo is regarded as an act of lese majeste. You can try it in the countryside of that beautiful country and it’s bienvenue, no matter how fractured your pronunciation and limited your vocabulary. You can speak it in Quebec, in Gabon, in the rest of Francophone Africa, in Haiti and a few other places but that’s pretty much it. When I was in college we were conned by French language grifters who persuaded us to take courses in the tongue and then disillusioned further when we learned that if you wanted to work in a French speaking country, you were more likely than not to end up in some desperately poor, malarial dictatorship.

So, we’re witnessing the further decline of French. The lesson is that if you don’t make your cultural patrimony accessible, it becomes ossified, fit only for a museum. Literature – even the bad stuff – needs to be available if it’s going to make any difference to people. In France they’ve decided not to participate in the democratization of literature and culture that is being delivered for other tongues across the internet. You won’t be able to call up a free copy of an out-of-print and out-of-copyright book in that language. Spanish has sped by French as a world language and English is completely dominant (I recall over-hearing a business conversation some years ago in the lobby of a Seoul hotel whose participants were Finnish, Chinese, Russian and Japanese, all speaking some form of English). Chinese is not far behind and Arabic and the Turkic languages will no doubt all have an international role. Only French will not be at the party and that’s because the fools decided not to attend, despite being cordially welcomed if they did.

And in Catalunya they continue to march backwards. A meaningless referendum was held for about a third of the voters in the region this past week. About a third of that one-third actually bothered to vote. The vote was to express support for Catalunyan autonomy/independence. So, let’s see, one-third of one-third is about one-ninth I think. Seventy percent of that one-ninth voted for some form of independence, amounting, in the end, to less than 10% of the voting age population. Hell, I bet that you’d get more voting for Texas independence!

So what is Catalunyan independence about? I reckon it’s about inferiority. The entire region is riven with a resentful, hard-headed dislike of Madrid and Castilla in general. There’s a history behind this, Franco was rough on the place. But Franco died a long time ago and Spain is now part of the EU. The central Government spends a lot of money on Catalunya and there’s no reason for this silly posturing.

Catalan is a ridiculous language. It is something between French and Spanish. If it wants to survive and people want to speak it, I’ve no problem. When the misbegotten regional government in Barcelona decided, however, that there wasn’t enough of it being spoken and it began to promote its use over Spanish, it was a body blow to the economy. Catalunya has always had a strong, industrial economy. Its people are creative and enterprising. Hobbling it with a requirement that forces the use of Catalan in place of a more international tongue is even worse than what their cousins across the Pyrenees are doing with French. There are very few people who speak Catalan but there are now signs in Barcelona that tell you it’s okay to reply in Catalan when someone addresses you in Spanish. The schools require students to learn Catalan. It’s no surprise that more and more back-office work is being transferred to Madrid where I suspect the regional Government doesn’t care whether you answer your phone in Spanish, French, English, Mandarin or even Catalan; the point is to communicate and get the work done.

Barcelona needs to take a lesson from the Dutch. There is no stupid language posturing. The Dutch speak Dutch, German, French, whatever they need to get things done. You can walk into a shop virtually anywhere in the country and do your shopping in whatever language you want, your money is what does the talking. Be practical Catalunya!

Whew! I feel better.

Sunday coffee ....13 Dec. 2009

Madrid. It is before 8 AM and the sky is cloudy. It is a Sunday morning in early September. We are in the barrio of Salamanca, the most expensive area in the center of the city. I can see a woman in high heels perched on the window ledge of a brick building, some four floors above a courtyard. The building is modern compared to its neighbors, built in the 1950’s; those that abut it date from the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

The woman is blond and even at a distance I can tell she is dressed fashionably. She is holding on to the bricks around the window. She is edging her way along the ledge to an open landing, about a meter away from the window. If she stretches, she can just reach the edge of the wall and pull herself into the open stairwell.

I am standing on my roof terrace, peering over the edge, watching the woman.

She is a thief.

A handbag is strung over her shoulder. I am certain that it contains the jewelry that she has stolen from the apartment whose window she has just climbed out of.

I think about yelling at her, about calling the police. I am afraid, though, that if I do the first, it may startle her and she could lose her footing – the high heels she is wearing are far from suitable for second story work. I think about the risk of her falling. Her life would be forfeit if she did lose her balance, the courtyard below is paved with limestone slabs and it is a drop of 30 or 40 feet. If I elect the second course of action, without startling her by calling out, and I just call the police, by the time they come she will be long gone. I muse that the purpose of their response will change radically to an investigation of death by misadventure from presumed thievery if I do yell and she loses her grip and crashes onto the stones below.

A few seconds only have passed and the woman climbs safely onto the landing. She straightens her dress, I notice that she is tall and slender; whether she is pretty I can’t determine, her features are too vague at this distance. I am certain she is Eastern European, probably a Romanian. Or perhaps I am wrong? I have deducted her ethnicity from my experience of the city. It is full of economic migrants; many of them work – as plumbers, carpenters, electricians, maids, waitresses – but many are criminal, pick-pockets, muggers and, more daringly, robbers who climb into carelessly open windows, left so by their tenants, seemingly secure because they are several floors above the street.

In an instant the blond thief moves off down the stairs and I know that within a few seconds more she will be at street level and out of the building. She will make her way down Ayala, which is empty at this hour, to Serrano where there are already a few pedestrians on their way to early Mass or to buy a loaf of bread or a newspaper. She will blend in and vanish.

There is no time for me to go down from our seventh floor roof terrace and around the corner to pursue her; among other things, I am in my bath-robe and I would surely lose her trail if I stopped to change. The alternative, scurrying down the street in my bathrobe and slippers, is embarrassing and I discount the option. I ask myself if my behavior is actually cowardice and am I just looking for excuses for my inaction?

My early morning coffee on the roof, usually a time of inchoate, multi-directional musing, has turned into a period of singular reflection. How have I behaved during this drama? What did I see? Why have I chosen to interpret it the way that I did? Have I witnessed a crime? I saw a woman leave an apartment in an unorthodox manner; she climbed along a ledge and I concluded that she was a jewelry robber, a second-story woman if you will. But, was she? Could she have simply been the resident of the apartment and lost her key which in this case was required for both opening and closing the door, inside or out?

That line of speculation is spurious, I move back from the edge of existentialism. I know that she is a thief and that I witnessed the last moments of her crime – the escape. I have never seen her before. No one would take the risk of death like she had if they weren’t up to no good. There remain a couple of scant possibilities: Perhaps she was leaving a lover? Perhaps she murdered someone inside the apartment and by climbing out of the window she supposed that suspicion would be directed towards someone other than her?

The sun has risen higher and the chilly temperature of the dawn has given way to a pleasant warmth that I can feel through the terry cloth of my robe. My shoulders are relaxed as I lean on the wall that encloses our roof-top garden. I take my coffee and turn away from the scene of the crime and move back to my chair. I sit and look up. The sky this morning is calm. There are a few cirrus clouds scudding about, propelled by winds several thousand feet above the calm at ground level, diverting me by their shape-shifting. I can no longer see the neighboring building, the open window that has been violated is now a mental picture only and what I’ve just witnessed is already fading into a mind imprint that seems unreal. It will be a memory that one morning, this morning, months later, will, without conscious thought, float to the surface of my ruminations.

Bette Jane Turney: September 2nd, 1924 to November 5th, 2009

Madrid

6 November 2009

My Mother died yesterday. She was 85 years old. She died in Tucson, Arizona where she’d lived for the past 30-some years. My Dad died in Tucson about 18 years ago.

I last saw Mom in August when I visited her twice, one evening and the following morning. She knew it was me but when I went back to see her the next morning, she had forgotten that I’d seen her the night before.

During her last year or two Mom mellowed into a sweet old lady – my nieces and nephew confirmed this. Certainly the last time I saw her she was exactly that, mellow and sweet with a smile plastered onto her face. Perhaps she’d found some peace, I hope that was the case.

I had a good childhood. My Mom was loving, protective and smothering. It took me many years to get over the last but I did. It wasn’t easy and there was a lot of broken china. Yesterday, soon after I got the news of Mom’s passing I wrote a bit about that broken china. It’s not the time to put that into the blog; it needs to steep a bit. Now is the time to simply record her passing, to be grateful that it was peaceful and that she had her daughter and two of her grandchildren with her when she went.

We were all prepared for this. I knew Mom was going, the doctors told us it was only a matter of time. I’d said my goodbyes but, still, when Meghan, my niece, called to give me the news, I stopped and sat and stared at nothing. There was a hole in the universe as she passed out. Whatever it is that life is made of soon washed over the hole and you would have had no notion that it had ever been there but, for a bit, that hole was palpable and there. It doesn’t mean she won’t be remembered or that she won’t have influence beyond death but the pattern of living was quickly restored. I suspect this happens however many times a day someone dies.

I can’t talk much about how I felt yesterday because I’m still not sure. I can report that I felt her passing and there was regret – about things that I will write about another time – but the feeling was really a combination of gratitude for the ease of it all for her and the emptiness that she left in me. Both for good and bad my Mother was a big part of my existence, more in earlier years than recently, but still a substantial percentage of whatever influences went into making me. That influence is now physically gone but it will never be entirely absent, both the good and the bad; I like to think that the good is more than the bad. I know that my Dad, whose passing I genuinely mourned and still do, still has a big influence, a positive one. My Mom will retain an influence as well; as I noted, not all for the good, but still there.

So, Mom, thank you for loving me all your life and for my childhood. There is much that we could have said and much that we could have done differently but there is no ‘do-over’. I pray that you ultimately had no shadow over the memories, no aching regrets. I have regrets but they are soft and indistinct as I hope yours were, having no greater weight on the scale than the warm memories of Christmases, picnics, rides in the country, family dinners and vacations at Kino. On balance its okay! Be at peace!

Financial Crisis? Nope, not here, it's more like Armageddon!

Madrid

28 October 2009

I'm finally beginning to realise how very close to disaster we came a year ago. We are still experiencing the after-shocks of the Lehman failure. Bank lending was very tight this past February and I was anecdotally telling people in the City of London that the banking houses in Madrid had been very lonely places, there wasn't anything going on.

Well, my friends, the truth is that there is still not all that much going on. Here in Spain we are at about 20% unemployment, highest in the EU. In my business, renewable energy, the price of assets is softening and the number of them on the market (for re-sale or for sale after construction) is growing. Owners who six months back were willing to sit on an investment, expecting that prices would begin to rise and that terms would evolve in their favour if only they held out, are now needier, they haven't seen many serious buyers and they haven't closed many deals. The terms are becoming more favourable for buyers and prices are, at a minimum, not rising.

This is not just a shift in my perception of what's happening, it's an important augury of what's really developing out there; there's a realisation taking hold that this is going to take a while to work out. The physical evidence supports this belief; the answer to what actually is going on in the economy is 'not much'. We are seeing a continuation of 'life support' activities, which you'd expect: groceries, fuel, agriculture. What we aren't seeing is what we did expect would be happening by now: a return to some form of normality in the rest of the economy. Naturally, we expected construction to lag; well, actually, to remain comatose for at least another 12 to 18 months. What we didn't expect was that everything else would be hurting. Deals just aren't happening and I think that's for two reasons: banks are not lending (at least they aren't lending easily and without extensive questioning of the deal) and buyers are very much more conservative than they were (and than we expected them to be at this point). The buyers are running scared. The due diligence is longer and more exhaustive. The desire to reduce the number of unknowns combined with a bull market in risk aversion has slowed the pace of business to a dangerously slow speed.

Sclerotic banks, needy sellers, conservative buyers: the way it stands now, we are going nowhere quickly. You cannot make buyers less conservative or quicker unless they've got some confidence in the economy as a whole. Banks are the only part of the dysfunctional algorithm that can be artificially stimulated. The upshot is clear, Governments have got to stimulate credit, they have to get banks to open the taps. Sellers will move enough in price and on terms to stimulate the buyers if they think the banks have enough confidence to lend.

So, are banks the bad guys in this picture? Yep, you betcha! There is no ambiguity; they got us into this mess and they are doing very little to get us out.

The photo-voltaic industry in Spain benefits from a feed-in tariff that is guaranteed by the Spanish Government for 25 years. What that means is that if you can get your solar cells producing correctly and the power you generate is evacuated into the grid, you will get paid. Unless it's got what they call trackers (little machines that turn the solar cell modules so that they get more sun), a photo-voltaic plant has, essentially, no moving parts and is undoubtedly the least risky way to produce power that there is. In other words, if you get your modules in place, there is not much that is going to stop you generating power and if you do, the Spanish Government guarantees you'll get paid. For a lender it doesn't get any better -- the deal is transparent, tick some technical and legal boxes and you've got a nice, steady income.

With these pluses, you'd expect that the photo-voltaic business, along with other renewable energies, would be one of those that would go through the crisis without much damage. Of course the industry isn't immune, a lot of sellers are construction companies that were battered by the residential bubble and have to liquidate assets to improve the balance sheet so, what do they sell, the assets they think will realise the most value, their renewable projects. Still, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the business (except maybe some over-enthusiasm on the part of Government when they first thought up these rich tariffs). Why can't we get things going then?

The answer is, again, simply that the banks aren't moving. Like deer in the headlights they are simply watching Armageddon hurtling towards them. They think that by strengthening their balance sheets they will survive and any loans they make now apparently do nothing towards that end. But, the fact is that theories about what percentages you need to be safe are all simply calculated risk assessments. The presume that we won't go over some financial cliff where all of those guesses (for that, in the end, is all they are) about bad loan reserves and so on are just so much statistical nonsense.

So, how do we get things going? Really simple, in my view; make some loans, prudent ones, but make them and make them soon! We've got to get money moving or we're really going to face some serious troubles.

Baby Einsteins?

27 October 2009

Madrid

To our horror, we've just learned that the 'Baby Einstein' videos from Disney (actually, I've been fairly busy recently and this is the first I've heard of them) do not work. Nope, you cannot put your baby down in front of the television, turn on the video while you have a beer, cook dinner or read pornography and have your baby come out at the end of half-an-hour a budding genius. Apparently the American Pediatric Society (or Association?) doesn't think you ought to have baby in front of a screen at all during the first two years of life. I believe, technically, that the Pediatric Society has actually contacted the American Association of Podiatrists on the matter because of a serious concern about Disney having put their foot in it.

So, what was happening in Baby Fido's mind as he sat in front of the screen? From the very little I've read (and I mean the very little I scanned, this is an issue I'm milking because it strikes me as silly), it appears that the infant viewers were simply overwhelmed by the colors, noises and movement on the screen. They do not 'get' much or any of it; they are, seemingly, mesmerized by the videos and sit there, just like adults, their minds turned into some sort of flickering screen-induced mush, staring gape-mouthed until their parents recall their existence and turn off the machine.

Too bad there is no such protection for adults; I've been known to sit there stupidly watching one repeat of Friends after another, completely bereft of any indication of sentience, letting the noise and the color and the movement on the screen wash over me, just like junior.

Gordon Brown likes Nick Griffin .....

24 October 2009, Madrid

Nick Griffin appeared on 'Question Time' because Gordon Brown and other Labourites wanted to encourage interest in the BNP. Every vote for the far-right is a vote that the Conservatives lose. Gordon will lose this coming June unless he pulls every sneaky, underhanded, low-down political trick he can think of. Even then, though, I think the disgust level across the country may just be high enough that he'll be looking for something else to do this coming summer.

Ups and Downs of a Broken Leg

24 October 2009

Saturday, Madrid

Most of what goes on when you have a broken leg is not all that positive. I broke my left leg ingloriously in four places, managing to twist myself into a knot on a flat piece of sidewalk outside my office. It took two hours of surgery and enough screws to open a hardware store to put me back together. I then had a week on my back in the hospital, another week at home, still on my back and, finally, a trip back to the hospital to put on a semi-permanent cast of fiberglass. I now make my way around on crutches, I'm not allowed to put any weight on the broken leg for another three weeks or so.

I've learned that Madrid is not very friendly for disabled people. I suspect this is a fact about much of the world of which I was, heretofore, blithely ignorant. It's even hard to get into the hospital – I had to wait outside for an orderly to come and get me with a wheel chair, the steps are not friendly and the ramp is a marathon without a rail to hang on to. I cannot go to my favourite cafe near the office because the steps in and out are very steep. Getting into the office itself is a chore – there are two very short flights of steps before you get to the lift but neither has a rail for support so I have to call a colleague to come down and lend me his arm so I can hop up the stairs without risking another broken leg.

Our apartment is called an 'atico' and, in local usage here in Madrid, that means it occupies more than one floor on the top level of the building. After the first two times of hopping perilously up and down from the main to the bedroom floor and, simultaneously, scaring the hell out of myself, I figured out that discretion called for me to sit on my butt and scoot up and down, step by step. It looks undignified but it has taken most of the risk out of getting to my desk, to my bed and to the living room.

Bathing is a very long and involved process – I yearn for the luxury of just standing under a shower and letting the hot water just run and run (not very 'green' of me but I promise to do it only once).

I get up early, no one told me that there would an irritating amount of relatively minor pain that would affect my sleep. I put on my robe and have figured out how to make coffee and take a cup of it to my desk (I fill a big glass half full with coffee, put it in the pocket of my robe and try to hop smoothly back to the desk where I then pour the coffee into a smaller, more convenient vessel for drinking).

Everything takes a long time and I get tired. I weighed about 220 pounds when this began. I've probably lost about 15 or so pounds but its still quite a work-out to use my crutches to go any distance – I can certainly feel my shoulders and upper body getting stronger. And, that's one of the upsides of all this – I'm actually getting in better shape! I do, however, need more naps!

I just went for a brief walk – out the door of our building, down to the end of the block, a few minutes rest on the edge of a planter and back. I think it's time for another nap.

Nihilism redux

Dirdam
22 July 2009

It's truly fortunate that in these times of economic crisis, rising unemployment, social disorder, terrorism and plain, pathetic pessimism, we still have that old reliable, nihilism, to fall back on. Without pillars of order and stability like nihilism, I believe, truly, that we'd be trying to hug smoke, to nail jello to the wall, to base our profundities on marshmallows......

Nihilism speaks to our poetic core. If you combine it with a healthy irony, the mixture is a truly potent one; a union in which bleakness plays no role; there is no room for delusional optimism in ironic nihilism -- the truth is what is not and what is not is false!

8 February 2008, Madrid ...

Boy am I pissed off ...

We have been given an opportunity to re-centre our civilisation. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that opportunity has been thrust upon us. It’s cant to talk about getting back to basics but it isn’t to talk about getting back to Aristotle. Is it actually possible that someone can speak to us from several thousand years previously and have something important and relevant to say? I suspect that a lot of evangelical Christians would answer the question with a defiant YES. Only a few would think of some bearded Greek (if, indeed, he did sport one).

On 11 September 2001 I lost my faith in Christianity, Islam and Judaism. I realised that day that those faiths are built on emotion and it’s emotion that makes people drive planes filled with innocent people in buildings filled with even more innocent people. It’s emotion that makes people believe in the words of some crazed lunatic who feeds them poisoned cool-aid or ends up leading them to fiery deaths in a compound outside Waco, Texas.

Aristotle does not talk to my emotions, he reasons with me. He is the foundation of the civilisation of which I want to be a part and of which I hope I am the child. Democracy is a work of reason. Justice is a work of reason. I believe that happiness – true happiness – is a work of reason.

We have been assaulted by terrible events these past 10 years. We have had leaders who did not understand the full magnitude of what happened and whose reaction was emotional rather than reasonable. We have encouraged and permitted greed to rule our economies and passion our politics. It is time to put a stop to this and let our finances and our politics be ruled by more human values. You see, as human beings, we are the inheritors of reason and logic and we ought to adhere to those superior values and not let ourselves be pulled down by the same emotions that appear to characterise the behaviour of jackals.

Actually, I may have overstated that last bit about jackals and, for that, I apologise to all jackals. In the end, their behaviour is rational.