It went on like that. Crazy, simple questions from the dean. Noam collecting a pay check with his answers. He did answer questions about the polar bears. He said, in effect, the rest of the world wants multi-polarism; the US wants uni-polarism. The US hates Russia. The US was okay with China until they started doing capitalism better and began yapping about changing the world reserve dumpling. Yo no soy can do, said America, and slapped down economic sanctions so fuckin hard that for a moment you had Nam-like flashback to that domnoes game you witnessed years ago at the apple orchard after work when a picker from Kingston slammed down some boxcars and screamed Ras Klat! triumphantly at his mate from Montego Bay. America. does. not. f*ck. around. Chomsky tells her:
The raging issue is the war in Ukraine. The developing issue is the US conflict with China, which in the longer term is far more significant" China is, of course, a second major power in the world. It's growing, developing, it's pursuing its own course, developing loan and investment and development projects throughout Eurasia, reaching to Africa, Middle East, South Africa, South Asia, even to Latin America. It's now the major trading partner for Latin America. The US is determined to try to prevent Chinese economic development.
Now that's a powerful answer there. You know you've been answered. Socrates would have been wowed.
Lori follows with the next question: So what does governance look like in 50 to 100 years? Could multinationals be more powerful than elected or other types of governments? I sh*t my pants laughing. Instead of wasting the loamy loam, I pulled a pudge out and put it on my desk and grew a red rose out of it. (Poets can do that kind of thing.) Noam, on the other hand, decided to humor Lori:
Very extraordinary power in the domestic policy of the United States and other state capitalist countries. How are they going to act when they are told they cannot deal with one of their major markets? Take Apple Computer's biggest corporation in the world. One of their main markets is China. Are they going to agree to lose the China market? That's where if you have an iPhone, it's probably assembled in China under the direction of a Taiwanese corporation, Foxconn. That's the way the world system works. The US is now trying to break that. Us has helped establish that system, of course. Now it's trying to dismantle it. Nobody knows how that's going to work out. But those are the processes that are taking place right at this moment.
Did that answer her question about 50 years from now? I dunno. I was away. Taking a sh*t.
On and on it went though. The thing I noticed was that Noam mentioned nuclear war and climate change right off the bat in the interview. He usually includes democracy's demise, too. He didn't mention it. I worried. I drew conclusions on the wall, as Dylan would say. Got me thinking.
A couple years back I was reading the 7th edition of the National Intelligence Council's Global Trends: A More Contested World. Basically, the report said that democracy is already kaput. There isn't any out there; it's just mirrors and smoke, bread and circuses; Caligula clones feeding postmodern lapsing Christians to the lions of industry for a lark, folks holding up there iPhones with emoji thumbs down, saying, Please, Caligua, we've paid good money for spectacle. Less over the top, the report said,
During the past year, the Covid-19 pandemic has reminded the world of its fragility and demonstrated the inherent risks of high levels of interdependence. In coming years and decades, the world will face more intense and cascading global challenges ranging from disease to climate change from the disruptions of new technologies and financial crises.
Rolling pearl harbors, Batman! We seem to have taken to the theme. Our greatest gift to the Ukraine war campaign may be the "kamikaze" drones pouring into the "theater." We almost got Putin the other day with a drone. Terror! Terror! Terror! Well, he gets ousted next year in the Russian national election anyway.
There are five themes in the report: global challenges; fragmentation; disequilibrium; contestation; and, adaptation. It's grim. In the chapter Scenarios for 2040: Charting the Future Amid Uncertainty, we are offered thoughts ranging from "a Renaissance of Democracies" to "Tragedy and Mobilization." The spooks insist that the US will have to lead that rebirth of the Big D, but don't tell us how they take no responsibility for undermining its integrity around the world with neoliberal claptrap designed to enslave the masses in materialist death spirals. Still, I like the idea of a renaissance. It's sexy. But 2040? What, are you on drugs?
Another book I laughed my way through recently -- and reviewed -- was former NATO head James Stavrisis's novel, 2034: A Novel of the Next World War. It's part of a nifty trilogy: 2054 and 2074 follow. Of the latter, Stavridid said, "Climate change comes home to roost." Laughable right? I don't know why he bothered with books two and three, as, a la the bestseller novel of the 60s, Fail Safe, two cosmopolitan cities are nuked, and if you think the sh*t hit the fan after Cheney/Halliburton did 9/11 (just kidding, don't have me killed). In Fail Safe it was Moscow and New York; in 2034 it's Shanghai and New York. Something about New York. Always the target. I don't know why Shanghai (as opposed to Beijing). When I think of Shanghai I think of the fortune cookie-sloganeering of Charlie Chan and his wisecracking first generation American number one son filled with the anxiety of figuring out what Being American means (like everybody else). It's a moveable feast, ontology. Also, I read somewhere that a former head of the FDA (Slaou, Operation Warp Speed) had operated a neuroscience lab in Shanghai and after I got over feeling queasy I thought of the babies cloned by a Chinese doctor who wanted to be a designer kid artiste-doctor, who "accidentally enhanced" the brains of the manipulants. And, of course, there's that expression: to get shanghaied. Ouch. Which freely associates at this moment to democracy. Democracy has been shanghaied.
No, really, the title of Stavridis's book says it all. They have a date set for our end. His book is full of cardboard and cliches and funny ha-has only military types would find amusing -- like sailing in the USS Michelle Obama, an aircraft carrier, during the pivotal, perhaps world-ending dispute between Chinese and Americans in the South China Sea off Taiwan. Funny reference, huh?
And people die in the book like they mean nothing: characters have arrested development; signs and omens abound (remember how they placed that black cat in Zero Dark Thirty just before the sheik blowed up the CIA?) and the sex remains depressingly casual, like a romance novel that's fallen under the new censorship regime at sensitive high schools, whose administrators feel that cupping a breast on page 34 is tantamount to inviting the reader to a casting couch, a gateway to Lolita. (I hear that the rewrite of To Kill a Mockingbird is going to skip the trial.) It's like critical thinking skills were the new lynch target; the Socrates theme again. And Wired magazine, which I've begun to suspect is an asset of the intelligence community (IC), ran the fuckin novel almost in its entirety, touting its end of the world thinking, as if eschatology were the new orange blacked and nine-eyed goat fur was the new fashion craze all the up-noses were wearing to the Fall Ball.
And because I can't seem to get enough of this stuff, I read an obscure General Mark Milley-commissioned Army report a couple of years back that was more telling than I wanted it to be about the likely future of America. It was titled, Implications of Climate Change for US Army(2019). Milley, who has been called a coup-maker and a coup-breaker and seems to hang on from administration to administration, once called the Chinese Army and told them not to be worried about getting bombed as Trump had implied with his recent rhetoric. Perhaps an act of treason. Technically. (It was reminiscent of Sy Hersh's account of the last days of Nixon when folks were scrambling to keep the football away from the oft-besotted Tricky Dick who wanted to nuke someone before he left office.)
The low-down is that the Milley Report has a clinically depressing forecast for the Army's ability to do much of anything about Climate Change, due to the intractability of the rigid structure of military bureaucracy, its vested interests, revolving doors, pounds and pounds of headlines still needing to be stapled to top generals's chests, as Dylan would say. The Report implies that the Army's critical mission(s) will continue to be sidetracked by rolling pearl harbors that will eventuate an end to democracy in America and a soft coup that begins with roadblocks and emergency deployments to fend off storms. Then those 450 million guns on the loose in America will find something to do. You'll see, mofo.
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