I went to the Boston Symphony last Saturday, Nov. 1. The first part of the program was Brahms' Violin Concerto, the second one was Richard Strauss' Symphonia domestica. I don't "get" Richard Strauss, except perhaps the famous and soaring Also sprach Zarathustra. I probably would nickname this piece the Cacophonia domestica, and that does not even take into account the gross narcissism of the whole thing, which is supposed to describe an entire day of the life of the Strauss family. If you want to describe "A Day in the Life..." of anything in music, give me the Pastoral Symphony anyday.
The program notes were very smartly written. About the Brahms concerto, they did not just focus on that piece, but contrasted it with the other great violin concertos (the Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Bruch — I have no idea why it omitted the Tchaikovsy). Some of the criticism made by others in the past, and reported in these notes, was rather shocking. For example, von Bülow said that other concertos were written for the violin, but Brahms had written his against it. And the reviewer contemptuously dismissed the Mendelssohn as an easy and gentle piece. I can't say anything about the ease aspect, but I have always found that concerto to be very moving, starting from the first bar (one of the earliest entrances of the solo instrument in the repertoire, I'm sure).
Friday, November 7, 2008
Rendez-Vous 2010
After the success of California Proposition 8 on the ballot three days ago, which writes into the Constitution of California that same-sex couples are not allowed to marry, my friends and I seem to have been shellshocked for a couple of days — even though the polls had actually predicted that we would lose this fight.
We're finally emerging from this catatonic state, and some of us have been exchanging messages. I wrote this today to other Board members of Stanford Pride, and I don't think I could paraphrase it better again, so I'll just quote myself here (I know it sounds arrogant the way I just said it):
"We need to lick our wounds a bit, but I think that this accident teaches us a lesson: we need to be proactive, and not wake up a month before the election, suddenly realizing that the polls are against us, and do a rearguard fight in the last couple of weeks to come back.
This being said, we can all be immensely proud that we did come back from a 10% deficit in the polls a month ago, to only 4% (and perhaps less once all the ballots are counted) in the end. This is still a tremendous improvement over the 22% spread from elections on this topic years ago.
History is on our side. In 2010, there will be about 3% of the voters who are currently between 16 and 18 years of age. While they are not all on our side, I think it is clear that young people are much more liberal on social issues, and much more used to studying and living side by side with "out" LGBT people whom they wouldn't think of hurting on the basis of their sexuality. Conversely, 3% of last Tuesday's voters, out of the older age range, will have passed away, and while I don't wish anyone dead, this is how the electoral base shifts over time even if you don't convince anyone else to change their vote.
I really believe that if we organize better, and maintain the effort throughout the period from now to the next election, we can reverse this unfortunate vote. And if not in 2010, then surely in 2012 (but 2010 must be our immediate goal).
I also welcome the idea that Stanford Pride should play a bigger role. I wonder if we can meet with our counterparts at Berkeley, UCLA, etc… the larger universities in the state. I also notice that one of the first Facebook groups about "repealing Prop. 8 in 2010" was created by UC Davis students. An intercollegiate consortium could be very effective in terms of its outreach. Everyone in the state must be at most 2-3 degrees apart from an LGBT alums from one of these colleges. Well… perhaps not in the boondocks, but the people in the boonies are not really a very useful target audience for us. The primary audience are the people who are educated and intelligent enough to change their vote once we explain to them what's really at stake and that some of the things they were told are lies."
I don't yet know if we will succeed in our resolution to be activists about this. Two years is a long time to maintain a level of engagement such as that which may be required here. But we must try.
We're finally emerging from this catatonic state, and some of us have been exchanging messages. I wrote this today to other Board members of Stanford Pride, and I don't think I could paraphrase it better again, so I'll just quote myself here (I know it sounds arrogant the way I just said it):
"We need to lick our wounds a bit, but I think that this accident teaches us a lesson: we need to be proactive, and not wake up a month before the election, suddenly realizing that the polls are against us, and do a rearguard fight in the last couple of weeks to come back.
This being said, we can all be immensely proud that we did come back from a 10% deficit in the polls a month ago, to only 4% (and perhaps less once all the ballots are counted) in the end. This is still a tremendous improvement over the 22% spread from elections on this topic years ago.
History is on our side. In 2010, there will be about 3% of the voters who are currently between 16 and 18 years of age. While they are not all on our side, I think it is clear that young people are much more liberal on social issues, and much more used to studying and living side by side with "out" LGBT people whom they wouldn't think of hurting on the basis of their sexuality. Conversely, 3% of last Tuesday's voters, out of the older age range, will have passed away, and while I don't wish anyone dead, this is how the electoral base shifts over time even if you don't convince anyone else to change their vote.
I really believe that if we organize better, and maintain the effort throughout the period from now to the next election, we can reverse this unfortunate vote. And if not in 2010, then surely in 2012 (but 2010 must be our immediate goal).
I also welcome the idea that Stanford Pride should play a bigger role. I wonder if we can meet with our counterparts at Berkeley, UCLA, etc… the larger universities in the state. I also notice that one of the first Facebook groups about "repealing Prop. 8 in 2010" was created by UC Davis students. An intercollegiate consortium could be very effective in terms of its outreach. Everyone in the state must be at most 2-3 degrees apart from an LGBT alums from one of these colleges. Well… perhaps not in the boondocks, but the people in the boonies are not really a very useful target audience for us. The primary audience are the people who are educated and intelligent enough to change their vote once we explain to them what's really at stake and that some of the things they were told are lies."
I don't yet know if we will succeed in our resolution to be activists about this. Two years is a long time to maintain a level of engagement such as that which may be required here. But we must try.
Icing on the Cake
I'm just back from seeing Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal at the Wortham Center, home of the Houston Ballet. Interesting program with two resolutely contemporary pieces, Toot and Noces, the latter on the eponymous music by Stravinsky.
I enjoyed the program, but the icing on the cake was the chance encounter with Connor Walsh during intermission. Mr. Walsh is a principal dancer with the Houston Ballet, with whom I had a very interesting conversation after a very moving performance — see my "Art and Politics" entry dated February 23rd. While I was buying a snack at intermission tonight, I saw a man rush through the line to order a pasta dish and sit down with it at a table. I thought I recognized him and chose a table that gave me a chance to observe... and got convinced that it must be him. Dancers can of course be hard to recognize in their street clothes, without makeup, and in his case with the beginning of a beard. He was obviously totally wolfing down his food to make it before the end of intermission, so I didn't interrupt then, but I kept staring and got worried that he'd be offended, although I would assume that he get stared at a lot!
Finally, he shoved the last bite into his mouth, it was high time to go back to our seats, but I went over and asked him if he was Connor Walsh. He was very gracious, we chatted for a second, mostly so I could remind him of the performance of Swan Song I had liked so much, and off we went our separate ways. I felt a bit like a groupie. Artists in general humble me, and people like him who personify the union of art, beauty and grace (I know this is multiply redundant to some extent) are exceptional. When I shake their hands, I wish that some of those gifts would rub off a little on me.
I enjoyed the program, but the icing on the cake was the chance encounter with Connor Walsh during intermission. Mr. Walsh is a principal dancer with the Houston Ballet, with whom I had a very interesting conversation after a very moving performance — see my "Art and Politics" entry dated February 23rd. While I was buying a snack at intermission tonight, I saw a man rush through the line to order a pasta dish and sit down with it at a table. I thought I recognized him and chose a table that gave me a chance to observe... and got convinced that it must be him. Dancers can of course be hard to recognize in their street clothes, without makeup, and in his case with the beginning of a beard. He was obviously totally wolfing down his food to make it before the end of intermission, so I didn't interrupt then, but I kept staring and got worried that he'd be offended, although I would assume that he get stared at a lot!
Finally, he shoved the last bite into his mouth, it was high time to go back to our seats, but I went over and asked him if he was Connor Walsh. He was very gracious, we chatted for a second, mostly so I could remind him of the performance of Swan Song I had liked so much, and off we went our separate ways. I felt a bit like a groupie. Artists in general humble me, and people like him who personify the union of art, beauty and grace (I know this is multiply redundant to some extent) are exceptional. When I shake their hands, I wish that some of those gifts would rub off a little on me.
Monday, October 20, 2008
The End of "Hamlet"
At the end of "Hamlet," everyone dies. It would be a literal bloodbath if some of the deaths weren't by way of poison instead of the sword.
I thought of the Bard's most famous play a lot in the past month, as I have literally been assaulted by news of people's deaths. Almost always people who were to young to die -- not that there is ever a good age, but you know what I mean. Some whom I didn't know, some whom I knew well, and every degree in between. Too many. The kind of events that makes you alternate between sadness and a sense of revolt: "f!@#, s$%^, why is this going on?"
My self-centered view of this started on Sep. 23, as I was talking to a colleague at the cafeteria of our offices in Clamart, outside Paris. He told me that a man whom I had casually known as a colleague for 30 years had died the week before, after a sudden relapse of a cancer he had fought off several years earlier. And then, as I was absorbing this, he asked me if I knew about another ex-colleague, who had left a few years back, was apparently working from home in the countryside, and had died of another long illness six months ago. I had not seen this man in many years, contrary to the first one, but this means that I could vividly remember him as his young self -- not only that, but I can even still hear his distinctive, constantly ironic tone of voice!
The next morning, as I walked into another one of our office locations, this one in Montrouge, I was greeted by two colleagues. We said hello and then, almost immediately, the woman went on: "Have you heard about M...?" When sentences start like that, you know what's coming. M..., a woman ex-colleague who was 58, had had a sudden heart attack (uncommon for a woman at that age), remained in the hospital for a while, and then died. So by now, that was three people whose passing away I was learning about in two days.
Back in Houston the following week, someone who actually used to work for M... was visiting for a training course, and invited me to have dinner. That was a nice chance to reconnect, as I hadn't seen him in two or three years. The last time was in a really ugly traffic jam at the end of the M4 coming into London, when I dropped him at an intersection where he could get on the Tube and I could turn around and go back to the airport (where I still missed my flight). We weren't in a panicked rush this time, and we ate a leisurely dinner at Churrasco's, an Argentinian steakhouse (the one near the Beltway, not the one near Montrose, for your locals). And then D... said, "oh, and by the way, did you know A...?" I did. Last time I had seen A..., in 2003, he had driven up from Houston to Austin, where I lived then, to discuss a project we were both working on. We spent the afternoon working together, then I took him to the Oasis to have a drink and watch the sunset over Lake Travis. When he left to drive back to Houston, we hugged and said "okay, let's make sure we see each other soon again." But A... left the company, and I had no chance to really remain in touch. And then D... dropped the bombshell: A..., who I think D... said was 35 years old, had accidentally killed himself just recently.
Six days later, on October 8, the "care page" maintained by my friend C... for his wife since she started her fight against inflammatory breast cancer four years ago took an ominous turn. There had been bad incidents before, and she had always come through. This time, after fighting infection and respiratory failure for days on end, she had just "crashed." The day went by, and early the next morning there was an urgent update: I opened it reluctantly -- she had passed away in the evening, at the age of 37. I will be going to a memorial service this week-end...
15 days, 5 deaths -- ranging from a dear friend to estranged colleagues. The last one was of course the one that affected me the most, but in some way the other deaths compounded the sense that something unusual had happened and that mortality wasn't just a concept.
Finally (for now), last week, while I was in Orlando at a conference, I got an email from one of the Stanford alumni with whom I work on alumni matters: a car carrying three business school alumni, aged 23, 24 and 29, had fallen off the road on the Pacific Coast Highway as they were on their way to a reunion in Big Sur. All three were killed. I didn't know them -- only one was listed among the members of the group I help manage, and I had never met him. Apart from the obviously tragic aspect of this event, this coming after the other five deaths seemed to continue a dramatic and improbable series.
People die all the time, of course. But in our age it's not often, absent wars or epidemics at home, that you hear about the deaths of 8 people, with whom you have some sort of connection, within a three-week period. Our ancestors had a sense of fatality about this -- all it took was an exceptionally harsh winter for people to fall like dominoes. But that was over 200 years ago.
I'm coming up on six days without hearing about another death. It would sound callous to say "I hope this series has come to an end" because it would seem to place my own mental comfort over the tragedy of these deaths and the anguish of those who have lost loved ones. All I can do is reflect on our fragile status, and cherish even more all the friends I still have among the living.
I thought of the Bard's most famous play a lot in the past month, as I have literally been assaulted by news of people's deaths. Almost always people who were to young to die -- not that there is ever a good age, but you know what I mean. Some whom I didn't know, some whom I knew well, and every degree in between. Too many. The kind of events that makes you alternate between sadness and a sense of revolt: "f!@#, s$%^, why is this going on?"
My self-centered view of this started on Sep. 23, as I was talking to a colleague at the cafeteria of our offices in Clamart, outside Paris. He told me that a man whom I had casually known as a colleague for 30 years had died the week before, after a sudden relapse of a cancer he had fought off several years earlier. And then, as I was absorbing this, he asked me if I knew about another ex-colleague, who had left a few years back, was apparently working from home in the countryside, and had died of another long illness six months ago. I had not seen this man in many years, contrary to the first one, but this means that I could vividly remember him as his young self -- not only that, but I can even still hear his distinctive, constantly ironic tone of voice!
The next morning, as I walked into another one of our office locations, this one in Montrouge, I was greeted by two colleagues. We said hello and then, almost immediately, the woman went on: "Have you heard about M...?" When sentences start like that, you know what's coming. M..., a woman ex-colleague who was 58, had had a sudden heart attack (uncommon for a woman at that age), remained in the hospital for a while, and then died. So by now, that was three people whose passing away I was learning about in two days.
Back in Houston the following week, someone who actually used to work for M... was visiting for a training course, and invited me to have dinner. That was a nice chance to reconnect, as I hadn't seen him in two or three years. The last time was in a really ugly traffic jam at the end of the M4 coming into London, when I dropped him at an intersection where he could get on the Tube and I could turn around and go back to the airport (where I still missed my flight). We weren't in a panicked rush this time, and we ate a leisurely dinner at Churrasco's, an Argentinian steakhouse (the one near the Beltway, not the one near Montrose, for your locals). And then D... said, "oh, and by the way, did you know A...?" I did. Last time I had seen A..., in 2003, he had driven up from Houston to Austin, where I lived then, to discuss a project we were both working on. We spent the afternoon working together, then I took him to the Oasis to have a drink and watch the sunset over Lake Travis. When he left to drive back to Houston, we hugged and said "okay, let's make sure we see each other soon again." But A... left the company, and I had no chance to really remain in touch. And then D... dropped the bombshell: A..., who I think D... said was 35 years old, had accidentally killed himself just recently.
Six days later, on October 8, the "care page" maintained by my friend C... for his wife since she started her fight against inflammatory breast cancer four years ago took an ominous turn. There had been bad incidents before, and she had always come through. This time, after fighting infection and respiratory failure for days on end, she had just "crashed." The day went by, and early the next morning there was an urgent update: I opened it reluctantly -- she had passed away in the evening, at the age of 37. I will be going to a memorial service this week-end...
15 days, 5 deaths -- ranging from a dear friend to estranged colleagues. The last one was of course the one that affected me the most, but in some way the other deaths compounded the sense that something unusual had happened and that mortality wasn't just a concept.
Finally (for now), last week, while I was in Orlando at a conference, I got an email from one of the Stanford alumni with whom I work on alumni matters: a car carrying three business school alumni, aged 23, 24 and 29, had fallen off the road on the Pacific Coast Highway as they were on their way to a reunion in Big Sur. All three were killed. I didn't know them -- only one was listed among the members of the group I help manage, and I had never met him. Apart from the obviously tragic aspect of this event, this coming after the other five deaths seemed to continue a dramatic and improbable series.
People die all the time, of course. But in our age it's not often, absent wars or epidemics at home, that you hear about the deaths of 8 people, with whom you have some sort of connection, within a three-week period. Our ancestors had a sense of fatality about this -- all it took was an exceptionally harsh winter for people to fall like dominoes. But that was over 200 years ago.
I'm coming up on six days without hearing about another death. It would sound callous to say "I hope this series has come to an end" because it would seem to place my own mental comfort over the tragedy of these deaths and the anguish of those who have lost loved ones. All I can do is reflect on our fragile status, and cherish even more all the friends I still have among the living.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Bristol Palin's College Applications
Do you know why Bristol Palin is not planning to apply to the University of Southern California (USC)?
Because the campus newspaper is called the Daily Trojan.
(Yes, I made this up myself, and I am proud of it...)
Because the campus newspaper is called the Daily Trojan.
(Yes, I made this up myself, and I am proud of it...)
Friday, September 5, 2008
How People End Up Believing in the Irrational
I'm glad I have my head screwed reasonably well on my shoulders, because otherwise I might have become tonight one of these people who are spooked into believing the irrational.
Uncharacteristically, I had my laptop on my dining table, doing miscellaneous stuff while waiting for dinner to be ready. My friend Mark, from the northern latitudes (he doesn't really like to be identified much more precisely than this), comes in on LiveMessenger, as he does almost every night, with some variant of "sup buddy?" I told him I was ready to eat dinner, he replied that he and his partner were too, and I wrote "cool". Then he wrote this sentence, which I reproduce verbatim because it is important for the rest of our story:
ya got a nice bottle of wine
Now, there are two ways to understand this sentence: "yes, we've got a nice bottle of wine!" or "have you got a nice bottle of wine?" because, at least on such an informal medium, "ya" can pass equally, I think, for an abbreviation of "yes" or of "you," and who cares about precisely placing commas in instant messages?
I understood the sentence the second way, which didn't seem far-fetched since, after all, I did have a bottle of wine -- which a friend offered me a few days ago -- and I looked at the label and typed:
Malbec 2006 from Argentina
,,, and what came back was:
um how'd you know
I'm scared
At first, it didn't make any sense, and it took me a little while to figure out what had happened: they had the same wine in front of them, and Mark, who had not meant to ask me what I was drinking, but just to tell me that they were having some wine with their dinner, thought I had guessed what they were drinking!
I was silent for a while, first because it took me a while to figure out what the heck had just happened, and then after that because I was playing games with him, letting him spin his brain around this little mystery. He "nudged" me (in LiveMessenger, a "nudge" is a command that makes the message window shake while your computer buzzes, as if you were given a shock) because he really couldn't take it -- not knowing how I had guessed correctly. At that point, I must admit that I embellished in a somewhat underhanded way: I didn't explain that I had misunderstood his statement, instead I said that I was just using the wine I was drinking as a wild-ass guess for the one they were having -- a half-truth at best.
End of the anecdote. What does one make of it? Well first, Malbec is now very much en vogue right now, so it's not too surprising that they would also be drinking it. Perhaps no less than one chance in 10? Secondly, there are not that many vintages in active circulation in supermarkets, I would guess mostly three: 2005, 2006 and 2007. So that leaves us with one chance in 30, if I oversimplify. So it's not so far-fetched that we would accidentally be drinking the same wine from the same year (for the record, these were at least not the same vintner or brand: mine was Domaine Jean Bousquet, from Tupungato Valley, Mendoza; theirs was Trivento Amado Sur, a blend with some syrah and bonarda, a grape I had never heard about).
But my point is this: if you take the average person with no knowledge of probabilities, and somewhat influenceable into finding a supernatural explanation more convincing than a statistical one, that person could be very easily convinced at this point that I am some sort of medium with clairvoyant powers. We know that people talk about "the laws of series" when three plane crashes happen the same week in unrelated contexts; or that many amateur gamblers believe that if the roulette has come out on black four times in a row, it is more likely than the next throw will come up red; etc. So surely, my wild but successful guess would have been interpreted by many of these people as a sign that a higher power was at work. The same people, of course, do not notice when plane crashes do not occur, or are very equally spaced, which is just as improbable as three in the same week; or when the roulette goes "black, red, black, red" which has the same probability as four times black in a row.
If I wanted to take the time, and antagonize some of my friends, I could be convinced to drift into how this kind of superstition is probably the source of most religions. But it's getting late and this is the kind of theory I need to explain when I have not had a glass of... Malbec 2006 from Argentina.
Uncharacteristically, I had my laptop on my dining table, doing miscellaneous stuff while waiting for dinner to be ready. My friend Mark, from the northern latitudes (he doesn't really like to be identified much more precisely than this), comes in on LiveMessenger, as he does almost every night, with some variant of "sup buddy?" I told him I was ready to eat dinner, he replied that he and his partner were too, and I wrote "cool". Then he wrote this sentence, which I reproduce verbatim because it is important for the rest of our story:
ya got a nice bottle of wine
Now, there are two ways to understand this sentence: "yes, we've got a nice bottle of wine!" or "have you got a nice bottle of wine?" because, at least on such an informal medium, "ya" can pass equally, I think, for an abbreviation of "yes" or of "you," and who cares about precisely placing commas in instant messages?
I understood the sentence the second way, which didn't seem far-fetched since, after all, I did have a bottle of wine -- which a friend offered me a few days ago -- and I looked at the label and typed:
Malbec 2006 from Argentina
,,, and what came back was:
um how'd you know
I'm scared
At first, it didn't make any sense, and it took me a little while to figure out what had happened: they had the same wine in front of them, and Mark, who had not meant to ask me what I was drinking, but just to tell me that they were having some wine with their dinner, thought I had guessed what they were drinking!
I was silent for a while, first because it took me a while to figure out what the heck had just happened, and then after that because I was playing games with him, letting him spin his brain around this little mystery. He "nudged" me (in LiveMessenger, a "nudge" is a command that makes the message window shake while your computer buzzes, as if you were given a shock) because he really couldn't take it -- not knowing how I had guessed correctly. At that point, I must admit that I embellished in a somewhat underhanded way: I didn't explain that I had misunderstood his statement, instead I said that I was just using the wine I was drinking as a wild-ass guess for the one they were having -- a half-truth at best.
End of the anecdote. What does one make of it? Well first, Malbec is now very much en vogue right now, so it's not too surprising that they would also be drinking it. Perhaps no less than one chance in 10? Secondly, there are not that many vintages in active circulation in supermarkets, I would guess mostly three: 2005, 2006 and 2007. So that leaves us with one chance in 30, if I oversimplify. So it's not so far-fetched that we would accidentally be drinking the same wine from the same year (for the record, these were at least not the same vintner or brand: mine was Domaine Jean Bousquet, from Tupungato Valley, Mendoza; theirs was Trivento Amado Sur, a blend with some syrah and bonarda, a grape I had never heard about).
But my point is this: if you take the average person with no knowledge of probabilities, and somewhat influenceable into finding a supernatural explanation more convincing than a statistical one, that person could be very easily convinced at this point that I am some sort of medium with clairvoyant powers. We know that people talk about "the laws of series" when three plane crashes happen the same week in unrelated contexts; or that many amateur gamblers believe that if the roulette has come out on black four times in a row, it is more likely than the next throw will come up red; etc. So surely, my wild but successful guess would have been interpreted by many of these people as a sign that a higher power was at work. The same people, of course, do not notice when plane crashes do not occur, or are very equally spaced, which is just as improbable as three in the same week; or when the roulette goes "black, red, black, red" which has the same probability as four times black in a row.
If I wanted to take the time, and antagonize some of my friends, I could be convinced to drift into how this kind of superstition is probably the source of most religions. But it's getting late and this is the kind of theory I need to explain when I have not had a glass of... Malbec 2006 from Argentina.
Monday, August 25, 2008
An Oversimplified Model of Recent World History
I just read some news item that said that tourists who went to Beijing for the Olympics were "dazzled and daunted" by the event, and that this was an unprecedented exercise in increasing the maturity of a country in such a short time span. Last night, the NBC commentators marveled during their retransmission of the closing ceremonies (bits of pageantry shown during the infrequent gaps left between commercials and the incessant replays of the achievements of almost only U.S. athletes) that Beijing had spent about $40 billion and mobilized up to one million volunteers for the games, and that one was unlikely to see an effort of this size any time soon, "or perhaps ever."
The description of the advances made in Beijing for these games may well be true. But what the media, and U.S. media in particular, do not seem to grasp, is that we're talking about the durable emergence of China as a pre-eminent economic, political and social power, not about a temporary flash of brilliance. And for that matter, I can look in my crystal ball and tell you exactly when the Olympics will cost more and mobilize more people than the 2008 games did: this will happen the next time the games are hosted by China, and I am pretty sure that this will happen again some time in the next 30 years (OK, make that 32), because China is in the front seat for good now.
So here's my oversimplified geo-politico-historical model: the 18th century was French (the Enlightenment, French spoken in the palaces of Europe, the Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen). The 19th century was British (Waterloo, Queen Victoria, the building of the Empire, international maritime commerce). The 20th century was American (the U.S. conclusively intervenes in two world conflicts, rules the economy, develops the atom bomb, puts a man on the moon, and ends up as the sole superpower in the last decade of the century). And the 21st century will belong to China: 1.3 billion people, a 9% annual growth rate in GDP, the world's largest manufacturer and soon the world's largest consumer.
Americans still think that they are God's chosen people: this hubris will only delay the inevitable realization of China's preeminence. The U.S. still has the best universities in the world... but students are increasingly dropping scientific subjects in order to choose careers in Finance, Business, and the law. Can you build an economy solely on that basis? No, you can't. The modern world isn't just virtual: someone needs to grow our food, make our clothes, build our homes and our cars. Increasingly, all these things come from elsewhere. And that elsewhere more and more takes the form of this little label that reads "Made in China." OK, food is a little different, because the cost and duration of transportation already make it expensive and/or inconvenient, and will make it increasingly so, to import foods from afar (we still cherish our Chilean strawberries in winter, but for how long?). Crude oil at $120/bbl is actually increasing the interest in local/regional food production. But will it cause a resurgence of manufacturing in the U.S. (and other Western countries)? Only when the cycle completes and our countries' economies sag so low that we will be the "new poor," and our ill-educated work forces, aided by a dollar worth 50 euro-cents or less, will make it cheaper for an American consumer to buy goods made in Mississippi than made in China (you can name the equivalent "bottom of the barrel" regions in your own countries).
The two questions that remain in my mind, because I believe the above scenario to be almost ineluctable, are: what accidents can happen in the meantime to delay or modify it? and what happens after that? Is this is a one-way street, or will the "decline of the American empire" and of other Western countries result in some sort of compensating pendulum swing, where China will find itself, by the dawn of the 22nd century, in a similar situation that the U.S. is finding itself now, unable to prolong its fading grandeur, and sobered-up countries with significant natural resources (the US, Brazil, Nigeria, Canada, etc.) will restore a different balance?
It will help China extend its domination if the Chinese government at the time does not repeat the errors of the most recent U.S. politicians, which caused the sudden and profound moral bankruptcy of this country on the international scene. Assuming that China grows out of the current climate of quasi-dictatorship and human rights violations, let's fast forward. If anything similar to the U.S. 2000-2008 political catastrophe happens in China in 50 or a hundred years, will the Chinese people have the political education, the will, and the ability to change things before it damages their country's standing in a similar way to what Bush & Co. have just done to the U.S.? Of course, today, it is clear that they probably wouldn't be able to. But as the country continues its rapid progress, a time will come when they will probably have that power. So the last question is whether the Chinese people in a few decades will have the knowledge needed to make the right decisions (as opposed to, say, Americans who can't locate Iraq on a globe, or still believe that there were WMDs in Iraq because Fox "News" tells them so). The future of the world may well depend on this more than on anything else.
The description of the advances made in Beijing for these games may well be true. But what the media, and U.S. media in particular, do not seem to grasp, is that we're talking about the durable emergence of China as a pre-eminent economic, political and social power, not about a temporary flash of brilliance. And for that matter, I can look in my crystal ball and tell you exactly when the Olympics will cost more and mobilize more people than the 2008 games did: this will happen the next time the games are hosted by China, and I am pretty sure that this will happen again some time in the next 30 years (OK, make that 32), because China is in the front seat for good now.
So here's my oversimplified geo-politico-historical model: the 18th century was French (the Enlightenment, French spoken in the palaces of Europe, the Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen). The 19th century was British (Waterloo, Queen Victoria, the building of the Empire, international maritime commerce). The 20th century was American (the U.S. conclusively intervenes in two world conflicts, rules the economy, develops the atom bomb, puts a man on the moon, and ends up as the sole superpower in the last decade of the century). And the 21st century will belong to China: 1.3 billion people, a 9% annual growth rate in GDP, the world's largest manufacturer and soon the world's largest consumer.
Americans still think that they are God's chosen people: this hubris will only delay the inevitable realization of China's preeminence. The U.S. still has the best universities in the world... but students are increasingly dropping scientific subjects in order to choose careers in Finance, Business, and the law. Can you build an economy solely on that basis? No, you can't. The modern world isn't just virtual: someone needs to grow our food, make our clothes, build our homes and our cars. Increasingly, all these things come from elsewhere. And that elsewhere more and more takes the form of this little label that reads "Made in China." OK, food is a little different, because the cost and duration of transportation already make it expensive and/or inconvenient, and will make it increasingly so, to import foods from afar (we still cherish our Chilean strawberries in winter, but for how long?). Crude oil at $120/bbl is actually increasing the interest in local/regional food production. But will it cause a resurgence of manufacturing in the U.S. (and other Western countries)? Only when the cycle completes and our countries' economies sag so low that we will be the "new poor," and our ill-educated work forces, aided by a dollar worth 50 euro-cents or less, will make it cheaper for an American consumer to buy goods made in Mississippi than made in China (you can name the equivalent "bottom of the barrel" regions in your own countries).
The two questions that remain in my mind, because I believe the above scenario to be almost ineluctable, are: what accidents can happen in the meantime to delay or modify it? and what happens after that? Is this is a one-way street, or will the "decline of the American empire" and of other Western countries result in some sort of compensating pendulum swing, where China will find itself, by the dawn of the 22nd century, in a similar situation that the U.S. is finding itself now, unable to prolong its fading grandeur, and sobered-up countries with significant natural resources (the US, Brazil, Nigeria, Canada, etc.) will restore a different balance?
It will help China extend its domination if the Chinese government at the time does not repeat the errors of the most recent U.S. politicians, which caused the sudden and profound moral bankruptcy of this country on the international scene. Assuming that China grows out of the current climate of quasi-dictatorship and human rights violations, let's fast forward. If anything similar to the U.S. 2000-2008 political catastrophe happens in China in 50 or a hundred years, will the Chinese people have the political education, the will, and the ability to change things before it damages their country's standing in a similar way to what Bush & Co. have just done to the U.S.? Of course, today, it is clear that they probably wouldn't be able to. But as the country continues its rapid progress, a time will come when they will probably have that power. So the last question is whether the Chinese people in a few decades will have the knowledge needed to make the right decisions (as opposed to, say, Americans who can't locate Iraq on a globe, or still believe that there were WMDs in Iraq because Fox "News" tells them so). The future of the world may well depend on this more than on anything else.
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