Rising tide on the river

Dulled mercury once
was ocean, now winter tide
nudging river's flow.

El Nervión, December 2011

CJM

A Christmas Story

As a child, I used to go carol singing in our neighbourhood, mainly to raise a little pocket money for Christmas. With a choir-trained voice, I had the advantage of being able to sing, and my efforts were usually rewarded.

            Now on this particularly bitter cold night, I was singing away when the house door opened and a very old man and lady peered out. “That was lovely,” they both said, and invited me in.

            Nowadays, of course, such an offer to a child would be impossible. A SWAT team would be surrounding the house and breaking the door down within minutes. Even then, as all children know from the Brothers Grimm tales, an old lady is most likely to be a witch who puts you in a cage to fatten you up.

            None of these fears was lost on me, but I was extremely cold and the old couple seemed harmless enough.

            They led me into a warm and cosy sitting-room, and offered  me a comfortable armchair close to an open fire. What a relief it was to feel the warmth in my limbs.

            “You must be very cold,” said the old couple. “How about a little glass of ginger wine to warm you up?”

Hey, I was twelve years old, and had never touched anything stronger than orangeade. Where was that SWAT team?

            Ginger wine? Ginger beer? What’s the difference, I innocently thought, and said yes, of course. In moments it was served on a tray with a plate of small cakes. Looking back, I now see it as bearing every resemblance to a glass of absinthe, the green devil. Little did I know what was waiting for me.

            ”A fig roll?”

Fig roll, figgy pudding, Christmas pudding. What could be nicer? “Thank you.”

            It was only then that I noticed the parrot, perched in an alcove on my right hand side. It was huge, bright green, and, more to the point, dangerously free to wander. Which it suddenly began to do, edging its way closer and closer to me with a rather nasty gleam in its unpleasantly close eyes.

            “Drink up your wine!”

I smiled nervously, lifted the glass to my lips and took a sip. A terrible searing sensation filled my mouth and my throat. I knew I was going to die. It was clear that the inventor of ginger wine for his own tortured reasons must have set out to design a drink that would kill off the human race, or at the very least destroy its taste buds.

            The parrot had now hopped on to the back of my chair, and was horribly close to the back of my head. It began probing around my neck with a beak that was enormous, grotesque and highly menacing.

            “Have a fig roll. They’re very nice.”

How could I trust these people now? But there was no way out. Into my mouth went a bite of the fig roll. It was dry, bitter and disgusting. I choked on it. Even the parrot wasn’t tempted. It was more interested in my ear lobe.

            I must have shown signs of panic. “Oh, don’t worry about him. He wouldn’t hurt a flea.” How often in life do we hear that just before the dog bites you! Then, “Oh, it’s the first time he’s done that,” as if it was somehow your fault.

            Now imagine the effect of all this on an impressionable child — a situation which would take the diplomatic skills of the Foreign Office to extract oneself from politely. It seemed I was doomed to die, either of ginger wine poisoning, fig roll inhalation or bleeding to death from a parrot bite.

 I don’t really remember how I got out of there. Presumably the ginger wine made me so daring that I stuffed the fig roll into the parrot’s maw, rendering it harmless, and fled to the door. I recall the echoing cry, “Do come again!” as I stumbled away to safety.

            Children nowadays will never have this kind of adventure. Maybe in my second childhood, though, there’ll be nothing to stop me from keeping up the old customs and go carol singing. But, if I come knocking on your door, no ginger wine, no fig roll. And above all, please, please, lock up your parrot!

CJM

Squall on the ocean

Rain curtains the sea,

Black winds pressing on the storm.

Behind, a rainbow.

 

Sopelana, December 2011

CJM

Doing God’s work – or playing dice? The Wisdom of Einstein

Albert Einstein, it is said, was asked on one occasion whether he carried a notebook to write down his ideas. “Why?” he remarked. “I’ve only ever had one idea.”

However, he did have a lot more pithy and wise things to say, the kind of utterances that stay in your mind. One that I’ve always felt kinship with was the comment that the human mind was far too important to fill up with facts. “I use a library for that.”

Another – and here I come to my point – was his famous proposition that: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it” (often glossed as, “from the same thinking that created it”).

We daily watch a capitalist world in unfolding crisis, where Einstein’s kind of visionary clarity is sorely missing. While the phrase “Think the unthinkable” seems to be much on economists’ and financial advisors’ lips, their “unthinkable” comes down to the hedging of outcomes in a world full of nightmare uncertainties. But their vision simply doesn’t go far enough. As Einstein, again, succinctly observed: “Logic will get you from A to B. But imagination will take you everywhere.”

We need imagination, not logic, in our present crisis. As is now all too obvious, the financial events of 2008 never brought about imaginative solutions, only the insertion of buoyancy tanks filled with the same kind of thinking as created the problems.  The true “unthinkable”, of course, isn’t that the euro will collapse, or the Middle East fall into the hands of assertive Islamic governments on the back of the so-called Arab Spring, or Russia or China become the springboard of new conflicts over global resources. No, as Einstein suggests, the unthinkable unthinkable is the thinking that your present thinking can’t and doesn’t even think of. We don’t see much of that brand of novel and imaginative vision, except possibly in the manifestos of the Indignant Ones occupying the centres of financial and political power around the globe.

Without “thinking the truly unthinkable”, how are we to get out of this mess? And what exactly is the nature of the mess? It seems that Einstein had a view on that, too, as while trying to locate the source of the famous phrase quoted above, I came across the following, written by him sixty years ago:

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labour encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organised political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights. (from “Why Socialism?” Monthly Review, 1949) [my emphasis]

           

Compare this damning analysis with Robert Fisk’s diatribe this week against the international bankers and financial institutions, and it is hard to insert a credit card between them. Fisk, as usual not sparing his punches, declares: “Bankers are the dictators of the west.” Isn’t that going a bit far? No, it seems, not if you subscribe to recent revelations about the tentacles of the notorious Vampire Squid, aka Goldman Sachs, reaching into every nook and cranny of the political and economic establishment. As JamesDelingpole blogged recently:  “ ‘The governments don't rule the world. Goldman Sachs rules the world,’ claimed a shockingly outspoken trader, Alessio Rastani, on the BBC two months ago.”

        Others have explored further among the squid’s tentacles with even more disturbing insights.

        In a recent interview with the Sunday Times (November 6, 2011) Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein made the appalling joke that GS was doing “God’s work”.  Perhaps this gives one a glimpse into the cynical, value-less landscape in which leading financial institutions now operate, and in which they reward themselves handsomely for failing in the one task for which their “mission statement” (allowing that they have any) might inspire them: namely, to be the unassailable pillars of security and honesty in a troubled and often criminal world.

            I used to say to each of my children, as they grew up and got entangled in the debt society, “Always remember, my child, the bank is your enemy.” I was only half-joking. I believe they now know what I was talking about.

            But even I was not ready for the amoral irresponsibility that currently seems endemic in the Olympian heights of the financial sectors, where doing God’s work reflects the worst human tendencies of the classical Greek divinities: lust, greed, bribery and revenge.

            On God, too, Einstein had a phrase: “God doesn’t play dice”. No, he doesn’t. Gambling is an all too human addiction, played daily, as we now know, by bankers and traders, and paid for by our elected (or unelected) governments.

CJM