What the Summer Breeze Said
Europe is giving new meaning to the term "bootstrapping," the
age-old (virtuous) idea of picking oneself up off the floor after some
blow or reversal of fortune has laid you low. The new method might be
called "skyhooking" in which a massive rescue apparatus secured at some
mysterious point unseen in the clouds lifts whole exhausted nations
from their knees in order get them to summer vacation. Hence: the
interesting spectacle of an entire continent headed for vacation
despite facing utter financial ruin, revolution, and civil war.
No one who has been to Europe in our time can doubt that it is a
lovely place to stage human existence. The towns and cities are in
immaculate condition, even the ones bombed to gravel in the receding
unpleasantness of the 1940s. The trains, trams, and subways run cleanly
and on-time. The citizens, though well-fed, maintain normal
physiognomies and wear dignified adult costumes out in public.
Everything along the streets broadcasts the notion, central to
civilization, that grace and beauty matter -- even the handwriting on
the bistro chalkboards. What a wonderful place. I'd like to go back.
But events suggest that this sweet period of history is drawing to a
close and whatever happens there next will be less like Midnight in Paris and more like Riot in Cellblock D meets Quest for Fire.
This skyhooking procedure has been both fun and sickening to watch,
like any great public stunt of seemingly impossible derring-do. Here
you have a whole bundle of nations, all up to their chins in the
quicksand of debt, pretending to catch lifelines of new credit dropped
mysteriously from the clouds by hidden central bank airships, only to
find that the lifelines are a kind of collective hallucination coming
over them like a fever dream in their hour of desperation. Seems rather
cruel, actually. Especially since they have lately sunk deeper in the
quicksand from their chins to their eyeballs.
No one on
the scene -- or watching from a remove for that matter -- can conceive
a happy ending to this chapter of history, which might be remembered on
some distant clear-skied day yet to come as the age of
government-by-check-kiting. Or the Chinese fire drill banking model --
no offense to that great nation of diligent workpersons. Yet, reports
from even the most anguished Euro nation du jour (Spain) say that the
restaurants are bustling and there is no shortage of nearly naked
nubile beauties along the beaches of the Costa Brava. And over in
Italy, of course, a squirrel could make the journey from Monterotondo
to Lago Maggiore by leaping from one outdoor luncheon table to the next
with its knobby little knuckles never touching the ground.
The question is: what happens when the recognition finally hits that
the money just isn't there? That the whole circus of alphabet soup
bailouts and skyhook rescue operations was a fraud? Well, my guess is
that things fracture and splinter and there commences a great scramble
for the table scraps of the incredible banquet that this congeries of
nations put on its Master Charge card. And when the table scraps are
all gone, the members of some nations, or regions within nations, set
out pillaging around the place where their neighbor sat at the banquet,
and pretty soon you get such a disorderly scene in the lovely old
banquet hall of Europe that even diligent Chinese tourists will not
venture there for a while.
None of this is to say that
the action I describe is not following similar lines in other corners
of our sore beset planet. For instance, those diligent Chinese I aver
to have been running a set of banking rackets at least as shoddy,
careless, and plumb crazy as the Eurolanders. And don't get me started
on the Anglo-American clusterfuck, which has left the rest-of-the-west
with a future as ingeniously booby-trapped as the Aurora cineplex
shooter's apartment (and to a strikingly similar note of destructive
insanity).
But in these dog days of summer (and the
horse latitudes of the spirit), isn't it easier to just mix another
vodka and tonic, kick off your flip-flops, and enjoy the feeling of
cool sand between your toes? Rest up all y'all. Events will be pinging
around the reality-scape good and hard in a few weeks. Me: well, I'm
just keeping the fruit trees watered out back for now.
Enjoy your vacation.
