(England’s iconic John Bull is often joined by his mustachioed compatriot, Colonel Blimp. We were the same rank. Photo courtesy Amazon.)
I am up late this morning at the farm, and there is a reason for my slacking. I managed to get the bed set up in the back room and no longer have to navigate the stairs. I am not really back to anything like I used to be and it is a bit frustrating. I need to walk more and somehow find more hours in the day to do it.
(New pillow-top University Queen bed courtesy of Sleepy’s. Photo Socotra.)
It is like that this morning. In the darkness in the plush comfort of the pillow-top mattress and under the eiderdown I surfed through the issues of the day. When I rose and stumbled to the coffee maker, I realized the things to talk about this morning are legion. The airfield we are about to abandon at Lages is one; the Doha Climate Conference Fiasco is another; the bed and the farm collectively as a hedge against the times to come.
I will spare you the bile that comes with looking at the lunacy up in Washington. We will either go over the cliff or we will not, or perhaps better said, we will tumble over the edge and grasp a likely branch that may avert immediate disaster, though it will leave us hanging somewhere high in the air.
Laws of entropy and all that- what cannot be sustained, cannot. Therefore, something will happen to restore equilibrium. Britain did it- painfully, of course, but there is a template for great powers whose imperial robes now sag around a diminished frame.
I am of a libertarian bent, as you know, though a pragmatist in affairs in the wide world. You may have seen the news of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s visit to the soon-to-be-redundant Lages Air Field in the eastern Atlantic, which Mr. Panetta would scuttle in the budget disaster. I think it was upgraded to be one of the Shuttle alternate landing sites and hence is world class in length and amenities.
We used to fly space ships. Remember?
I know, I know. I sound like Colonel Blimp or something. But also remember the key role of Ascension Island in Britain’s conflict with Argentina in the Falklands? The Archies were just months off in their timing- the Royal Navy was about to shrink below the level necessary to sustain forces so far away, and the airfield on a spec of land in the mid-Atlantic was crucial to resupply the war effort.
Do the Chinese desire Lages? I don’t know, and increasingly I find myself with the querulous view of an old apparatchik- akin to Colonel Blimp or the District Commissioner retired from the back of beyond in the old Colonies.
You recall the type, though most have passed on. The role of the Commissioner in the old empire was akin to that of Governor, and has continued in some of the old colonies though naturally the faces have changed.
Remember the days when the Union Jack was coming down all around the world? The District Commissioner analogy does linger. I wonder how the legions of Commissioners must have felt, called home with the independence of their charges to a 90% tax and welfare structure in the UK in the 1960s?
Well, the Brits have survived, after a fashion, though the last decades have certainly had their challenges and the future appear problematic. When confronting a tough challenge, I always look back to the ideas conceived by the brains that won World War II.
When I see the global calculus changing, I look back to Britain for lessons regarding modern equivalents of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.
Of course, the Brits were actually turning their world over to a sometimes fractious and rebellious child- that is to say, us. I see none of those out there, only an inscrutable smiling faces of South and East Asia.
One of my better counselors said I was thinking like an old District Commissioner. He is of the opinion that the Chinese are screwed, too, the products of unbalanced demographics and a rapacious and implacable political system.
“We humans have the ability to imagine the future – however unclearly – and prepare for it,” he told me this morning. “I think our generation will be generally OK, so long as we can avoid being put on the Liverpool Care Pathway.”
I had to ask him about that, since the inner workings of the UK’s health management system are largely unknown to those of us who will emulate it. The Liverpool Care Path is the course of treatment equivalent to Hospice, and based on lack of resources, is the course of choice for the elderly and new-born alike.
Sort of scary, but that is to be expected if you are just back from a long time overseas. My friend ended his summary by saying: “It’s good advice to the youngsters that eludes me. What are they to do? How do they adapt and overcome?”
I would have to find a real District Commissioner to ask, and they are in short supply these days. In the meantime, I have to agree with my pal. I now have television in the Great Room, the last bastion of tranquility. I may not be commissioner of much, but this will have to do.
(The reinvigorated Great Room, with media inputs. Photo Socotra.)
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocora.com