2009
I apologise for the last few months – they’ve slipped by like a sneaky fortnight. I should have begun my blog on October 1st 2008 and was prepared to do so but on that very day my first book was published. This wonderful event (at least in my eyes) made me lose the plot – I got ‘lost’ in the daily round of promotion and book signings and more interviews than are conducted by a rock star; and the poor old blog got pushed to the rear of my consciousness. I had become a published author, and I was to discover the first lesson about that particular condition – namely that writing becomes harder when one is published because the published work has demands upon the author that the author has little dreamed of. This, by way of explanation, is what happened to me.
The book was published, as I say, in Australia. It received good reviews and I spent a long time talking on radio stations all over that country about the events of the sixties that my book describes. I was on a talk programme with Patty Smith who was very gracious and allowed me to give her a signed copy of my book. I went to a Martha Wainwright concert and she and Brad got a signed copy as well. I was on television and had some funny moments, I was on radio and managed to say more in three minutes than most people say in ten. I sent copies to friends in America and England, one even got as far as South Korea. The Reuters music correspondent purchased a copy in Perth Australia in the airport bookshop, boarded a plane for Los Angeles, then called from America to tell me he loved the book. All this stuff and fluff made me dizzy with contented pride. The blog remained a distant dream. As a courtesy I sent copies of the book to the Grateful Dead and to the Rolling Stones. I talked about nothing but the book for three months. It was great fun, and thanks to Claire at Random House in Australia I received, as they say, maximum exposure.
Then, at the end of 2008 I stopped promoting the book in Australia and moved to Europe to begin work on my next book. That, in a nutshell, is what happened. And whilst it was happening the house where I was staying got flooded three times in the worst storms for a century that hit Queensland. They floated my lap-top off its desk and were of singular assistance in aiding my natural prevarication – for how could I write with nothing to write upon? Now I am “better”. I have a MacBook Pro, and there are no more excuses, so my blog career begins here. From here on in, every week (come hail or shine) the blog will and must appear. Bear with me!
Finally the Americans have a new President. Isn’t it interesting? Somehow the whole world is waiting for him to fix America’s troubles, troubles that we out here in the world are told are our troubles too. The American economy catches a cold, the world sneezes; the American economy catches pneumonia we’re all virtually rolling over and ready to expire. I feel like I’m being told to please die quietly and don’t make a mess like my old mum used to say. Wish someone would say that to the banks!
I had the opportunity to talk to an eminent economist who is an advisor to the Chinese Government and a man responsible for several zillions in investments. We had dinner together. I asked him what I should do with the small inheritance I had received. He gave me a wan smile and told me to take the money out of the bank, put it in a tin box and stash it under the bed. Conversely, if I was so minded, now (he opined) was a good time to take out a massive loan and gamble on the stock market and the housing market and every other bloody market – if it didn’t work then I always had the option to go bankrupt which was what most of the banks already were. Trading whilst insolvent. That’s bankrupt in layman’s terms. The situation is so bad, he told me, that the banks have no idea of their debts and obligations – they are simply unable to assess their condition because in an unregulated market they swapped debt between one-another and no-one (basically) kept the books straight. No-one in effect really knows who owes what to whom, and how much.
But the last American President (good ol’ boy that he was) helped them out; bless him. Two trillion was it that he and the politicians took from the American tax-payer and handed to the banks, to ‘reflate the economy and steady the credit markets’, and goodness knows what else. I’ve heard of day light robbery and seen it with my own eyes, but never in the history of our lovely planet have I seen such blatant malfeasance. This is theft by any other name. The American people have been saddled with tax-payer-funded debt that will take at least three generations to pay off! Where did the money go? To the banks!
I sometimes wonder if the powers that be in America ever think about how this all looks to the outside world, how this ‘plays’ (as the Americans say) in Europe and Asia. Here’s what a foreigner ‘Joe the plumber’ thinks. Hey America, give us a break from your endless ‘moral high ground’ bullshit about democracy and fix your own crap before telling us about how we should lead our lives. We don’t want you to fix the world’s troubles with your massive armies when you have a massive army at home living on food stamps. We live in a multi-polar world America, where we know that great cultures have existed long before the white man established his ‘paradise’ in the back garden of the Indians which was already a paradise long before Columbus ‘discovered’ it. We know that America was founded upon the near extermination of its native peoples and upon slavery little more than a couple of hundred years ago. Joe the Plumber (here in Europe) knows that two thousand years ago the Indian emperor was sending diplomatic emissaries to the Greeks, two thousand years ago Chinese Junks roamed the Pacific, two thousand years ago (if not six thousand years) what is now called Iraq was the cradle of an ancient civilisation. When is America going to realise it’s the ‘new kid on the block’?
We know of China, of India and Russia, great civilisations long before the American founding fathers had their dreams. Two hundred years of civilisation and what have we in the world received from you – the blues and a litany of lectures about freedom accompanied by massive armed interventions all over the world. Now that the American economic model is staggering Joe the Plumber (over here) is asking: If you guys are so ‘free’ how come you can’t conduct your affairs in an orderly manner where your citizens are protected from the rapacious requirements of unrestricted commercial greed? How come your own people can’t feed themselves? Or at least, if you’re ‘free’ does this mean free to receive food stamps which millions of Americans are being forced to get in order to survive? Or does it simply mean, free to dream?
President Obama will fix it? As my old mum used to say, “if voting made any difference they’d make it illegal”. The President is the titular head of a nation state – he cannot fix the problem because the problem is not amenable to ‘single state-based solutions’. The contemporary nation state is now an anachronism, as much of an anachronism as the city-states and monarchies it replaced. It doesn’t possess the powers to control its institutions because those institutions are multi-state based. If American banks only did business in America then an American President might be able to fix the problem, but he has inherited a problem that is beyond the remit of one country to solve. Debt knows no state boundaries, recognises no state lines. Joe the Plumber borrows in Ohio it affects Joe the Plumber in countries from Australia to Iceland. This is a world problem, and needs to be fixed by the world acting in tandem in ultra-state solutions. The Presidency can be a part of the solution, but he has to remember this: if you aint a part of the solution then you’re a part of the problem. American institutions gave this problem to the world, now we (in the world) want it fixed cooperatively between all nations. Remember the United Nations?
I’m tempted to say I’d be so happy if four little green men stepped out of a spaceship and announced that all our weapons systems are inoperative and that we have now to learn to live together. That we have made a complete botched job of running the planet and that the visitors from Space are sick to death of our stupidity. But that would just be a dream, and it seems as if there’s no ‘dreams’ allowed for on this planet other than the “American Dream”. Well the American dream is looking like a nightmare out here in the rest of the world, and no doubt at home. It’s tarnished and disturbing. Everyone knows that you don’t cure a bad dream by lying back down and trying to have a good one and we’re bored with being told better a bad dream than an unendurable reality.
We live in a world of multiple dreams and trillions of aspirations. Hopefully Barrack Obama will lead America to a slightly more ‘nuanced’ understanding of its place in the world and of other people’s dreams. We don’t need America to lead and lecture, all we need is for America to feed its own people and (broadly speaking) stop thinking it’s the sole source of moral political authority in the world. We need America to accept that we like our own dreams; indeed, that we have dreams too, and that they are deserving of American respect. All us Euro Joe the Plumbers would like a softer more sensitive and inclusive America that doesn’t seek to impose just one version of the dream, for we all remember Bob Dylan’s great line: “you can be in my dream, if I can be in yours” and Mister President, we like to share.
Meanwhile, talking of dreams, how come the Grateful Dead didn’t reform and play at the inauguration of Barrack Obama? Now THAT would have been a dream that I could have shared and millions of others too!
© Sam Cutler 2009
