Scenarios! A testing ground for my opinions and an incubation tube for the people who are going to populate the plot of my narratives. There is no entry on this site that in some way isn’t useful for the novel in preparation. The Guardian for instance is a test run of some of the characters which we will meet again in a different time and a different milieu, but not necessarily with a different motivation. The three essays in preparation on The Postman, The Career of a Prostitute, and Homoousios or Homoiousios - I know it sounds like a conversation between the horses in Gulliver’s Travels - are studies on the various forms of good and evil.

I hope, by now people appreciate the new and cleaner layout and the labor that went into the index was worth the while. There is plenty of new stuff, although I doubt that the reader got already through last months additions, but I am trying to keep up the pace.   

Some may feel that there is a bit too much of history on my site. I have an excuse. History is made by people and it is the people I am interested in. Right now the aftereffect of the war in Iraq is hitting us in the face, just late enough for the jerks that caused the calamity to take the rear exit. I guess it will be expecting too much from the next administration to have the culprits rounded up, stripped of their perks and immunities and put them on trial. (Did you know that the Athenian electorate had their own victorious strategists put on trial because they had failed to save the lives of the survivors of a naval battle - Athenians as well as the enemies? That was centuries before the Christian era, but I am digressing.)

As I write, the price for crude oil has soared to 120 dollars per barrel and continues rising. If we look back to the prices before the tanks crossed the border to the oilfields in Iraq, we read of about 34 dollars and this was already considered too high at the time. After the first shots were fired in anger the prices made a quantum leap to the 62 dollar-margin and continued climbing.

This is not a natural progression. It’s also not connected to the depletion of resources. This is not the market’s way of telling us that we run out of fuel. On the contrary, right now we have more access to more oil than ever before. Even if we consider the demands created by the increasing fuel consumption in China, the prices should never be that high - there is enough oil around for generations to come. So what does this mean? It means that the global market is facing a new monopoly. What is new, you may think, the OPEC has been around for quite some time now, right? Well, this here is different. Bush senior, in his address to Congress about the state of the nation, had spilled the beans: “We cannot allow Saddam Hussein to control 40% of the world’s oil reserves.” In the aftermath of “Desert Storm” Saddam was prevented from exporting oil but guess what, the oil prices stayed comparably low, less than thirty dollars. So the very moment the oilman in the Oval Office gave the go ahead to invade Iraq it should have been clear to everybody what is going to happen next.

There is a bright side to this though: the steep increase in fuel prices will accelerate the move into alternative energy technologies, and the Europeans are leading the way; you Americans better watch out, you could be in for a surprise. I expect in the foreseeable future Europe to be completely weaned off from fossil fuels, except as raw material for the chemical industry, while China will continue to monopolize the demand and tighten the screw on American investors who turn to Asian lenders for cash injections. But in the long term this is not going to be of any good for the Chinese as well. Their technology is still developing and if kept dependent on oil will eventually fall behind. And should the Chinese investor feel the need to recall his investments, he may find it a tad difficult to reach into a naked man’s pocket. On the other hand, the Chinese space program is just gearing up, so, who knows. We look ahead to interesting times.

One side effect of all this is already hitting the poorer countries. At present there is no famine and no drought, but there is a serious food shortage.

The much vaunted climate change has nothing to do with it, the globalization of the economy does. In forty countries, 32 of them in Africa, the masses of low income earners are no longer able to afford the prices at the grocery stores. Food is there, but out of reach. The biggest producer of wheat on the market is not Canada but Kazakhstan, and at present Kazakhstan has closed its borders for the export of food stocks completely, so has Indonesia for the export of rice. Other food exporters like Russia have hiked up the prices by 40% and rising, and in the rich countries who depend on imports like Singapore, the building contractors have a smile on their face. Singapore is increasing her storage facilities. It’s a good time for hoarding food stocks and driving the prices sky-high.

In this day and age, subsistence farmers have become a dying species; they migrate in masses to the slums of the big cities where a miniscule income in the sweatshops is beating no income in the fields hands down. But now $1.50 a day is not nearly enough to feed an average family of six. And why is that so? Because the poorer countries have trusted the promises of globalization and therefore boosted investments in industries for export instead of agriculture, after all the world market would always be there to supply the food stocks, wouldn’t it? Well, not anymore. (And they dare telling us that Marx is passe.)

And what are the rich countries doing about it? They agonize over “saving the planet.”

Or so their governments say. It’s an opportunity to scare the taxpayer into hitherto unheard of tax-hikes and in the media the mill of daily misinformation is keeping busy coining new terminologies like “carbon footprint.” Esperanto is turning to Desperanto. Newspeak is alive and kicking. But climate changes happen. They have happened in the past and right now we are on a cycle towards the next one. Greenland has its name from a time when the Viking settlers really sunk their plows into a green land. That was less than 800 years ago.

Then the climate changed and a thick glacial sheet buried all the arable land under ice. Viking settlers who failed to adopt the lifestyle of the Inuit died of scurvy. 500 years later the French poet Francoise Villon (1431-1463) grew up under a blood red sky. He never saw anything else in his entire life. The red menace in the skies lasted for 80 years, but it didn’t come out of the medieval chimneys of the stinking and polluted Paris. The chemical signature of core samples from the glaciers in Greenland clearly indicate that it was the fallout of a volcanic eruption elsewhere on the planet, an eruption at least five times bigger than Krakatoa. So, it happened before, and it is going to happen again. And nothing we do will prevent it. Volcanic activities (Yellowstone is a disaster waiting to happen), sunspot activity, the release of methane in the farts of our cattle (yes you heard me right, it is far more serious than the emissions from our cars), changes in the salinity of the oceans and the volatility of the Earth’s magnetic field are factors of far greater impact than our own contributions to the carbon cycle, which by the way, is making the trees grow faster and taller.

So we may just as well enjoy ourselves as long as it lasts and in the meantime learn from our space technologies how to survive on a soon to be more hostile planet. We have the know-how, we have a trump card - genetics - but we misdirect our resources and what is worse continue catering to the wrong kind of expectations. I know it titillates our vanity to think about our presence in terms of a stewardship over creation. Come on people, get real! Neanderthal-man survived two ice ages by adapting to the circumstances, not by trying to arrest his environment in an idyllic time-warp.

Instead what is it we are actually doing?

The English taxpayer is asked to subsidize the numbskull idea of “bio-fuels” which in actual fact will increase the “carbon footprint” and in countries which already can’t afford the loss of arable land it is going to accelerate the destruction of our rainforests. The much maligned “bureaucrats in Brussels” are fully aware of it and therefore call for a moratorium on the whole idea, and rightly so. But will Gordon listen? I mean, all we would be doing here is burn “sustainable fuels” instead of fossil fuels; the effect on the environment in terms of emissions is exactly the same, the environmental costs of introducing it are devastating and the effect this will have for the prices at the pump, which is the rationale behind the whole exercise, remains to be seen.

Not to mention that we remove an incentive for the car manufacturers to actually come up with alternatives to our engine designs. The moon-rover did not run on bio-fuel.  

Anyway! Enjoy!

michael sympson, May 2008

© - 5/1/2008 - 1,650 words

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Introduction

Fiction is like the hypnotist's touch on your shoulder.

The doorbell rings and there she is, painted toe-nails, the sandaled foot rubbing up the suntanned calf of her other leg, her left hand with lipstick and makeup mirror still poking backward for the tiny purse dangling from the thinnest of shoulder straps. She looks at you, the face seems serious. And then a little flutter of her mascara smudged eyelashes gives away the mirth in her narrowing eyes.

People who recognized Tolstoy in the streets used to ask the writer how Oblonsky was doing. They knew of course Mrs. Karenin had thrown herself before a train, but nobody could forget her appearance in that black ballroom dress with a deep plunging neckline. Fiction is a pleasing lie, and it doesn’t fail because it is telling a falsehood; it fails when it ceases to amuse.

Through geological ages the animal mind had found relief only in muscular discharge, a torrid routine of howling, scraping and honing; then we arrived and with us the word, an innovation of greater import, than even Gutenberg’s. Perhaps it began with a lover’s whisper, a gossipy nudge at the fireside. This opened the window. Already at sunrise a muffled murmur accompanies the chores of breaking camp and the words rush ahead into the receding shadows and to the next water well. Fiction in its infancy! According to the anthropologists, speech in primitive societies is mainly the purveyor of gossip; it accompanies the daily labors with talk and singsongs, stringing together just so stories about anything and everything. It made us fit to verbalize our thoughts and to develop mental cookie cutters turning the whole world to bits of manageable bite size.

By stretching the limits of plausibility stories have taught us to speculate about the unknown and actually discover what might be out there.

Where the monkey only knows to throw a stone and then duck, we’ve learned to throw out a counterfactual and then draw conclusions from how it is received. But for most of us the attraction lies in the luster a story is lending to our existence. We drift along the Banale Grande of a shopping mal and stop for a glance at the display in the jewelry section. A fantasy is abducting the mind and we suddenly find ourselves drifting downstream the Amazon, on a secret mission in search of El Dorado. A world entirely of your own, the person standing next to us, has no idea. Left and right of our canoe we feel the forbidding mystique of silent treetops. A cormorant is spying for fish from the back of a half submerged reptile as his observation post; the bird is dropping guano on the alligator. Then the images begin to morph and I remember stories I’ve heard before.

This is what it means to be alive: to exchange our stories.

© - 5/1/2008 – by michael sympson,

500 words, all rights reserved

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