Circumnavigating the Globe

I awoke disoriented the first night back in the States. It was the noise: the low rush of cars, people in the street, the sound of jets overhead. With the windows open, my empty apartment was filled with sound. Tonia was there beside me, gray silhouette, warm. The moon crossed against the blinds. All familiar and all completely unknown after two weeks of irregular sleep and hermetic hotel rooms dominated by the low hum of air conditioning. I awoke at home and I did not know where I was.

The body has its rhythms, its flows, its interruptions. I was two weeks around the world and whatever circadian rhythms there were in me were shattered. When I awoke somewhere in the world I was hungry and eating, and somewhere else I was getting ready for work, and somewhere at home I was supposed to be sleeping and I was tired but could not sleep. And then, as I had been the entire trip, I was feverish, the temperature in my body set for sleeping but there I was awake and sweating. Never once in two weeks was my body truly at rest, cooling and deep with dreaming. The dreams came fast like when I was doing speed: quick images and fragments of problems and all of them without any narrative, not even one as random as dreaming.

I was still processing Tokyo as in Tokyo I still had been processing Paris as in Paris I still had been processing Copenhagen as in Copenhagen I still had been processing the sheer chaotic joy of traveling by jet around the world. I could not get out of my mind all those hours in the plane with the high perspective, 32,000 feet above the scoured plains of Baffin Island, long and brown with the late summer; over the frigid icecap of Greenland; watching Venus rise over the east coast of Iceland, the dawn creeping in from the north, where the pole at midnight is bathed in sunshine. I delighted in the sunrise, gold and blood red, along the coast of Sweden. I was able, that high, to discern the bomb scars left in the wheat fields of the Somme; to trace the chill coastline of Estonia; to wonder, in the lowering twilight, about mysterious cities in Siberia, connected by bright golden lights obviously invested with military secrets; and to trace the passage of a lonely freighter across the Sea of Japan. And I marveled at the cordillera of Honshu, poking through the tropical clouds of Typhoon Rex, through the turbulence the rice fields bright green and awaiting harvest; the slate sea rippling with energy along the coast of the Aleutians, and the familiar peaks and fiords of the Inner Passage and British Columbia. It all came as a dream and it made sleep impossible, there, in my unfamiliar home.

Modern travel is an exercise in both defying physics and acceding to them. Flight defies conventions of space and speed and time, and you can will your body to defy convention, for a time, but the stress takes physical force eventually. And the view from above is all about stress and physics made clear and unambiguous: The dappled pattern of clouds lofted on heat and light. The heavy thrust of mountains, twisted and bent by tectonic force. The intense rip of the currents against buoys, struggling in the tide. The globe has its rhythms, its flows and interruptions. When seen from high, from the long view, that hidden force is apparent: sheer physics, accompanied by the somnolent whoosh of the jet cutting through the air, cradling sleep.

History has its rhythms, its flows and interruptions, too. I circled the globe during the two weeks in August 1998 when the sheer force manifest in history erupted. I left Seattle as an agent of ascendant, triumphant, transglobal capitalism, chartered to teach English via machine to the rest of the world; I returned to Seattle as transglobal capitalism slid into an economic abyss. At a moment when the American press (but apparently, not its public) were in an uproar over an indelicate blow-job administered to the president, and the European press were hoping to commemorate the death of a very pretty and very useless princess, the bottom fell out of the markets.

Each morning in Paris, I had coffee at Les Deux Magots, and watched the press grudgingly accept its responsibility. The Clinton saga, sure to sell papers even in Paris (Humiliee! blared the headlines), had to share space with the collapse of the ruble, and Princess Di got bumped to page two. The International Herald Tribune similarly shared stories on its front page, addressing Clinton and Yelsin with headlines whose banality screamed establishment. The London Financial Times, ever in Keynesian retrograde, tried to connect the two; the Tory papers demanded Clinton’s head, downplayed Yelsin’s ineptitude, and managed to find space for Diana, however small. It was as though real life suddenly intervened in pleasant fantasy. The Murdoch mode of the last two decades suddenly gave way to old-fashioned press reporting: they were running on the banks in Moscow, and things do not look good.

One rhythm, unnatural after all, reached the point of exhaustion. The European press turned to more serious voices. Princeton professor and neoliberal critic Stephen Cohen, the author of some of the best history monographs on Russia, finally supplanted Harvard professor Marshall Goldman, the anointed neoliberal whose hackneyed observations have been wrong for years. They found space for commentary by Gore Vidal, upper-class traitor, instead of George Will, upper-crust apologist.

The shift in the American press was less dramatic, especially on CNN, which had circled the globe far in advance of my trip. They held on for dear life. I watched in amazement as the prattle and blare on Clinton continued. The Speech, which in Paris, where left and right wing are acceptable terms, had seemed to me unassailably brilliant and straightforward, was excoriated in America as not sufficiently contrite and abject. Not a word on the president’s key point, that the Starr frameup is politically motivated, much less on the debt exposure of German banks, the limits of IMF funding, or the effect of a devalued ruble on the Euro. But the American press is no longer capable of handling anything more complex than the Lewinsky scandal. Not once did they ask where the IMF gets its funding, because to do so would expose a global redistribution of wealth from the lower and middle classes to the upper class in a nation that resolutely denies—despite every evidence—that there are classes.

The press, in both the US and in Europe, historically has been divided over its role as publicist for the ideology of the elite, and its more democratic role as the agent connecting issues and programs for the majority. In recent years it has been especially reluctant to execute on its position as the informant who makes politics—to use a Microsoft term—actionable. With the collapse of Russia, the Europeans, sensing a new rhythm, begin to shift. But in America, the bottom-line question continues to shortchange the public: which story, Lewinsky or Russia, will sell more advertising?

Still, I crossed over Russia at the exact moment when the incessant prattle of the West could not silence the wail around the globe of those for whom victory in the Cold War resulted in squalor and misery, life mean and getting meaner. Despite rosy homilies administered by economists and revisionists and "third-wave" utopians, the new global economy enforced by American arms has not brought an idyll to the Russian masses, the Mexican workers or the Japanese salarymen, and porcine investors in the United States only deceive themselves when they argue that their exorbitant profits benefit everyone.

The rest of the world knows this is not so. The rest of the world knows that—whatever its terrors and flaws--the collapse of the Soviet Union took with it the ambitions of generations for a more just world, better keyed to simple human needs. And the rest of the world recognizes in the new world order triumphalism hawked by the con men of the West an essential falsity. It is this: no economic order will naturally bring a better world. No economic order can operate invisibly, without the rational intervention of human beings. No economic order can be left to its own devices and deliver both a high material standard of living and a high spiritual standard of justice. Economic orders are social constructions built by human beings for myriad purposes. But they do not operate independently of people, despite the shrill, recurrent insistence of free market absolutists, busy shirking responsibility for a postulated agency that does not exist. The West approaches decadence when it insists that the orthodox monetarism of a handful of wealthy men is a philosophy capable of organizing society. It betrays the reasonable judgment of history, which already delivered, in 1929, its verdict: no industrialized society can sustain an economic order that does not admit of the moral and ethical needs of all its citizens. No economy can operate where the majority do not earn wages sufficient to buy the things they make. Period.

The sudden collapse of world markets betrays a criminal mentality that not all the news stories about celebrity cocksuckers can obscure, a sense that the investors know that they operate in violation of the real rules of history and the actual order of economy. It is as though the free market absolutists of the world suddenly realized that the jig was up, that they can’t spin it anymore, and that theft is finally recognized for what it is. They’re rushing for the exits, but where can they run? One-by-one the markets collapse: Asia, Japan, Russia, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, Germany, the United States. One-by-one the poor of the world recognize that they have more in common with each other than they do with a man born to privilege who speaks their own language but insists that sacrifice is good for the soul.

In Tokyo the sacrifices were becoming evident. The rhythm of toil and prosperity had definitely shifted. The postwar economic miracle was giving way to a post-Cold War economic catastrophe. Along the rivers and canals, beneath the endless bridges of Tokyo, there were makeshift shanties made of broken wood and plastic. When I stayed in Shinjuku in March, I didn’t see the homeless; in August, each night around 7:30 they gathered on the train station overpasses, constructed makeshift cardboard sleeping quarters, and bedded down for the night. Bob Meyers, the Tokyo-based American businessman I was working with, said that there had been a cardboard shantytown in Shinjuku for years, but it seemed new to me, and, if the Japanese papers are any guide, the great Japanese experiment in an efficient, inclusive, ethnically-based capitalism that distributes its wealth evenly is coming to an end.

American treasury secretary Robert Rubin visited Tokyo while I was there, as did recurrent scores of neoliberal economists, all advising the Japanese that the only way out of their economic crisis was to liquidate the assets and savings of working Japanese, stored modesty in postal savings banks, and use them to cover the debts of the transglobal investment banks that had overextended themselves throughout Asia. Mirroring the neoliberal efforts to get at the Social Security savings of working Americans, the bail-out was the plan of the new Japanese government, but it was running into formidable opposition in the Diet, which proposed instead (Horrors!) temporary nationalization of the banks. The English-language papers in Tokyo all launched proper invective against the opposition scheme, which, although supported by the majority of Japanese, was derided as out-of-step with the march of global capital.

Like our American pundits, the Japanese experts maintain that global capitalism is a historical force that cannot be resisted. All well and good. But the desire for a life where work is intermixed with pleasure, where decency is valued as equivalent to efficiency, and justice is a virtue greater than profit, is also a historical force that cannot be resisted. It is as real as the tectonic pressures that uplift mountains, or the weight of moisture coalescing into thunderstorms. Like the long waves visible in the ocean only from above, the desire for a better world is hidden, and easy enough to believe absent. But it swells, crests, becomes manifest even at close range, sheer physical force. It too, circles the globe.

Free market absolutists would have us believe that their ideology is the way to secure a better world. It’s cant. In the end they always advocate an economic order based on ahistorical fundamentals and generalized assumptions about human psychology. Scratch a free market absolutist and you’ll discover a social Darwinist: the way to secure a better world is to reward the fit, and punish the rest. But there’s never been an empirical measure of who the fit are, and there never will be. Social Darwinism, like free market absolutism, is premised on power and greed, and one single, self-serving tautology: the fit are those with the most wealth; those with the most wealth are the fit.

Free market absolutism is the ideological beard of social Darwinism. It is a way of obscuring the rapacity of the core doctrine, and of obscuring the shared ideological roots of social Darwinism and fascism. It postulates "rules" and "orders" and "processes" to a "complex" economy such that the economy cannot be understood by those without "training." And then the business schools of the West churn out MBAs by the dozens who act like novitiates in the Middle Ages, busy explaining the order of the celestial spheres to the uncomprehending.

The success of global capitalism depends upon the obscurantism of such divines. It also depends upon the ability of the world’s elites to seize the assets and incomes of the world’s millions and make it their own. The only way the free market absolutists will squeeze out of the current impasse is by seizing the social security, unemployment insurance, workman’s compensation and health benefits of the middle classes in Japan, Europe, and the United States. This is what the absolutists demand when they insist that the Japanese government "restructure" its economy. This is what motivates the French to go on strike. This is why the American right wing hate the current administration: they balanced a budget imbalanced by the preceding right wing administrations, and in the process broke the ideological cudgel with which the elites can beat the body politic and steal their billions. In Russia and Japan and the United States, the economic crisis precipitates a political crisis, and this is because, in the end, the elite measures "leadership" by its ability to deceive the democracy and redistribute wealth up the socio-economic ladder. Measured by the long view of history, it is as though the elites of the West distributed wealth to the masses just as long as they needed them to build the nation-state; now that the nation-state is obsolete, they are taking it all back, and restoring the medieval social order.

History has its rhythms, its flows, it interruptions. Most of my life the public discourse of the West has been dominated by an unnatural, inordinate stupidity, organized by gross wealth and cultured viciousness. This mode has had its cheap pleasures, its heady disorientations. We’ve been caught up in the speed of the moment, in suddenly new perspectives. Me, too. I got on that plane, going around the world, with an absorbing but fantastic sense of mission, as if, for one minute, I could believe all the hoary market optimism about technology changing the basic order of history, liberating us from traditional economics, circling the globe and spreading peace and democracy. It’s intoxicating rushing across Paris in a taxi destined for a meeting that will result in millions of dollars; it’s flattering to exchange bows with presidents of Japanese companies in Tokyo. It is also beside the point. Underneath all the cheap rhetoric, the chief force circumscribing the scope of history has been the simple necessity of working together so that the collective measure of our talents exceeds the limits of our lives. That hasn’t changed in a world as ruined by technology as liberated by it. That hasn’t changed because our grandfathers defeated fascism and our fathers overwhelmed communism. The end of ideology is not the beginning of greed unrepentant, capital released to its blind rapacity. It is, as it should be, another chapter in the long narrative of our liberation from need, our mastery of ourselves, our slow and dogged insistence on making the world better one small life at a time. That fundamental collective desire is at least as universal as free trade, and far more stable than the markets. That unites the globe most of all.

So I circled the earth (in coach), agent of global capitalism, determined to do my part, but not necessarily the part assigned me. Because, despite the temporary disorientation, history, like the jet-lagged body, eventually catches its rhythm. You begin to think clearly. Morning breaks. And you have days of work ahead.