Sunday, 27 April
 |
| The cavalcade of news |
Good Morning
Jack…
News is an
endless serial of interrelated events that offer no definitive conclusion. We like our stories to be like Aesop’s Fables
and have a clear, resolute finish. The
fox couldn’t reach the grapes he desired so he eventually walked away from them,
defeated after much effort, and mumbled to himself, “They’re probably sour,
anyway.” Such endings give us the
opportunity to draw conclusions about people, ourselves and the way of the
world. Stories make for neat packages
that we can finish up with ribbon and put a bow on it. The end of the Cold War brought the curtain
down on Communism and proved the failure of Marxist ideas.
News is the
cavalcade of human events and, as such, is impossible to contain between ‘In
the beginning’ and ‘The End’. Sure, a
world leader’s biography ends with their death but their impact reverberates
with newsworthy significance long after they’ve stopped being a household
word. Those reverberations put new
events into motion and inspire the minds of fresh people that, in turn, become
world leaders with lasting impact on the human community. How can we possibly make sense of it all if
we don’t find an ending point around which we draw our conclusions?
We
write: The Age of Roosevelt; The Soviet
Union under Stalin; Twentieth Century China.
Roosevelt died. His presidency
ended. But he inspired a generation of new
politicians, including Lyndon Johnson, who’s Great Society was patterned after Roosevelt’s New Deal. Roosevelt’s Social
Security is ancestral to Johnson’s Medicare which, in turn, paved the way for
Obamacare. Stalin’s world view reflected
the geopolitics of Russia under the Tsars as well as the catastrophe that was Napoleon’s
19th century invading army, culminating with the burning of Moscow
and, more recently, Germany’s repeated 20th century attempts to make
western Russia German. In the space of a
single century China overthrew its ancient Manchu Dynastic rule and attempted
to create a republic based on Sun Yat-sen’s founding principles: nationalism, democracy and people’s
livelihood. Years of turmoil followed –
invasion by Japan, civil war, the Communist Revolution, Mao Zedong’s Great Leap
Forward and the Red Guard, China becomes a nuclear power, and the economic reforms
of Deng Xiaoping whose impact continues to this day. All this history, all this collision of human
desire, ideas and collective action were compressed into a single demarcation
of human time – a century of years.
Today we
have President Obama on a tour of Asian nations aimed at firming our economic
and political ties in a region where our dominance is being contested by China,
the new rival for power on the world stage.
While meeting with allied leaders in Japan and South Korea the President
simultaneously has to defend his efforts to resolve a confrontation over the
Ukraine with Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin.
As with most clashes between nations of the world the motivation driving
confrontation has to do with wealth and economic resources. In this instance Western Europe is vying with
Russia over whose economic sphere the Ukraine will choose to become part. Russia has historic, ethnic and geographic
claims for influencing Ukrainian affairs while the nations of the European
Union offer a track record of overall economic success. Whose method of affiliation is more likely to
improve the quality of life of Ukrainian citizens?
The
political norms of international affairs reflect the shifts in power among
nations. The dominance of any one
nation, society or civilization over humanity hasn’t the permanence of natural
law. Power gravitates towards wealth and
access to the resources that provide a nation’s wealth are dependent upon a
complex interplay of factors that include, to no small degree, the foresight
and wisdom demonstrated by a country’s leaders.
There is no act of God or world body that will protect us from our blunders. The winning streak must inevitably end for
every society at the forefront of human progress as it did for the Egyptians,
the Romans and every one of history’s other empires. Competition among civilizations is always
rigorous, fast paced and limited to nations offering other societies something truly
exceptional.
Love,
Dad
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