MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"
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MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents" |
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Event #172: Segue to The Solstice 
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The final scene wasn't supposed to be like that. It was more than in-grained, Cold War partisanship that made me feel angry when I learned that the Russians had occupied the sophisticated Slatina air base, it was a deep feeling that moral and aesthetic vandalism had been committed, destroying the happy ending. The wicked witch that had supposedly been vanquished in the penultimate scene had not been destroyed after all.
But, then, there was a much more profound moral and aesthetic under-pinning to the story. The good fairies had squabbled over who was the bravest and who would therefore lead the grand parade; for two fatal days they put domestic media considerations above the needs of refugee Kosovars; and, not for the first time, their intelligence - in both meanings of the word - let them down.
Like all good stories the climax echoed the opening scene but Pristina is no Berlin. There was irritation in Washington and London at Russian antics but this is nothing to the hysteria behind the smiles on VE day. Churchill's public pronouncement that we had slaughtered the wrong pig was one of the few occasions that he gave way to under-statement. This was, rather, a Mahlerian symphonic device where the opening major theme is brokenly re-stated in a lower minor key at the end. The metaphor only holds if you remember that Mahler was anything but nostalgic and the Berlin references were surely that, a hankering after Churchill and Roosevelt if not "Uncle" Joe Stalin. The chief drawback of nostalgia is that, like chewing gum, it continues to blur the palate even after it has lost its savour.
Clinton, Blair, and even Yeltsin almost up to the last, could hardly have played their hands better. Half a century on from the Berlin Air Lift the media is less literate and more venal, the populace less political and more secure. This is no age for heroics, for the hectoring triumphalism of Thatcher and the bumbling imperialism of Reagan. It is a necessarily careful age, careful of public opinion, careful of its own soldiers' lives, of the proportionateness of response, an age for Strobe Talbot who proved once again that the world would be a much better place if the White House paid more attention to its State Department.
Talbot's almost impossible task was to deal with a Yeltsin administration united only in its resentment of Western hegemony and nostalgia for its lost status. Torn between a propensity for global violence and a desperate need for Western money, its petulance and instability are palpable, with divisions between Departments and between the civil government and the military; add to that an up-coming bitter Presidential election and it is a wonder that Talbot got as far as he did, even though the terms of Russian participation in Kosovo are itchily vague.
Matters will resolve themselves this week in obedience to the iron law of Karl Marx and Friedrich Hayek. Russia's debt re-scheduling will be considered yet again and the complete separation of this from antics in Pristina would require a degree of fortitude beyond Clinton's powers. As an isolated issue America might be inclined to a high degree of self-interested leniency but there is the wholesale repair of the Balkan infrastructure, economy and civil society to deliver and the small matter of Third World debt re-scheduling; and whereas the voters may not be very interested in the antics of politicians in a general, media hungry way, they are interested almost to the point of obsession in taxation.
When considering how to handle debt we should be thankful that high-mindedness is in relatively short supply. It takes a particular kind of moral strength to forgive the trespasses of feeble, corrupt, military/industrial complexes when you have beggars on your own streets and such a level of ghettoed social deprivation that the resort to narcotics and the theft to fund them are both out of control. Even more painful is the judgment to be made between the 'deserving', morally upright, hard-working poor, ground down by taxes, living on the edges of ghettoes and frightened of being sucked in to the no-go zones on the one hand and the nieces of junior ministers in one-party states on the other.
The case for re-scheduling debt, and the case for reconstructing Serbia under Milosevic, should be looked at from a strictly practical point of view; all that morality will tell us is that we must give all that we have to the poor, which poor is a question of politics.
While we leave such munificence to the Canonised, we will have to undergo yet another episode of enforced sacrifice, to give up a necessity at home in order to pay for the mistakes of others abroad, mistakes, moreover, that we never failed to point out.
During the past half century we have had to pay for German reconstruction after the Second World War; Eastern European reconstruction after the Cold War; and we will now have to pay for Serbian reconstruction. Add to that what we have to pay to put right for the poorest people in the world the evil visited upon them by the collusion between their politicians and greedy bankers and the image of the whining Western consumer takes on a holographic ambivalence.
We will endure but not enjoy our domination as the Russians blunder on; we are too sophisticated, rather than too upright, to be triumphalist. We always knew that there would not be a happy ending, not because we have given up our pursuit of happiness but because we know the story has no end.
Kevin Carey can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".
© 1999, GENERATOR 21.
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