Tokyo Babylon

One day I hope to live in East Timor. When I was a young man, some year ago, I read about the East Timor independence fighter’s struggle to free their land from Indonesia. It always seemed unjust to me that a small independent nation, a former Portuguese colony, should be wiped out by Indonesia, with US blessing. The fact that these ragged men continued to fight when the international community had abandoned them meant they always had a place in my heart.

Now that I am older and have experience of living in Asia I would like to do my bit to help this impoverished nation, which is the newest in Asia. They’re having a hard time of it at the moment. The Australians have screwed them over the division of oil rights in the sea between Australia and East Timor, but the East Timorese are getting something out of it.

I wish I could say that my interest was entirely selfless, however I definitely do not qualify as a saint. One reason I want to go there now is that it’s close enough to Australia that I can virtually commute when I’m in need of an English conversation in a English speaking pub.

The permaculturists says that borders are the most fertile. If that really is the case then East Timor, where Asia meets Australasia might be just the place to be.

The way we think about things is often channeled by the terms that are used to describe them, in very much a half empty, half full fashion. In my international classes I came across the term “containment’, which was used to describe the way the Soviet Union was ringed by US allies, the way that a nuclear reactor is contained within a pressure vessel. This predisposes you to think of containment as a good thing, since it is holding back something lethal. Containment is generally the answer to things that have no cure, like radiation sickness and the ebola virus.

On the other hand if you described the reality as “forward deployment” then what was manifestly a virtuous response to something vile turns into standing on a neighbour’s doorstep with a gun in your hand.

There are many such altered realities in our everyday world. Homeland Security becomes Government Intrusion, the “war on terror” becomes “keeping citizens in a state of fear”. However, the one I came across recently was subsistence. To people who believe in markets this amounts to a cardinal sin (You mean you don’t trade! – How primitive!), whereas exactly the same reality could also be described as being self-sufficient, providing for your own needs. Since when did growing our own food make you a pariah?

When you consider the amount of junk we as citizens produce every day there seems to be a crying need for more of us to start growing our own food. It’s fresh, trustworthy, hasn’t travelled the world to get to your plate. How much oil do you really want with your food? But we keep coming back to this derogatory term subsistence.

When you think about it, you take shit from your boss so that you can get the money you need to drive to a Walmart, fight your way up and down aisles and drive home again. In the process given the way these soul-less hell bound execs run their business you’ve screwed over small farmers in every corner of the planet. It doesn’t sound like a virtuous cycle to me. Shit from your boss. CO2 from your car. Making evil corporate SOBs richer. Screwing smallholding farmers. Having someone drive a trolley into your heel.

On the other hand with just a bit of ingenuity and maybe a sizeable backyard you can count the days till you tell your boss to go screw himself, send Walmart into bankruptcy where it belongs, save the planet by walking into your garden rather than driving to the supermarket, and hit back at the system that’s killing farmers, all by having a few potatoes and tomatoes running up your wall.

When you think of subsistence in these terms it’s really not a vice at all. Pro-marketeers will try to convince you otherwise. There’s no money they can make out of you growing your own food.

I expect every civilization the world has ever known never saw the bad times coming. Willful blindness is apparently an essential component of what it is to be human. If to err is human then I think of late it is the unconscious past-time of virtually every citizen of the developed world.

Don’t know what I mean? Well, look out your window at the building opposite you. It will seem unremarkable most likely, a building that could be almost anywhere in the world. The fact that it does so is remarkable. Is it not incredible that this virtually global tangible manifestation of uniformity should be before us yet we do not think about what it represents?

Ever heard the expression ‘don’t put all your eggs in the one basket’?

It is likely that the building you are looking at is made from brick or concrete. Bricks fired in kilns, concrete made using cement that has been fired in massive industrial complexes before being transported in a cheap energy vehicle to the construction site. The world over it’s done the same way. Globalization is perhaps just another way of saying one system, one market, one basket. Is it basket or basket-case I wonder?

It seems to me, and I may be wrong, that the building opposite you is a symbol of a world built on cheap energy with no consideration of how that energy, or the materials it processes, seeps into the environment and into you, into me. If it is a new building you can be certain that it was not built to last. You can be certain that it was not built to be deconstructed at the end of its life. It was not always so.

One of the reasons so many buildings in ancient times are mere shadows on aerial photos is that they were disassembled and their materials put to good use in providing a family with shelter, because it was cheaper in terms of energy expenditure than starting from scratch. Such is not the case now. Buildings now are designed to be reduced to unusable fragments, those fragments shoved under the corner of the carpet, out of sight out of mind.

Surely a case of all’s well before it ends badly.

Those who talk about the end of oil, the beginning of expensive energy and what this means to a civilization whose every artifact, whose every structure and machine requires cheap energy are mostly ignored. But consider that every aspect of your life is made possible by cheap energy, the house you live in, the plastic wrapped food you eat, the car you drive to work in the morning, the lights you leave on accidently when you go out. Now imagine what it means when energy becomes less abundant. I would imagine that like leprosy this energy starvation will affect the extremities first, the life blood of the system doesn’t make it all the way to the fingertips and slowly but surely they darken, atrophy and fall off. 

Your government suddenly talking about nuclear energy begins to make more sense doesn’t it? 

On the other hand is it forlorn attempt at maintaining a system that is increasingly unaffordable? It’s probably just my opinion, but I think I need to make arrangements while the going’s good.  On the other hand if you look at insurance costs and security companies the signs are that I’m not wrong in my thinking.  It’s likely that we’re heading towards market failure, bank runs and refugees fleeing those darkened extremities in their millions. The problem is that too many people are making too much money from the way things are. It’s rather like entrepreneurs selling the wood of the lifeboat you are sitting in. These men are feted for the moment “Neutron Jack” Welch – called this because like the neutron bomb he left buildings standing but killed people, Donald “Apprentice Master” Trump – whose genius was that he borrowed so much that his debt became the bank’s problem not his, and the master Entrepreneur Richard Branson, who is investing in space like he knows something the rest of us don’t.

I really need to get my act together, get a piece of land to call my own, make it more fertile than Eden, get my energy generation systems together before they can’t be bought for love nor money. But you know as well as I that the rich will be able to buy their way out of a dead end, but the rest of us will be like those who wandered the American heartland in the 30s with a sign saying will work for food.  Back when the Berlin wall fell an American called Fukuyama said it was the end of history, that the evolution of our civilization had come to a close, there was no more. 

Maybe he was a couple of decades too early?  

Take it anyway you want, either creep as a noun or creep as a verb. Perhaps using  both senses simultaneously would most apt. In any case the spectre of security again raised its ugly head, inserting itself into the private lives of ordinary people everywhere. This week thanks to my special visa status I was perhaps the only foreigners on my flight into Japan who was not photographed and fingerprinted. The immigration waiting line for foreigners was longer than I’d ever seen. The contrast with the Japanese national side, a half acre of unoccupied carpet, had never been so stark. The television screen detailing the procedure featured a seemingly delighted blonde western woman. She had her photo taken in a manner reminiscent of a graduation ceremony. She had her fingerprints taken like she was expecting to have her fortune read. I trust the blonde lady was well paid for her part in that fiction.

Ostensibly the reason for fingerprinting was to prevent terrorism. This completely overlooked the fact that the only contemporary terrorist attacks on Japanese soil were committed by Japanese nationals. Interestingly foreigners arriving at some Japanese hotels have been asked to present their foreigner identity, or gaijin, cards. The fact that there is no legal basis for such a request does not stop it happening.

The stench of zenophobia wafting from the hallowed halls of officialdom contrasts starkly with the reception foreigners recieve from young Japanese people. I sometimes wonder how it is that a country whose citizens disavow war and aggression should have such a government. On the other hand when you consider that the same group of people have run Japan since the mid-50s it makes more sense. In Japan politicians don’t come to power they inherit it, it is passed down from mandarin to protege much like lands and titles in monarchies, and as in monarchies, the ordinary citizen, or should that be subject, has little say in the matter.

Interestingly the next day I read a column by Naomi Klein in which she wrote that investments in alternative energy solutions to growing environmental problems were playing second fiddle to investments in security systems. Apparently there is more money to be made from protecting people from the consequences of their consumption than in seeking solutions to those problems. In the contest between make a better world or ley it rot and buy a gun – the gun is winning. The walls are going up, in Japan, in the EU and in the US.

Interesting that the market should give signals of business as usual and preparing for doomsday at the same time isn’t it?