Stuff


I'm enduring an odd, September-grey hangover near an open window. The fresh breeze is just chilled enough. A mix of Glen Campbell Wichita Lineman and Buddy Holly, whom my father loved when he was alive on the earth, is playing on Radio 2 as I write.

How odd these moments of clarity are. The United States is nationalising a large portion of the financial system, centred today upon a loan to AIG, the insurance giant. This goes to the heart of one of the institutions which are at the core of the republic of lawyers that was reformulated in the twentieth century.

It's all very well to talk of tort lawyers running America, for instance, or of a culture of rights. I have, though I hope not yet past the point of tedium. That model of a politicised legal system to which people turned and congress deferred or passed the buck, intimately depends upon the insurance industry.

America, unlike England and Wales, is regulated through the courts, which allow contingency fees for lawyers, force costs onto the sued party, and imposes punitive damages upon businesses. Congress and state legislatures are thus left time to push law enforcement to the limits of civil liberties and to run a mad combination of a statist education system and a war machine whilst fighting over how much of a debt they could employ to do it.

None of this would happen without the insurance that anyone in business or operating in public is required to bear. The system should be self-funding, and yet, in common with the rest of the party guests at the orgy of greed that finance has been for years, AIG is in deep trouble today.

Unlike other republics, America maintains the idea that it is unbroken. There have been five French republics, for instance, Ireland, Italy and Germany have endured massive changes or interruptions in forms of government from time to time, and Russia, of course, has until recently endured a nightmarish carousel for a hundred years.

The trait of paying public worship to a federal continuity is common to many states in the Americas. In the USA, it disguises many changes. The present order, for instance, is one in which tort lawyers regulate society. The media follow a personalised political agenda, and are themselves owned by large corporations, which sponsor a huge number of political activities.

Government in this order became a national security business, and state debts were tied to the financial markets or restrained any attempted liberalism, at the federal and most importantly the local level. More people than ever before in history, but still a small slice of society, became super-rich. The celebrity game and mega-religion kept the masses happy, and maverick behaviour was made safe within the confines of 'scenes' in music, sports and drugs cultures outside of which therapeutic Freudianism held sway.

If the rest of the world bothered America at all, it was as a zone in which financial power, first crudely at Suez and then privately, drew the world around the republic, desperate for reserve currency, fleeting profit, and lacking in any alternative. The barons of this power were foreign, but their values were American (and not always on the right, either).

American power has often been celebrated by neoconservatives and others as 'hard'; in truth, the silken cords of money and corporate activity have been as familiar to those who are strangers to the republic's streets. It was dusted over by a deeply attractive ideology of liberal democracy which even Popes who know better now make pledges to. I wondered at that, earlier this year; the successor of Peter, who predecessors declared Americanism a heresy, stood on the White house lawn and declared it all true for his own purposes.

This morning, every single pillar of that American order is under threat. The republic of lawyers won't function if insurance is not available for the appearance of wealth redistribution and punishment from profit makers to plaintiffs. A grinding war in Afghanistan has become, in truth, a Pakistan war. Oil, oil refineries, and controversies over new deposits, has become fuel for worry over gasoline shortages. Russia is back.

The financial markets are unwinding and so, if you look and listen for the odd snatches of a clue, is the Asian association with the American federal deficit which has financed debt so deeply and for such a remarkably long time. Yet, alongside that there is hope for America. It's to be found in the odd arms of the carry trade's collapse, and it is there because the world will have to come back so long as the British Dominions, for want of a better word, and the Euro are so unattractive.

The republic has also met a foe in Persia which some of the more sane within its walls understand is too big, bad and mad to launch a small war against. The frustrating thing is that none of this is necessary. It is the American Republican government's wilful fault.

What of the opponents? The Obama campaign seems to be gathering as attackers to itself the sulphurous gasp of Christianists, conspiracists, and, bizarrely, even anticommunists from the shadow world of the 1950s as it, equally bizarrely, challenges this old order.

I write bizarre advisedly. This is because, by European standards, the Obama campaign is a centrist, almost conservative campaign led by groups who seem to have subsumed their youthful Marxism and racial politics into a populist set of arguments that challenge very little whilst patronising working class people and the racially aware with populism.

Something very fundamental is shifting in the west, now barely subterranean, not even behind the walls. This iteration of the American republic which has been around for seventy years or so is going down, holed by one of the most maliciously incompetent administrations in its history. The people behind that administration now want to continue with more of the same. McCain-Palin : Strong, wrong, reckless and ruinous.

Don't load what's happening onto the head of George Bush either. One can speculate on his health, a motor and coordination problem he seems to have developed that suggests, in slurred speech and a lack of physical balance that there is something wrong with him. He could, of course, just be exhausted.

I don't think he's drinking again, and nor do some of the neurologists who raised the issue of how he behaves and how he's guided around with me independently and with friends recently. Even Vladimir Putin, given the open goal of criticising Bush, doesn't think the President is running the country anymore. I think that's right. I'm just glad that Cheney's not in open charge, and that the joint chiefs seem able to hold the Vice-President back.

Depending upon events, I think that the crisis will deepen and peak in the coming eighteen months, and I hope to God that you, my American reader, have the sense to hold your loved ones close, pay down debts and pray. Good luck.

The picture at the top of this post is John Sloan's 1907 painting, In the Wake of the Ferry.