Life is being awfully kind at present as I get to spend another week in Paris. This trip combines biz and romance; separate biz, romance very much ensemble avec mon mari. Prior pics from our prior address in Paris; a city that inspires like no other, other than Roma....
However, one has to balance the practical with the sublime and visiting la lumiere feels more fun; banking and business is easier in Amsterdam, which brings us to the banking crisis, naturally.
Italy's taking a beating, listening to outside analysis is pointless, no one understands Italy but Italy, we shall see...but its hard to watch the markets pound them at 7.8%. Comparing Italy, which is not bankrupt, to Greece and co, which is, appears pointless. Ireland wasn't, but they were forced to sign up to their banks debt, but banks, being banks, refuse to accepts losses.
Such is Europe's loss, at present.
What Fresh Hell comes along each day is everyone's guess, so many items vying for our arm chair inspection. France still insists it lives in the center of our universe so one feels this to be true when there and who sooner to be at the eye of the banking storm if not France.
When we lived in the 5th it was still 2005, rainbows were outside our flat along Rue de la Montaigne Ste. Genevieve, making our entire flat purple, such as it was...but that was then.
Now, we've all planted our feet firmly on terra cotta, hovering low, wondering which nation state in this globalized planet will experience financial terrorism next.
Places on the planet that once appeared exotic, countries with names like Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, are as common on CNN as they are in a re-occurring diary I'm paid to write for a glossy magazines.
But let's be honest, even to those in Eurasia, perhaps especially to those in Eurasia the CIA camouflage appears weaker by the year, the month and day.
Few in the international press debate whether Libya is now run by Al qaeda which reminds me of David Letterman's response to Woody Allen marrying his adopted daughter. After the news broke Letterman's monologue began, "now let me get this straight, Woody, you've been seeing the same therapist for 25 years, twice a week, hmmm. I have two words for your therapist. Nice Job."
EU's latest casualty allows for the following: Budget clears deal for new Belgian government. They haven't made one, but soon the two sides(Flemish and Walloon) that never get along just may have to. For a spell the idea appeared romantic for some..do we really need government outside of the basics, if only to make more laws? We thought the question had been addressed.
Pakistan shuts down supply routes and reports that suggest, "24 'allegedly' killed", report at their own peril. Stupid. Evil. Drones. Stirring up, killing and inspiring more and more people to trust the American government less and less...
Change is imminent, absolutely everywhere. Eurasia is re-emerging, not emerging..
Reminds me of an essay Gore Vidal wrote in 1986 in the Nation.
"As early as 1950, Albert Einstein understood the nature of the rip-off. He said, "The men who possess real power in this country have no intention of ending the cold war. " Thirty five years later, they are still at it, making money while the nation itself declines to eleventh place in world per capita income, to forty sixt in literacy and so on....Now the long feared Asiatic colossus takes its turn as world leader, and we-the white race-have become the yellow man's burden Let us hope that he will treat us more kindly than we treated him. In any case, if the foreseeable future is not nuclear, it will be Asiatic, some combination of Japan's advanced technology with China's resourceful landmass. Europe and the US will then be simply, irrelevant to the world that matters, and so we will come full circle: Europe began as the relatively empty uncivilized Wild West of Asia; then the Western Hemisphere because the Wild West of Europe. o the sun has set in our West and risen once more in the East."
Gore wrote this article in '86, before the PC police had arrived..close enough and prescient for 6 decades that man, Gore Vidal; America's biographer.
