Take me to the room where the red’s all red
Take me out of my head-‘s what I said yeah
Hey take me to the room where the green’s all green
And from what I’ve seen it’s hot it’s mean
If the Chinese have any sense of humor to accompany their embrace of manifest destiny they’d choose the above as their Olympics theme song. As this article insists, it’s the way things are shaping up for the 21st century.
What would those Victorian masters of old have made of the fact that Chinese security men were on the streets of London this week, ordering our own police about and fighting running battles with British protesters while bewildered athletes carried the Olympic torch on its relay through the capital?
It was a brazen display of how confident China has become of its new place in the world, just as the British Government’s failure to take a firm stand on Chinese abuses of human rights shows how craven we have become.
The West is weak, a willfully beached whale encumbered and suffocating under its own heaving mass, tired of living, growing old, losing faith, conceding surrender to legal and illegal invasions of foreign hordes with not the slightest bit of inclination or desire to assimilate, and I lay the blame for its critical condition and spiritual stupor squarely at the feet of those guilty Western equalists who got the vapors being Number One. The folly of the Iraq War was simply coda to decades of self-evisceration and puling retreat from national pride.
As it builds gleaming skyscrapers on its fields, China alone consumes half the world’s cement and a third of its steel.
What is happening is so extraordinary that economists have had to invent a new word for it – this is not an economic cycle, but a supercycle, a shift in the world economy of historic proportions.
When demand increases and supply stands still, prices shoot up. Iron, wheat and oil are all at record prices, despite slackening demand in the faltering Western economies.
A double whammy. Demand in the West for materials decrease but prices continue to rise on increased demand in China. A weakened economy could at least eventually benefit from a drop in prices due to weakened demand, but now that is denied us. I see a big hurt coming. Stagflation all over again.
China rises on these factors:
- dem asian smarts perfectly suited for the modern visuo-spatial tech economy
- fierce jingoism
- ethnic pride (what in the West would be called racism)
- a collective spirit of predestination
- a complete absence of self-flagellating guilt
- a first instinct not based on fear or apology, but righteous entitlement
- a less tender ethical sensibility
Remind you of countries past?
Yet there is audacious hope on the horizon.
But Western attitudes will change as well, with a likely shift to the political Right. White liberal guilt, the driving force behind political correctness, will subside as Westerners feel threatened by the global order changing, and their supremacy slipping away.
Anti-Americanism will disappear as Europeans realise how much better it was to have a world super power that was a democracy (however flawed) not a dictatorship.
There is even speculation that the intense economic pressure on countries such as Britain will cause them to trim down their bloated welfare state, simply because it will no longer be affordable at present levels.
I used to think that the physical death of the last wheezing remnants of the Boomer generation would be needed to finally slay the PC Eye of Sauron, but now I see that China’s triumph is the X factor that will re-energize American culture. Chinese supremacy may very well turn out to be a blessing in disguise for an anemic West. In the tribulation of real challenge, of growing powerlessness, America has the opportunity to toss off the shackles of navel-gazing self-doubt and deconstructionist -ism wallowing and reclaim a renewed sense of self. I foresee the Chinese Century ushering in a quietly robust Underground American Century marked by its jettisoning of postmodernist nihilistic silliness.
Real loss of power has a way of focusing the mind.
She’s low down
-She don’t take no prisoners
Go down
-Gonna give me the business
No time
-Yeah chained to the rack!
Show time
-Got a dragon on my back
Show down
-Go find another customer
Slow down
-I gotta make my way*
*yeah, i know this song is probably about drugs, but i liked how it worked as a china metaphor as well.
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