[] vȯ)) ̷̨ʅ (ʅ(Ɵʅ():::()̵̳̗̊(Ɵʅ()vȯ)) ̷̨ʅ) by ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ (Four Tet)
Some mornings, some days, songs like this with titles like this are, for no particular reason at all, some of the few things that offer a sense of comfort and relief. This is the energy that permeates mid-January, the feeling of being holed up in an artificially heated box on the sixth floor of a vast apartment complex.
It’s all the more disorienting when I begin to read about The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, where the constipated global elite travel in private jets to a remote mountainside of Switzerland and pretend to plan the future of the world’s billions of peasants, the latter a group to which I belong. Whatever. The conference consists of talks with world leaders and formerly bailed-out bank executives, Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari Royals, overly lobbied yet publicly elected US Politicians, and vast leaders in the space of tech and finance who must have popped out of the womb wearing sleeveless down jackets from Patagonia.
At one of the talks on day two of this annual self-important circle jerk where a new world order is formed and truffled foie gras is stuffed down stodgy white rich men’s throats, something of a candidly strange yet poetic nature was said aloud by a US congresswoman named Mikie Sherrill: “The time of peace in the world was quite bad for democracy.” Mikie Sherrill, whose given name my computer keeps autocorrecting to Mike, is making note of, I guess, how the US was at war for the last 20 years, but now that these wars are more or less ‘over’ (Afghanistan??) many people seem to be more inclined toward strongman autocracy, how it’s tougher to sell NATO and neoliberal democratic values to younger generations when the politics of US peacekeeping has been so hypocritical and out of whack. Through her supposedly oxymoronic statement, it isn’t clear whether the Democratic senator suggests that the US (whom I can never bring myself to refer to as ‘we’) should go to more war, more brute-force strategy, more foreign intervention, or whether the country should continue withdrawing troops from foreign territories. Her sentence, again, “The time of peace in the world was quite bad for democracy,” has for some reason been stuck in my head all day, like a brilliant line from a verse written by James Fenton. It all, I suppose, comes down to the word ‘peace’, brilliantly used both rhetorically and sarcastically.
The primary goal of the US's involvement in most wars has been to conscientiously spread around the world the contrived idea of US exceptionalism and US values, which mostly come down to the not-so-gentle worship of consumerism and expansionism, greed and extreme economic inequality under the cheap and misleading guise of Judeo-Christian, but mainly Protestant, values. Saudi Arabia, along with many of its rich and powerful allies in the Arab world, believes in something slightly different. The Saudi’s wealth, power, leverage, and global influence continue to rise. While the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia certainly do value consumer capitalism and big business, there’s a more powerful doctrine that governs their behavior; a genuine national belief in religion, in Islam. And I believe that a powerful country's very sincere adherence to religious values truly scares the shit out of US lawmakers. (Iraq, Afghanistan, and the various other religious countries that the US has previously molested have never had the wealth and influence of Saudi Arabia, which has a judicial system based on Shariah law.) I think, in an odd way, that it’ll end up being the extreme yet prudent nature of religion, or specifically Islam, that helps to shape what many call the new global order; due to years of the faith’s abuse in the interest of wealth, Christianity has become an anachronism.
I now wonder whether, eventually, Islam will have the same fate. In other words, will the Saudis, like the Americans, let the allure of luxury, wealth, and greed supersede their religious ideology? Or, unlike the Americans, will they stick to their guns? Or swords, I should say.
Enough politics for now, forever. Davos, so stupid. I’m very sorry to have bored you.