WWII Is over and Germany won! ( Maybe.)

There are some things science cannot explain. Like why a lettuce and mayonnaise sandwich tastes so much better than it sounds. And just as science has been rendered mute and helpless in the face of such monumental culinary conundrums so too has political science reached something of an impasse in trying to predict what the future of Europe is going to look like.

Economists have a term for this as economists tend to, they call this particular branch of probability theory a ‘Martingale’ and it goes something like this; your expectation of a future value or state is equal to the current observed value at the time of observation. Or put more simply your best guess as to how much the US dollar will be worth tomorrow is how much it’s worth today and no number of fancy PhD’s from the London school of Economics can increase your ability to better what is at it’s heart a non- prediction.

Things used to be much easier for those of us studying politics. Emanuel Kant pretty much figured out what would be needed for lasting peace over 200 years ago[1] and it included, amongst other things the creation of a ‘Federation of free states’ or rather, disparate states inextricably linked via the user- friendly banter of fiscal interdependence. It was a good plan, a wholemeal plan, filled with roughage and it was duly put into effect, sans Kant's 'fiddly' imperative morality of course! That kind of thing was sure to get in the way of what promised to be a bloody good party. The Zollverine in 1818 was a Prussian-dominated customs union, cultured from the tatters of the Holy Roman Empire. It was designed to initiate German independence on the one hand and on the other hand to ensure that the centre of the German world would be Berlin and not Vienna. The Union became a Confederation, the Confederation a Federation and finally, after the odd war or two a unified German state emerged.

Yes ok, this new country was something of a problem and yes it would take Europe 120 years to sort that mess out, but the statesmen of the day in post WWII USA were neither oblivious nor indifferent to Kantian notions of peace; the solution was devilishly simple, more than moderately expensive and looked like altruism but smelt like self-interest. The Marshall Plan was, simply put, a thing of beauty. 'Here,' they said, 'Is $13 billion (about 5% of US GDP!)  which we give to you with absolutely no strings attached whatsoever aside from one tiny little detail… you won’t get a bean  unless you  join the 20^th Century equivalent of a pan European Zollverine.'  

Those in the know would have nodded very cleverly at one another. ‘Ah yes,’ they must have pontificated, ‘Positively Machiavellian old boy.’ For the United States, the real victors of WWII, the Marshall plan killed two birds with one cheque. Firstly, they re-built a Europe that they desperately wanted to sell shiny things to. That was good. Secondly they engineered the longest unbroken peace in European History. That was better. Yes, of course there was the small matter of  a cold war testosterone-soaked pissing contest.to deal with but hey, boys will be boys! Whilst détente  threatened to  make Sodom and Gomorrah look like the slapstick destruction of a Laurel and Hardy set, the thermonuclear sword of Damocles nevertheless came, in hindsight, at a bargain price. No French soldiers walked timorously across the German border, no Armada gathered of the coast of Flanders and  no Swiss mercenaries besieged European cities singing  'stand and deliver' at 4 O'Clock in the morning..  More importantly for our Yankee friends, American soldiers were left free to storm beaches in south East Asia where the enemy spoke in  unfamiliar tongues and had no air support whatsoever. Good times y’all!

The collapse of communism brought the whole plan into sharp focus. The 120 year question ‘What the holy-fuck are we going to do about Germany?’ was answered with a cry ‘Let’s all become part of Germany! Yes there were dissenters, yes people said it wouldn’t work; yes the right wing press screamed headlines at us like the Express’ ‘EU’s plan to liquefy corpses and pour them down the drain!’  But those of us who made it our business to pay attention to what was going on in Europe saw the writing on the wall. Inch by inch Europe moved towards a Confederation (although that word was never used,) the Kantian Federation (although no-one dared mention that F word either,) didn’t seem that far off. And the economic crisis did not change the eventual goal anyway, if anything it seemed set to accelerate it. Desperate times called for desperate measures. On the day that Poland gave the German Chancellor Carte blanche permission to ‘fix Europe’ it seemed that the deal was done. Germany would enter a fiscal Union with everyone else, they would check budgets, they would alter budgets and then eventually they would issue them. And then David Cameron issued something of his own, his rabble rousing veto. He walked out of the meeting hall looking like an Owl taking a shit; the thought bubble above his head read ‘What the shitting Crikey have I done? ‘

I didn’t see it coming, but then again neither did the Deputy Prime Minister. Though the intransigence of the French gained Sarkozy points towards the upcoming election that he’s liable to lose anyway and though Cameron regained the respect of the Murdoch press, the tangible effect of this single, stupid, selfish act was to effectively neuter the last desperate attempt to fix a quintessentially financial crisis via political mechanisms. Without the short term advantage of shoring up the Euro zone itself, old objections were raised to the fore, unsheathed and waggled in the faces of ancient enmities like a giant sulky nationalistic phallus;  a threatened referendum here an opposition party’s  denunciation there.

And so here we are, Europe is a martingale. What happens next? I have no idea. I can offer you a number of scenarios, the EU might disintegrate, it might Federalise, it might shrink, and it probably won’t expand… it might be a Federal Republic of 17 states, or 15… 26… 27? Sorry that’s all I’ve got; uncertainly has not only increased, it’s a virtual commodity nowadays, they've been trading it for Christ's sake! We're left with a world moving too quickly for anyone to make sense of it.  If Virilio’s examination of dromology (the speed at which things happen,) is anything to go on (and trust me it is,) soon we won’t be able to see further than our own noses, this blog post may well be moribund before I even hit the publish button. I’ll make one prediction though, Europe is almost certainly going to go broke, we've lived beyond our means for far too long now and that's the problem with being the historical masters of the world, it's an addiction, the financial crisis, an intervention; we need to kick the habit. Europe's star has fallen, America's is falling and there is some hope there. They have further to fall of course and though dromology dictates that they are falling more quickly than the British or Roman Empires ever did, but that too points to something hopeful. Europe parachuted into obsolescence, it was a slow fall and the ground rushed up towards us at a pleasingly gentile pace; no problem we thought, we have time to figure out what to do. But we hit the ground anyway, and gentile pace or not we folded up like an Ikea flat pack table.
The US is in free-fall, not quite terminal velocity but close to it. They have less time to react to the looming disaster but at least the threat has become plain to all, a palpable sense of urgency permeates the American conciousness; the US recently slashed it's military budget by nearly half and if that doesn't tell you that they are taking this seriously then there is no hope for you. At all.

---

[1] You can read Kant’s rather brilliant essay here. http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/kant/kant1.htm

Life, Art and the New 52

You can tell an awful lot about the world through comics.

Superman's formative years took place in a world suspicious of it's own institutions where only the plucky reporter could be trusted to bring low the anti trust mogul and the Washington skink. Iron man taught us that the world comes in Manichean hues, of crimson commie bashing cold war prose where only Yankee guile might prevail. The 70’s comic reflected the defiant introspection of the time, the land of the free suddenly revealed as a far from colour blind chimera. The 80’s lead us into a darker more complex world as we pondered the inevitability of Armageddon before giving way to insipid triumphalism and machismo; meanwhile makeovers, do-overs and reboots reflected both the changing pace of society and the new corporate reality of the comic book industry.

And now, the new 52.

A story can only be sustainable for decade upon decade if it remains unchanged in totality.  That’s why Tolkien works, you can read his epic once or a dozen times, the thrill of the novel will give way to the warm fuzz of the familiar or the nostalgic. To continue to tell stories indefinitely generates problems; back stories become too complex, flashbacks a nightmarish collection of half remembered back issues written years before your birth. But worst of all, especially from a publishers point of view, it requires prior knowledge of characters and plot; picking up an X- men comic book half way through Chris Claremont’s classic run would be like trying to watch the penultimate episode of Lost without asking anyone present for just a little clarification as to what the HELL was going on.  

So we reboot. I get it.

But I do not have to like it.

Much was promised; the old stories were gone, finished, the characters would be defibrillated, repackaged and renewed. Hell, you might recognise these guys if you squinted but not even that was guaranteed. Yeah man, dried pasta was out, fresh pasta in. 

Yeah right.

The New 52 is no year one,  no origin story retold. Perhaps for fear of having to rewrite a back-story in its entirety we enter our hero’s lives some time after they have adopted the alter ego persona that ultimately makes them an interesting read. Whilst the justice League’s Green Lantern seems surprised that Batman is real over in Justice League International it would seem that Bats and Guy Gardner go way back. Barbara Gordon is Batgirl and yes she can walk again but it seems was nevertheless shot by a Hawaiian shirt wearing joker meaning that… (So wait the Killing joke did happen… or what?) Green arrow is Oliver Queen the disaffected young CEO of a major corporation who fights crime with a bow, neglects his company and has a new haircut. Over in Action Comics we see an early superman sporting a home made costume of jeans and boots, his relationship with Lois is… hard to fathom (since technically we have never seen them interact before.) Over in Superman # 1 the end of an epoch is symbolically rammed down our collective throats as they destroy the familiar art deco contours of the Daily Planet and replace them with the sleek curves of hypermodernity. Whilst Perry puffs and pants his way through the struggling print format Lois our new Lois (who is nothing like the old Lois honestly,) barks orders about online feeds. It’s achingly hip agonisingly ‘now’, mentioned you tube? Check Mentioned Twitter? Check. Gratuitous shot of man using a Blackberry check! (Bleugh).

So what does New 52 tell us about the world we live in?

If there is one recognised rule to being cool and that’s that you must at no point be seen to be trying to be cool. Aquaman sans- beard( possibly because he doesn’t look old  enough to shave) remonstrates that he doesn’t talk to fish cause they don’t have very large brains and that would be stooopid (stooopid.)  The assistant director of Cadmus labs is about 20 years old because… you know all scientists reach such lofty heights early on in their career. Captain atom has something akin to a whisper of a Mohawk atop his head; the new Robin is just the old/new Robin, (Batman’s son Damian.)  and it makes sense because, hey, no-one under twenty wants to read stories about anyone over twenty and anyone over thirty wishes they were twenty. Right? The heroes are so ‘today’ that they abandon grammar in favour of street cred ‘O-M-G I’m liking these powerz!’

Don’t get me wrong, heroes always had to look the part, the sex appeal of a Greek god poured into Lycra with only the artists word that no ‘nip slips’ will ensue. I get that, we all get that. But why does Jimmy Olsen have to look like the offspring of George Clooney and Heidi Klum? The only person even wearing glasses is Clarke. And he doesn’t even need them.

And this is what the new 52 reflects; a society unashamed of it’s adoration of the superficial. Everyone’s got a cool pad; super science abounds yet exists paradoxically with familiar techno fetishism (‘Lois we’re getting flooded with cell phone video footage!’)  Everyone is young and everyone is pretty which brings with it a predictable lament; villains, ever mirrors of the heroes, are forced into the role of the grotesque. The Joker removes his own skin; Batwing’s enemy decapitates an entire police department, Dead shot is being devoured by rats and Grifter himself stabs punks in the eye with a scalpel. Hyper violence for hyper modern times because hey guys, the old world is turning to shit, the party is drawing to an ignominious end, everyone feels it, everyone is doing their best to ignore it. We’re reliving the 20’s we’re the beautiful people, looking down the barrel of the gun, lapping up the coming storm with all the augury of a ‘huh?’  

Some of the comics shine, Justice League is almost sublime, and Animal man of all titles forces the character into perhaps a new era of excellence. That’s not the point. The point is that the line itself leaves a foul taste in the mouth, the x-factor painstakingly inked and scripted by a middle aged facsimile of what the kids want to see.