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TIME: Almanac 1993
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1992-09-23
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ESSAY, Page 96Welcome to the Global Village
By Lance Morrow
A new world has developed like a Polaroid photograph, a
vivid, surreal awakening.
The effect has been contradictory: a sense of sunlight and
elegy at the same time, of glasnost and claustrophobia.
Whenever the world's molecules reorganize themselves, of
course, someone announces a new reality -- "All changed,
changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born," in W.B. Yeats'
smitten lines about the Irish rebellion of Easter 1916.
Seventy-three years later, the Irish troubles proceed, dreary,
never beautiful -- an eczema of violence in the margins.
But the world in the past few years has, in fact,
profoundly changed. In Tiananmen Square last week, many of the
demonstrators' signs were written in English. The students knew
they were enacting a planetary drama, that their words and
images in that one place would powder into electrons and then
recombine on millions of little screens in other places, other
minds, around the world. The planet has become an intricate
convergence -- of acid rains and rain forests burning, of ideas
and Reeboks and stock markets that ripple through time zones,
of satellite signals and worldwide television, of
advance-purchase airfares, fax machines, the miniaturization of
the universe by computer, of T-shirts and mutual destinies.
The planetary circuits are wired: an integrated system, a
microchip floating in space. Wired for evils -- for AIDS, for
example, for nuclear war, for terrorism. But also for
entertainment, knowledge and even (we live in hope) for higher
possibilities like art, excellence, intelligence and freedom.
Justice has not gone planetary and never will. But the village
has indeed become global -- Marshall McLuhan was right. No
island is an island anymore: the earth itself is decisively the
island now.
Travel and travel writing are enjoying a sort of brilliant
late afternoon, what photographers call the magic hour before
sunset. But the romantic sense of remoteness shrivels. Even the
trash announces that the planet is all interconnection,
interpenetration, black spillage, a maze of mutual implication,
trajectories like the wrapped yarn of a baseball.
A scene: blue plastic bags, bags by the thousands, struggle
out of the Red Sea onto the shores of Egypt.
The wind dries them, and then they inflate like lungs and
rise on the desert air. They come out of the sea like
Portuguese men-of-war and then, amphibious, as if in some
Darwinian drama, sail off to litter another of the earth's last
emptinesses. Reverse Darwin, really: devolution, a flight of
death forms.
Those who actually read Salman Rushdie's notorious best
seller The Satanic Verses may have absorbed Rushdie's brilliant
perception of what the planet has become: old cultures in sudden
high-velocity crisscross, a bewilderment of ethnic explosion and
implosion simultaneously. The Ayatullah Khomeini's response to
Rushdie is (whatever else it is) an exquisite vindication of
Rushdie's point. Khomeini's Iranian revolution was exactly a
violent repudiation of the new world that the Shah had
sponsored. The struggle throughout the Middle East now is, among
other things, a collision between Islam and the temptations and
intrusions of the West. In the new world, everything
disintegrates: family, community, tradition, coherence itself.
The old community perishes in deference to a new community not
yet born.
So the world is exactly Salman Rushdie's Indian characters
passively seat-belted in their flight from Bombay to London,
then blown apart by a random, idiot bomb and soon seen
pinwheeling down to a soft landing off the English coast -- the
England where Kipling comes home to roost and the empire will
implode and intermingle.
A media tale: American television correspondent covering a
unit of government troops moving against a guerrilla post in El
Salvador keeps eyeing his watch and asking the commander when
he will order the attack. Distracted commander says, "Not yet,
not yet." Correspondent finally explodes, "Goddammit, I've a
bird (satellite feed to the network) at 6 o'clock!" The leader,
understanding perfectly, orders his attack immediately.
The definition of conquest has changed. Japan has proved
that territory, sheer acreage, means nothing. The Soviet
Union's geographical vastness has availed little in
productivity.
The deepest change may be a planetary intuition that
military war is pointless. Except in atavistic places like the
Middle East and Ireland, conquering territory is a fruitless
and counterproductive exercise. Why conquer land? The Soviets
have more trouble than they can manage with their nationalities.
The new world's battlegrounds are markets and ideas. The
Japanese and Germans, having learned their military lessons the
hard way, re-entered the war by other means.
Cities like Cairo, Lagos, Nairobi, Mexico City are
slouching toward the new world in the darkest way. Life and
death struggle with one another: great birth rates, great death
rates. This is the new world's suffocation, of population,
poverty, pollution. The country people crowd into the cities.
Their continuities are broken, their communities, their village
frameworks wrecked, with nothing to replace them.
In the new world, America has lost some of its radiant
pride of place. Japan has risen. Europe is organizing itself
into a new collective power. The Soviet Union is struggling to
escape the dustbin of history. Gorbachev, a magician of much
elan, attempts to rescind the hoax of Communism without
denouncing its idea. It is fascinating to watch a smart man
trying to defend a premise that is beneath his intelligence.
What is the meaning of the new world? Like the older one,
it goes dark and then goes light. It flies through the air. It
is perhaps too intimate to be heroic anymore. It is, on
balance, better than the one before, because it is more
conscious.