G20: First Day

God, I wish I were in London today.

There are extremes, of course. I’m no anarchist, and I can’t think of anything more immature and unrealistic than praying for system failure.

On the other hand, bankers waving £10 notes out of the windows at protesters in the City of London would make me long for a missile launcher.

Today promises to be a stew of fun, a hyperreal mashup of crumbling canon and wired futurism. The whole world nowadays feels like someone’s turned the house lights back on, allowing us to see just what bizarre, archaic structures had loomed so imposingly over us for the last century.

We’ve all been genuflecting before gods long since dead, their lifeblood gone, animating themselves only through what fear they can engender.

I’m not just talking about war, or government oppression. I’m talking too about false social gods: the need to impress others with the biggest house or vehicle or jewelry or breasts. The need to create drama to stave off meaninglessness, and the hunger for security blankets to swaddle and insulate from that drama.

The house lights have been turned on that, too…revealing angry, panicked, diapered children in huge, clunky cars. No amount of entertainment can drown out the billboards reading “Fail”.

We’ve heard a lot of talk lately about ethics, and everyone seems to assume that we’re all talking about the same qualities and behaviors. We need more honesty. We need more transparency. We need more liberty and freedom.

Those all sound great…but they all conflict, too. The world’s been pushed to such a point that demands for a change in direction are nearly unanimous. But it’s no more fair to demand western heritage be thrown out, than it is to demand that any other culture annihilate itself.

It’s taken as an axiom by some that the West can do no wrong, and by others that the West can do no right. I’m not an middle-grounder—muddled compromises between the bad and good sides of a system are nothing but patches and produce nothing but cruft.

Thus, bill-waving, taunting bankers. Thus, angry anarchists. And meanwhile, people and dreams both are struggling to remain viable.

I used to believe the whole system needed revamping. That we should just hit “format c:/” and start again. Then I went to Europe and saw where a lot of this mess, and this beauty, came from. And I returned to America, where we’ve taken the great and the rotten and made them both larger than life.

I am on the side of the protesters—business cannot go on as usual. We have run to the end of that line, we have seen the man behind that curtain, and to force a continuation of that world-lifestyle would be suicide for this Western experiment. We need to have the courage, the vision and—dare I say—the hope to strip the shit off and uncover the fundamental ticking archetype of our society.

But I am on the side of the established leadership, too, and that’s a first for me in a major conflict. We cannot just reboot. Western society isn’t too big to fail…but it is too good to fail. We have an inheritance worth saving.

If the crap and garbage that’s resulted from millions of cumulative compromises and self-indulgences can be stripped away–and I believe that it can—the beau ideal of this society can be retooled for these times.

It comes down to statements of bare fact that have almost taken on the tarnish of cliche: hope is not lost; we need to work together; we need to all be heard and accounted for; don’t cut your nose off to spite your face.

We stand at a crossroads, at one of those moments like the fall of the Wall or 9-11. But this time, it’s not that things could go “either way”—it’s that they can move forward in a new form, or perish.

Once I might have been for the latter. But I’ve changed.

“The king and queen were there, dancing with the people. Talk in the shadows of intrigue. Who cares? Kingdoms rise and fall. Just don’t burn the paintings in the Louvre, that’s all.” –Anne Rice