Pierre Tristam: Globalism In Your Pocket/Candide's Notebooks

CULTIVATING LIBERALISM
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The Gist
Globalism in Your Pocket
Pierre Tristam/Candide's Notebooks, Jan. 23, 2006

Highest life expectancy: Andorra, that barely lived-in shadow of a country, at 83.5 years. The United States is in dismal 40 th place, tied with Portugal—the Arkansas of Europe—at 77.9 years (that’s women and men combined). Just about every country in Europe, including England and all its bad gums, plus a few surprises (Cyprus, Malta, Guadeloupe) do the US better in life’s regards. Largest foreign aid donor? In dollars, the United States, at $16.3 billion. In relation to the size of countries’ economies, the US drops out of sight, to 26 th place. Saudi Arabia leads the pack in that one. You could say that the Saudis conveniently mish-mash their foreign aid of oil and dates with their aid to madrsassas, but then the US likes to mish-mash its foreign aid with its military bribes, too, so the two countries are even on that score. And on it goes: The book is addictive.

I’m quoting from The Economist’s Pocket World in Figures, 2006, just released and making it to every subscriber’s bathroom-reading shelf. It’s more fun than a World Series box score (when the Yankees win) and weird, too: On one page The Economist, a shameless slut for anything American, ranks the US first in business creativity and research, with Taiwan, Finland, Japan and Sweden on its heels. But the country with the most patents filed, by far, is Japan (119,000 last year, compared with the US’s 86,000), and according to the “number of patents in force per 100,000 inhabitants,” as good an indicator of creativity as any, Luxemburg wins by landslide, at 5,800, followed by Switzerland at 1,166, Sweden, Ireland, and so on. The US is a distant 15 th. Then there’s highest health spending. As expected, the US is first, at 14.6 percent of GDP (which has nothing to do with health, as we’ve just seen).

But what on earth are Cambodia and Lebanon doing in second and third place? And how is Lebanon ( Lebanon!) leading the world in car ownership per 1,000, at 732 (the year of Charles Martel turning back Islam’s autobahn into Europe, incidentally). New Zealand is second, Brunei third, and the US, Notre Dame Cathedral of the car culture, in 14 th place. The NASCAR hordes will howl when they see that. The book goes on, 250 pages of gems as meaningless as they could be, in any given hand, vital. Depends if you’re one of those Luxumburgians who can turn a particle of dust into… well, a country, in Luxemburg’s case.

THE DAILY JOURNAL

VANPOEM

As One Put Naked Into a Cigarette Boat

Continue chiding, since it's part of the new aesthetic,
and parcel to our coming home, as if
we'd disappeared into the burning bush
that calls to those who sit vacantly in parlors
awaiting a fate freighted with song and dance.
I stroll while staring and raging
with difficulty at the stubborn sky.

On my honor I step a little distance
from behind the curtain, only to disappear
the moment no birds sing, which occurs frequently.
Leaves dustier than furniture, the sound
of sleeping grating through the cosmos,
my footstool, my only talisman.
It's been real, arguing on your behalf.
Gray cobweb shadow, falling, floundering,
finding a place to not be shy and think
boldly about the oldness of beauty, a place
to rest its weary insubstantial head.

It may be that I stand on the threshold
of the checkout line, unsure of what
to be impulsive about, which momentous emptiness
to spontaneously identify my alienation with,
what kind of languor to slide into

before being reduced to grubbing for credentials,
locked in that tumid late-afternoon skin,
effervescing in its sea of dreams.
And all the things hearkening back to it,
the boat ride to breaker beach
there at the end of one world
where it paid to rage at the stammering waves
that kicked and screamed solely for my benefit,
staged objections to the inexorable fact of me.

Look: I've installed a turnstile in my kitchen,
so your picture-postcard of desolation has no power over me.
In this doggy-dog world land is made motionless
and the broads are standing on the wharves
with some of that sipping whisky on those silver trays,
which we'd be a bear to pass up. You speak
of the old gods who've washed up on shore,
but I don't see them, don't hear their hue and cry,
though their maze awaits us, will amaze us.
Here, let me get this little rock out of my damn shoe.
Then we can talk about paddling off to parts unknown.

—Van Foreman