The Tropic of Canker

“As China has shed its chaste Communist mores for the wealth and indulgences of a market-oriented economy, the boom has bred a generation of nouveau-riche lotharios yearning to rival the sexual conquests of their imperial ancestors” (“China’s New Wealth Spurs a Market for Mistresses,” NYT, 8/9/11). So begins an article by Times reporter Dan Levin on the epidemic of adultery among Chinese parvenus. We choose the word parvenu in the spirit of avoiding redundancy, but what we are referring to are the same nouveau riche fat cats who since time immemorial, long before anyone ever contemplated owning a Porsche and wearing a gold neck chain as a way of attracting women, have spread like STD’s from continent to continent. It would be fun to pile on the Chinese, but adultery is as American as apple pie, Ben Franklin, John F.Kennedy, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Bill Clinton, John Edwards and Mark Sanford, as French as the madeleine, the croissant, Napoleon, Madame Bovary, François Mitterand, Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Les Liaisons Dangereux, as Russian as Anna Karenina and Pushkin, as English as Lord Byron, as Italian as Silvio Berlusconi and spaghetti, and as Latin American as Gabriel García Márquez getting a black eye from his one-time friend and rival Mario Vargas Llosa. China is a juggernaut and its titans treat their sexual peccadilloes the way its government deals with the non-floating Renminbi. Bribery has apparently become the foreplay of choice in the Chinese plutocracy, with the romantic sensibility of the culture remaining inversely proportionate to its productivity. Even the paramours practice realpolitik when it comes to their benefactors. The Times quotes one Li, a child of poverty who, armed with a university education, climbed to the top of the food chain by having an affair with her boss, who lavished her with luxuries like a Posrche and finally divorced his wife to marry her. “You can’t feed yourself with love,” says Li, with no apparent irony.

The Age of Acquirius

This could very well be the beginning of a new age! If China revalues the renminbi, the two-state solution finally gains traction in the Middle East, Google acquires the rights to most of human thought, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-il finally acknowledges his polymorphic perversity and stops trying to silence critics of his dictatorship, then we can only assume that the problem of cold fusion will soon be cracked. Imagine a world in which energy is no longer something that major powers fight over. As Freud once said about analysis, once it’s over, the real problems begin. If we accept Marx’s analysis, the drive for economic hegemony infuses international politics. Without the struggle for resources, life will lose its meaning and many world leaders will walk around with sunken eyes, like Max Von Sydow losing his game of chess with Death in The Seventh Seal. 

   

What will this new age be called? The Age of Acquirius. When Wall Street is battered as it was in the past year, analysts say that the market is making an adjustment. Wasn’t Period of Adjustment the name of a Tennessee Williams play, later made into a movie starring Jane Fonda? But what is this new age? Thorsten Veblen’s conspicuous consumption is still an apt description of the overarching materialism that has spread exponentially in our time. Our economies have grown from the horse drawn chariot of supply and demand to the nuclear powered rockets of computer-generated algorithms. Profits of some hedge funds exceed the GNP of modest countries, while England is referred to as Iceland on the Thames and the entire country of Greece faces the equivalent of a massive foreclosure proceeding. An explosion of information has awakened whole continents of knowledge, yet newspapers are defunct and the democratization of truth via outlets like Wikipedia has crushed the notion of a moral center. Is this the paradigm shift that Thomas Kuhn was alluding to in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions?  Yeats’s oft-quoted lines ring true once again: “The best lack all conviction and the worst/ Are filled with passionate intensity.”