Crossposted from www.eurotrib.com
Imagine if the Pope had the kind of temporal power Putin (That’s President Putin, SIR!!!, Your most Majestic Highness, Lord of Lords, Star of our firmament, etc, etc) holds in his cool hands right now?
There he stood, in the mindblowing halls his ancestors lived out their megalomanic arc of Russian history, they so impeccably maintained and bespeaking the kind of Imperial omnipotence that era’s architecture loftily declaimed, yet his demeanour held no apparent regality.
He lanced his guests’ boils of pretension with delicate, statesmanlike precision and a dry glee, perhaps consciously uncomplicit with a western audience, as if he was thinking how he would tell the boys at the fishing club later how these bigshots tried to put one over him, and he reminded them right smartly to mind their manners!
No ‘putin’ much around our Vlad.
It is irony-rich, this combination of antipersonality with a rush to power, a modern type of power which does less with trappings and ostensible glory, and more with pipelines, death and deals in the sand.
The G8 had a nerve, telling him he’s not readfy for admission to the WTO.
Guests in his palaces, to boot and reboot (at his pleasure!)
They were lucky he didn’t run a whole Czar number on them.
Putin still looks like a good little Soviet, obedient to some past idealogy, and thankfully so….a little grey apparatchik, under the spots in a small boat with the usual suspects, with their bloated, lurid cartoon ids.
Happy with a normal life, as well as doing his duty to Russia and history while his term lasts, never wearing his emotions on his political sleeve.
Something almost monkishly uncorruptible, a line of principle, that whatever else it describes, does not permit him to nuzzle posteriors, or especially take seriously his pretend betters, and their media posings as statesmen.
They’re lucky, like Helen at ET said, that he didn’t burst out laughing at their delusionary self-importance!
There’s something of a po-mo ‘noblesse oblige’ about this; chuckling behind his sleeve at their marx-brothers/ monty python imitations.
Next, we’ll see the Chinese diplomat-wallahs learning pithy John Stewart one-liners as apropos conversation-stoppers, when we try to lecture them about pesky human rights details,….. (so tacky to bring up over pate and champagne, no taste at all. Of course with civilisations so young and inexperienced, it’s understandable, their absence of couth….so unfortunate.)
I could see Putin, computin’ a pooty-pout, looking into the camera, and saying in perfect Michael Caine english, something like:
” Forget these clowns you have elected, they are clueless and arrogant, destructive and greedy, for all their tough swaggers and campy slips, toothy spin and Sage Pronouncements, they are milking your last pennies as they are driving you to the cliff to push over!
Trust only me, Great Vladimir of Vladimirs….
Wihout my magic gas you will shiver in your beds listening to your politicians lying to you over your fading tv screens and wind-up radios!
Sign this 50-year contract, ( with secure and easy online access for your credit card) and I’ll send you a free dvd of easy russian phrases like ‘Thankyou President Putin’, and ‘Which direction would you like your statue in out town square to face, El Presidente?’ and ‘Which of our selected exports would you like first choice at?
And a free year at the Bolshoi anti-obesity academy!”
He could go all feudal on us and it would be pan-european Tolstoy Time incountry again!
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We have the means to create gas here. If they can do it for a family in India with the shit from 5 pigs, how come we’re not turning all the refuse from the huge meat industries into gas and oil? (yes, I know, charming, I apologise)
Why aren’t landfills combed through for things to recycle?
Why is manure a problem that pollutes aquifers around feedlots, yet we pay huge amounts of national sweat -equity and capital for gas to make fertilser that then pollutes our aquifer?
If that manure were composted and sold/given to farmers, there’d be 2 problems solved at once!
Governments are getting rewarded by private interests to block what the public needs them to do, reverse the capital flow back to conservation of soil (a country’s true bank account), and finances, cutting down the outflow for gas of which we could produce locally while also creating useful employment, urban and rural.
The more indpendent we are, the less demand to tempt the next Russian PM to raise prices, citing the usual about storing up capital for when the Holy Gas runs out, etc.
They will have to keep it competitive, because we won’t be so dependent.
And their reserves last longer, so everyone wins…
Governments decide policies, the folly or wisdom of which we enjoy or suffer. If we are too far in the back of the bus to be able to stop the driver heading for the edge, what can we do?
Water needs to be prioritised, proactively.
We have already set the wheels in motion for the continuing Africisation of europe, by climate as well as population and culture.
We need to create many new watersheds and plant permaculturally sensitive forest habitats, re-encourage wild life.
Set up systems where farmimg is taught to children while still very young, in a pleasant surrounding, not as child-slave-labour in 40 degree pepper fields at midday.
We need to make governments want more to help us change fast and soon for good, than continue to act as stooges for the old order, which has come to see us as wollies to be duped, and then sold more poison to, as much as the poor staggering old donkey of a market will bear, already replete as we are with new toaster models coming out every year to drive in, make breakfast in, sing along to.
We got so much junk already, supermarket shelves groaning with the shiny impossi-bile-ness of it, headed for the permanent landfill after its fa$hion-dictated briefest of sojourns in your company.
The food is the worst part…knowing how many hospital visits are prepackaged in that colourful wrapping, designed to invite and seduce, and leave you hungrier for more of it the moment it has left your stomach to lodge somewhere else perhaps less temporary.
The perfect vegetables…what is the human story behind them?
The fact that they’re ‘jetfresh’ in from the other side of the planet….could the fuel burned getting them here been used to produce a solar panel for a wellpump somewhere?
Aren’t there probably some interesting old-fashioned fruits from your neighbourhood that you don’t find in the supermarket?
Could you maybe plant one, so there’s more of a chance for variety in the future?
Are they disappearing, because of the standardisation of brands, leaving fruit that’s bred to look good, and withstand 9 months refigeration?
With the ‘mouthfeel’ of a tampon…
How about a government program to help kids identify wild plants and mushrooms?
How about swap programs where city and country kids could mingle ans swap for a week, and round out each others’ worldviews?
Tax breaks for cities with the the highest number of solar and wind megawatts?
Priuzes for people with the the most imagination and creativity in recycling old refrigerators amd water tanks into solar heaters, keeping old things running, and better yet for those 4 machines that would stop us returning to the dark ages, and making them then TO LAST?
Which would be your last 4 you’d let go of?
Peak-oil candlelight parlour game!
Drive sparsely and safely, amigos, see you down the line…