The Superclass and the Untermensch

I'm the underbelly. I'm the untermensch.
Though it can be hard to remember that while being ferried by taxi to a five star hotel.
Now, global rich list might say otherwise. But I don't feel like one of the priveliged people, even if I am in the lucky-enough position of being able to say 'fuck it' when accommodation somewhere like New Delhi goes belly up late at night, and can buy my way out of trouble temporarily.
There may be air-conditioning, and all-night net access and a fresh water swimming pool and special slippers. But I'm just visiting, and paying a large price for the privilege. I don't get to live here.
But some do, and it is worth remembering that. People would like you to forget. I see them in their chosen environment on my rare visits, though. I see them, in their suits, with their expense accounts picking up the tab, and they're relaxed, off the hook, among friends.
Over a few drinks in the hotel bar, they look almost human.
But you can't forget that these people are the ones running the world for their own personal benefit, so that they can have the air-con on full blast while Delhi swelters, and their pick of Scotches from the bar.
All over the world, especially in the developing world, your prospects in life are closely defined by one perameter only - your proximity to the superclass.
I've been reading David Rothkopf's fascinating eagle-eye account of the superclass in his book that came out last year. I've been meaning to read it for some time. Another benefit of time off is catching up on the reading.
Rothkopf was a regular attendee at Davos. He rubbed shoulders with the extremely small coterie of people exercising nearly all the power and managing most of the money on the planet for decades.
And even though he is utterly an insider with an unjaundiced degree of admiration and affection for them, he is enough of a journalist and writer to point out the simple fact that the whole planet is run by a very small number of extremely connected people.
In a very real sense, we're currently in a re-run of the late Nineteenth century, when most of the most powerful people in Europe were all related to Queen Victoria. Late imperial battles where invariably also family squabbles writ large.
At the top of investment banks, major economies, trans-national industrial entities and diplomatic circles runs the same small number of people in tight little circles encompassing each other's boards of directors, advisory councils, Bilderberg and Carlyle, Halliburton and Davos.
Rothkopf reckons that the large bulk of wealth and power on the planet inhabits a little over 6,000 people, most of whom he has at some point or other met.
They all know each other, is Rothkopf's point, and they know and like each other a lot better and have much more in common with each other than they have with the rest of us, the untermenschen.
Rothkopf's qualifying criteria for his chosen few is admittedly somewhat arbitrary. But power is not a simply transparent thing to measure, any more than wealth is.
But it works out at an exceptional few, almost entirely male, mostly white, each one a one in a million compared to the number of us who aren't part of the party.
It's also a shifting feast, with some in and some out each season in keeping with current policies and fashions.
So Bono and Peter Sutherland are in, Mary Robinson and John Bruton are too, Bertie was until recently, but McAleese and Cowen never were and likely never will be.
Whether you accept this tiny coterie of the superclass as a beneficent oligarchy or not, that's what they amount to. Democracy is little more than tokenism and the methodology for ensuring a small crack open to permit new blood.
Their loyalties, ultimately, are to ensuring they can have the air-con on full blast while Delhi swelters. Their interest in the underbelly is only to make sure they stay above it.

Other Buggers' Efforts

I've blogged about this before, but it really, irrationally, annoys me.

What do Ian Botham,
Salman Rushdie,
the director of Specsavers opticians,
a KGB colonel who defected to the West,
a Persian CNN reporter,
the head of the Loreto Sixth Form College in Manchester,
Michael Eavis who runs the Glastonbury Festival,
a Scottish primary school janitor,
the director of Battersea Dogs Home,
York Minster's organ player,
the head of the Northern Irish Tourist Board,
Stephen Poliakoff the writer,
a 77 year old baseball coach from Kent,
trashy novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford,
blues covers singer Joe Cocker,
footballer Ryan Giggs,
a crofter from the Scottish highlands,
snooker commentator Terry Griffiths,
the British international development officer in wartorn Basra,
the blokes who wrote 'Auf Wiedersehn, Pet',
a black presenter off children's TV show 'Play School',
a restaurant owner from Middlesex,
a hospital radio broadcaster in Bradford,
a milkman in South West London,
a female skiier from Sussex,
a female boxer from Bristol,
a hospital porter from Hull,
cosmetics mogul Liz Earle,
a Welsh auctioneer,
a Scottish highland dancer,
the Sunday Times crossword puzzles editor,
a Welsh Karate expert,
the RNLI press officer in Merseyside,
a playgroup manager in Leicestershire,
an Ipswich rope maker,
a Wigan rugby league player,
an Oxfordshire ploughman,
footballer Teddy Sheringham,
the HR manager in Belfast Passport Office,
the managing director of Sellafield Nuclear Plant,
the head of Halliburton's engineering subsidiary KBR in Iraq,
jazz singer Norma Winstone
and innumerable Northern Ireland Office penpushers, including one aptly named Leach, all have in common?

They all were given honours for the Queen's birthday (the official one that she wasn't actually born on) this weekend.

If ever there was good reason to scrap outdated honours systems like Britain's, surely the list above is it.

Welcome to Jamestown

2007 is a real year for anniversaries. One of the most important is that it will be 400 years next month since the settling of Jamestown by English settlers.

Where's Jamestown, you may ask? Good question, as it's not on any contemporary maps anymore. It was the original settlement of the English in what we now call America.

Forget that fake origin myth about the Pilgrim Fathers. The original settlement was at Jamestown, though it didn't last very long.

In December 1606, over 100 settlers from London sailed from London under orders from James 1st (or the 6th, depending on whether you talk to the English or the Scots) to find gold and a westerly route to the trade centres of the Orient.

Yup, like all imperial adventures, it was a moneygrab, nothing more or less.

They settled Jamestown island in Virginia and almost immediately began fighting the actual inhabitants of the land, the Algonquin indians. Nice way to make friends in a new country. But there was no talk of multiculturalism or assimilation in those days.

By 1609, two-thirds of the population had starved to death. But the colony limped along for another ten years, until it was saved by the importation of, you guessed it, black slaves.

In 1622, the highly pissed-off local population took the battle to the colonists and killed 300 of them. King James was so annoyed he took the land into crown ownership.

The site remained of token importance as the location of Virginia's legislature until 1698, when the statehouse burned down. Within fifty years, it was buried below ground, the abortive first foothold of England on North American soil forgotten.

But its legacy obviously remains. Other English came, eradicated the natives and claimed the land. America became white, anglo-saxon and protestant, Wasp in other words.

Built on the back of black slave labour and continual immigration, not to mention genocide of the native inhabitants, the United States has good claim to be one of the least justifiable regimes on earth, from the very point of its origin to today.

On some level, Americans know this. Hence the continual desire of so many to hyphenate their nationality. They're not Americans, they're Irish-Americans, Latino-Americans, African-Americans.

In fact, the United States is so excited about celebrating its abortive birthplace that they've got luminaries like Bruce Hornsby and Chaka Khan to play at the celebratory event! Talk about ancient history!

On the other hand, the Brits are tremendously excited to resurrect memories of a time when they utilised theft and genocide to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of the world.

The current occupier of James' throne, good old Betty Saxe-Coburg Gotha, will be making a rare trip to the site of Jamestown next month not to commemorate the atrocities commited by the English at the site, but to 'celebrate' them.

What's to celebrate? English imperialism? Indigenous genocide? England doesn't lose habits easily. They're still involved in both activities today, in locations as diverse as Ireland and Iraq.

As Bruce Hornsby might sing, 'Some things will never change.'