Gesundheit!

I think this bird flu threat is wildly exaggerated. I never once heard a chicken sneeze or cough.

 

Download Anthony Steyning’s passionate E-Novel: A Kiss by the Clowns

Winds of Fate

When I was younger I convinced my children that each time her dog barked represented a signal their grandmother had just farted.

 

Of course when we visited and sat in her garden, people would pass by and her dog would grunt sotto voce, then jump up and bark without fail.

 

Whereupon the kids would look at me in a conspiring sort of way and I rolled my eyes, nodding away.

 

Then they would look at a lady who to this day doesn’t understand why every time her dog barked they howled with laughter, run as far as they could.

 

Poor thing!

 

 It wasn’t anything that she ate.

 

Download Anthony Steyning’s powerful new E-Novel: A Kiss by the Clowns

 

Vision Thing

Hugo Chavez was a self-made victim. His exaggerated resentment of the U.S. not so much a sentiment as a tool that killed him by way of making the ideological choice not to get treated for his cancer in New York or in Houston, but in Havana.  

 

Even the Pope doesn’t go to Lourdes when he’s sick, but to the American Hospital in Rome.

 

It’s all right to believe, but not to be stupid.

 

Download Anthony Steyning’s terrific new E-Novel: A Kiss by the Clowns

Death of a Salesman?

The tribesman turned towards me with oblique, impenetrable eyes, the eyes of primitivity. And the sort of indifference both he and I knew could evaporate in a moment, turning into explosive aggression. But then he did walk away, quietly, not giving a damn, kicking up some dust, turning his back, leaving me silent, mouth dry, heart pounding. It was high noon, with me the only fool not protecting himself from the sun, the only fool daring to seek direct eye contact with a life thousands of years old. A walking fossil, a two legged relic, slave of a certain human darkness. With me just such a slave, but one chained to modernity, by a ridiculous briefcase.

Still, who’s to say who gets to stay, who gets to go? Do you know? Or still unharmed, each getting his space to walk away, a last accommodation?

Irony of Ironies

And when we’ll have overcome all natural checks and balances, defeating all diseases, become near-immortal, we’ll have committed collective suicide by making the planet unlivable because of our sheer number, in addition to the phenomenon of living three lifetimes in one, with three careers, three sets of houses, three cars, three flown holidays each year, three spouses and three kids with each one, tripppling the abuse of this battered heavenly body.

LOCUST-R-US

Certainly not all, but all the wile and cunning it takes to reach the top, leaves many completely addicted to the chase but soon enough losing all sight of the only objective.

The great irony that what it takes to become a major, even historic decision-maker leaves one voiceless when the time comes to speak out or think beyond the immediate.

At Davos 2009 nobody seems to worry about your children and grandchildren. While trying of course to fix the current, rather too drastic world economic decline, nobody has time for trivial questions like a planet unable to sustain ‘Western’ industrial life style to begin with. Let alone making it universal, that is 3 billion Chinese and Indians owning 2 residences, 3 cars per family and taking 3 vacations a year in Hawaii, Paris and Samoa and to which they’re as entitled as Mr. Mrs. J. Blow from Wichita Falls.

That while consumerism is still the best way to distribute wealth, there is the matter of waste, garbage, raw materials and climate change to consider.

That therefore, demographically speaking, far fewer people are a ‘must’, still complicated by them living longer than ever. And technology making half this brave new world’s workforce redundant in less than a couple of centuries or so, the thought of how to keep these people fed and busy or let Darwinian observation prevail, not such a remote idea at all.

Society sooner than later reaching the threshold of having to pay a lot of people to stay at home and stop ‘producing’, or at least perform social duties in exchange for guaranteed income, preventing them from gratuitous thrill seeking or the falling into personal depression and crime.

That a conference decade upon decade blindly focusing on ‘Now’, on ‘Growth’, on ‘Development’, concerned with ‘Gain’, always ‘Bigger’, ‘Better’, ‘More’ and still… ‘More’ is a conference of the visionless, unable to view the soft-landing, intelligent economic reduction of nations the future demands, while hanging onto our planet for dear life…

Or better still, hanging on to our dear planet for life. But what to expect from decision-makers repeatedly found to be mostly smiling, always smiling but ambitious, blatant buskers performing only on the pavements of history. Their show one day turning out to have been a mere side show. A prelude, to continuation… or life zero.

Ah, yes, details! After the photographs, let’s do dinner, Your Excellencies!