The creature did not seem to think so. It was more a case of interest. Frank, standing there in his windbreaker. They looked at each other. Frank mimed chewing a cud of his own. The creature tilted its head to the side, interested at this, perhaps. It blinked from time to time. A gust of wind ruffled the hair on its back, then Frank’s beard. Frank smiled to feel it.
Something reminded him to look at his watch. It was late! Apparently he had been locked in a gaze with this chamois or ibex or mountain goat, this person of the alps, for around twenty minutes! It had felt like two or three.
He stirred, raised his hand uncertainly, waved weakly at the beast. Turned and headed back.
75
In the United States, the National Students’ Union website showed that thirty percent of the union members had now responded YES to the union website’s standing poll asking them if they were in so much financial distress caused by their student debt that they would like to see the union initiate a fiscal non-compliance strike, by not paying their next debt payment. On joining the union, members had agreed to join any strike requested by thirty percent of the membership, so now the union coordinators called for a strike vote to be sure, and got an eighty percent yes vote, with ninety percent participation. None of this was surprising; student food insecurity, meaning student hunger, was widespread, also student homelessness. So the strike began.
Student debt was a trillion-dollar annual income stream for the banks, so this coordinated default meant that the banks were suddenly in cash-flow hell. And they were so over-leveraged, and thus dependent on all incoming payments being made to them on time to be able to keep paying their own debts, that this fiscal strike threw them immediately into a liquidity crisis reminiscent of the 2008 and 2020 and 2034 crashes, except this time people had defaulted on purpose, and precisely to bring the banks down. The banks all rushed to the Federal Reserve, which went to Congress to explain the situation and ask for another giant bail-out to keep liquidity and thus confidence in the financial system itself. There were calls from many in Congress to bail out the banks, as being essential to the economy, and too connected for any of the big ones to be allowed to fail. But this time the Fed asked Congress to authorize their bailing out the banks in exchange for ownership shares in every bank that took the offer. This was either nationalizing finance or financializing the nation, in that now it was clearer than ever that the country was in effect run by the Fed. And since Congress ran the Fed, and people voted in members of Congress, maybe it was all beginning to work, somehow, because of this strike. Definancialization of a sort. End of neoliberalism.
This possibility was shocking enough, but in that same month, the African Union informed the World Bank and the Chinese government that they were declaring all African debts to these organizations to be odious debts. All the national governments forming the African Union were together backing complete debt forgiveness, the haircut of haircuts, to be followed by a new set of agreements, negotiated by the African Union in collaboration with all the African nation-states. They called this the end of neoliberal neocolonialism, and the definitive start of Africa for Africans. Even Egypt and the rest of North Africa joined in on this, plumping for people over capital, continent over history, and in Egypt’s case, maybe all the Muslim north, splitting with Arabia.
And in the very next month, in China the workers known informally as the billion took over Tiananmen Square, by the simple expedient of walking into it by the millions, on the way causing all the rest of the traffic in the city to grind to a halt. By taking over Beijing’s highways by way of a crush of pedestrians, they were able to bypass the barriers and checkpoints around Tiananmen Square and fill it and the surrounding district so full that the police and army couldn’t react, confronted as they were by about five million people jammed into the city center. Similar demonstrations appeared in all the largest Chinese cities; there were literally hundreds of such demonstrations, far more than the Chinese army could deal with in any typical crowd control way. Coordinated demands for the end to the hukou system were supplemented by other demands that together insisted that the Chinese Communist Party be more responsive to all its citizens’ needs. As the protests had been timed to the five-year Party congress meeting, it proved possible to pressure the Party into appointing an entirely new standing committee, one including women and younger people, and devoted to reforms as demanded.
Seeing an opportunity in all this turmoil, the Kurds declared Kurdistan in the part of Iraq they already controlled, with significant chunks of Syria, Turkey, and Iran included within the new boundary, to underline the point that the Kurds were asserting themselves here, and there was no one strong enough to stop them. All the surrounding countries were outraged and antagonistic, but they were also already antagonistic among themselves, so they could not form an effective response that would not also constitute an attack on a neighboring sovereign state, either ally or enemy, but either way a nation dangerous to attack.
All these events occurred at once; and these were not all. There was so much going on, such a spasm of revolts occurring spontaneously (if it was spontaneous!) all over the world, that some historians said it was another 1848, some kind of reemergence of the spirit of 1848 around the zone of its bicentennial. And just as it had been during that period of enormous unrest and revolutionary upheaval, no one could explain why it was happening in so
