Even as it de-anglicizes, so the world after America is reprimitivizing, fast. In the early years of the century, in many columns filed from the VIP lounges of the world’s airports, Thomas L. Friedman, the in-house “thinker” at the
From December 2008:
Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones.63
And it wasn’t just space-age Hong Kong! From May 2008:
In JFK’s waiting lounge we could barely find a place to sit. Eighteen hours later, we landed at Singapore’s ultramodern airport, with free Internet portals and children’s play zones throughout.
We felt, as we have before, like we had just flown from the Flintstones to the Jetsons.64
And it wasn’t just stone-age JFK! From 2007:
Fly from Zurich’s ultramodern airport to La Guardia’s dump. It is like flying from the Jetsons to the Flintstones.65
I gather that “The Flintstones” and “The Jetsons” were two popular TV cartoon series of the mid-twentieth century. If you still have difficulty grasping Mr. Friedman’s point, here he is in 2010, bemoaning the “faded, cramped domestic terminal” in Los Angeles, yet another example of America’s, er, terminal decline:
Businesses prefer to invest with the Jetsons more than the Flintstones.66
More fool them. Scholars of twentieth century popular culture say you’d have made a ton more money if you’d invested in “The Flintstones,” which was a classic, instead of “The Jetsons,” which was a stale knock-off with the veneer of modernity. But, if you were as invested in this theory of terminal decline as Friedman was, it would have helped to think it through a little.
Here’s one more from the
For all the talk about the vaunted Afghan fighters, this was a war between the Jetsons and the Flintstones—and the Jetsons won and the Flintstones know it.67
But they didn’t, did they? To reprise the old Taliban saying: “Americans have all the watches, but we’ve got all the time.” The American Jetsons had all the high-tech gizmos, but the Afghan Flintstones had the string and fertilizer.
The United States had accounted for almost half the world’s military expenditures. But somehow it didn’t feel like that. In Afghanistan, a few illiterate goatherds with IEDs had tied down the hyperpower for over twice as long as it took America to win victory in the Second World War. To be sure, counterinsurgency campaigns are difficult. But D-Day difficult? Liberating-a-continent difficult? Liberating a continent from a serious enemy with well-trained troops and state-of-the-art technology?
If the jihadists’ problem was an inability to forget the Crusades, perhaps the West suffered from an inability to remember. After Muslim provocations against Christians, Pope Urban II spoke to the Council of Clermont in 1095 and called for what we now know as the First Crusade.
Within four years, an army had been raised, got to the Middle East (on foot for most of the journey), liberated the Holy Land, and established a Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem that lasted for two centuries. Four years, eight years, twelve years after George W. Bush spoke in the rubble of Ground Zero, Ground Zero was still rubble, and all the smart thinkers insisted that it was a waste of time to discuss whatever it was America was doing in Afghanistan in terms of outmoded concepts such as “victory.”
Nobody had any desire to be in Kabul for another two centuries, or even another two years.
Well, the First Crusade was too long ago, and so was D-Day, and the wars were different now: America had more ships and more planes than anybody else on the planet. So, entirely reasonably, nobody wanted to get into a dogfight or a naval battle with them. Instead, the geopolitical Gulliver was up against legions of Liliputians—fiercely motivated youths generated by an ideology with all but unlimited manpower. It had been that way since Somalia in the early Nineties. The Americans made a film on the subject (
So, in the fall of 2001, the Jetsons toppled the Flintstones. And the Flintstones bided their time, and quickly figured out that the Jetsons didn’t have the stomach to do what it takes, and their space-age occupation of Bedrock would rapidly dwindle down into a thankless semi-colonial policing operation for which the citizenry back on the home front in Orbit City would have no appetite. Jetson-wise, the West was all jets and no sons. The sociologist Gunnar Heinsohn pointed out that 1,000 German men had 480 sons, while 1,000 Afghan men had 4,000 sons.69 To lose your only son in a distant war is devastating. For your third, fourth, and fifth sons, what else is there for them to do?
The Pentagon was post-human before post-human was cool. Having pioneered unmanned drones to zap the natives from the skies, it developed more sophisticated models—drones that flew in the exosphere, and were even more invisible to the goatherds far below. When you’re dependent on technology in an age of globalized computerization, it’s hard to make everything “secure,” and certainly not as secure as a group of inbred jihadists sitting around a camp fire. The unceasing Chinese cyber-probing grew more and more probing, and daring. Drones would suddenly drop from the skies for no apparent reason. Nobody minded: if it was a casualty of war, it was not one to be memorialized or exploited for political gain. Eventually the cost of replacing them became prohibitive. The land of the unmanned drone gradually abandoned the drone, while remaining unmanned.
Recall H.G. Wells’ Time-Traveler. When he makes his first foray into the Morlocks’ subterranean lair, he is impressed to find that, unlike the effete Eloi, they are not vegetarian. On the other hand, he is not clear exactly what large animal it is that they’re roasting on the spit.
And then the penny drops.
“Even now man is far less discriminating and exclusive in his food than he was—far less than any monkey,” he reflects. “His prejudice against human flesh is no deep-seated instinct. And so these inhuman sons of men —!”
He calms himself and tries to look at it in a scientific spirit. “After all, they were less human and more remote than our cannibal ancestors of three or four thousand years ago.”
I gather that, for TV comics and newspaper cartoonists of your time—the mid-twentieth century—there were few more reliable laughs than putting a white man wearing a pith helmet in a big pot surrounded by dancing natives. Yet, oddly enough, there was virtually no empirical basis for such a persistent stereotype. “The rest of the world had always believed that there was cannibalism in Africa,” wrote Charles Onyango-Obbo in
Yet by the early days of the twenty-first century, when the PC enforcers would clobber you for even the mildest evocation of the old cooking-pot gag, cannibalism was flourishing. Mr Onyango-Obbo had been reporting