Saturday, June 02, 2012
The Eurovision Song Contest doesn’t get a lot of
attention in the United States, but on the Continent it’s long been seen as the
perfect Euro-metaphor. Years before the euro came along, it was the prototype
pan-European institution, and predicated on the same assumptions. Eurovision
took the national cultures that produced Mozart, Vivaldi, and Debussy, and in
return gave us “Boom-Bang-a-Bang” (winner, 1969), “Ding-Ding-a-Dong” (winner,
1975), and “Diggi-Loo-Diggi-Ley” (winner, 1984). The euro took the mark, the
lira, and the franc, and merged them to create the “Boom-Bang-a-Bang” of
currencies.
How will it all end? One recalls the 1990 Eurovision
finals in Zagreb: “Yugoslavia is very much like an orchestra,” cooed the
hostess, Helga Vlahović. “The string section and the wood section all sit
together.” Shortly thereafter, the wood section began ethnically cleansing the
dressing rooms, while the string section rampaged through the brass section
pillaging their instruments and severing their genitals. Indeed, the charming
Miss Vlahović herself was forced into a sudden career shift and spent the next
few years as Croatian TV’s head of “war information” programming.
Fortunately, no one remembers Yugoslavia. So today Europe
itself is very much like an orchestra. The Greek fiddlers and the Italian wind
players all sit together, playing cards in the dressing room, waiting for the
German guy to show up with their checks. Just before last week’s Eurovision
finale in Azerbaijan, the Daily Mail in London reported that the Spanish
entrant, Pastora Soler, had been told to throw the competition “because the
cash-strapped country can’t afford to host the lavish event next year,” as the
winning nation is obliged to do. In a land where the youth unemployment rate is
over 50 percent, and two-thirds of the country’s airports are under threat of
closure, and whose neighbors (Britain) are drawing up plans for military
intervention to evacuate their nationals in the event of total civic collapse,
the pressing need to avoid winning the Eurovision Song Contest is still a
poignant symbol of how total is Spain’s implosion. Ask not for whom
“Ding-Ding-a-Dong” dings, it dings for thee.
One of the bizarre aspects of media coverage since 2008
is the complacent assumption that what’s happening is “cyclical” — a downturn
that will eventually correct itself — rather than profoundly structural.
Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, found herself skewered like souvlaki on a
Thessaloniki grill for suggesting the other day that the Greeks are a race of
tax evaders. She’s right. Compared to Germans, your average Athenian has a
noticeable aversion to declaring income. But that’s easy for her to say: Mme.
Lagarde’s half-million-dollar remuneration from the IMF is tax-free, just a
routine perk of the new transnational governing class. And, in the end, whether
your broke European state has reasonably efficient tax collectors like the
French or incompetent ones like the Greeks is relatively peripheral.
Likewise, on this side of the Atlantic: Quebec university
students, who pay the lowest tuition rates in North America, are currently
striking over a proposed increase of $1,625. Spread out over seven years. Or
about 232 bucks per annum. Or about the cost of one fair-trade macchiato a
week. Which has, since the strike, been reduced further, to a couple of sips:
If you’re wondering how guys who don’t do any work can withdraw their labor,
well, “strike” is a euphemism for riot. The other week, Vanessa L’Écuyer, a
sexology student at the Université du Québec à Montréal, was among those
arrested for smoke-bombing the subway system and bringing the city’s morning
commute to a halt. But, as in Europe, in the end, whether you fund your
half-decade bachelor’s in sexology through a six-figure personal debt or
whether you do it through the largesse of the state is relatively peripheral.
In the twilight of the West, America and Europe are still
different but only to this extent: They’ve wound up taking separate paths to
the same destination. Whether you get there via an artificial common currency
for an invented pseudo-jurisdiction or through quantitative easing and the
global decline of the dollar, whether you spend your final years in the care of
Medicare or the National Health Service death panels, whether higher education
is just another stage of cradle-to-grave welfare or you have a trillion
dollars’ worth of personal college debt, in 2012 the advanced Western
social-democratic citizen looks pretty similar, whether viewed from Greece or
Germany, California or Quebec.
That’s to say, the unsustainable “bubble” is not student
debt or subprime mortgages or anything else. The bubble is us, and the
assumptions of entitlement. Too many citizens of advanced Western democracies
live a life they have not earned, and are not willing to earn. Indeed, much of
our present fiscal woe derives from two phases of human existence that are
entirely the invention of the modern world. Once upon a time, you were a kid
till you were 13 or so; then you worked; then you died. That bit between childhood
and death has been chewed away at both ends. We invented something called
“adolescence” that now extends not merely through the teenage years but through
a desultory half decade of Whatever Studies at Complacency U up till you’re 26
and no longer eligible for coverage on your parents’ health-insurance policy.
At the other end of the spectrum, we introduced something called “retirement”
that, in the space of two generations, has led to the presumption that
able-bodied citizens are entitled to spend the last couple of decades, or
one-third of their adult lives, as a long holiday weekend.
The bit in between adolescence and retirement is your
working life, and it’s been getting shorter and shorter. Which is unfortunate,
as it has to pay for everything else. This structural deformity in the life
cycle of Western man is at the root of most of our problems. Staying ever
longer in “school” (I use the term loosely) leads to ever later workplace
entry, and ever later (if at all) family formation. Which means that our
generation is running up debt that will have to be repaid by our shrunken
progeny. One hundred Greek grandparents have 42 Greek grandchildren. Is it
likely that 42 Greeks can repay the debts run up by 100 Greeks? No wonder
they’d rather stick it to the Germans. But the thriftier Germans have the same
deathbed demographics. If 100 Germans resent having to pick up the check for an
entire continent, is it likely 42 Germans will be able to do it?
Look around you. The late-20th-century Western lifestyle
isn’t going to be around much longer. In a few years’ time, our children will
look at old TV commercials showing retirees dancing, golfing, cruising away
their sixties and seventies, and wonder what alternative universe that came
from. In turn, their children will be amazed to discover that in the early 21st
century the Western world thought it entirely normal that vast swathes of the
citizenry should while away their youth enjoying what, a mere hundred years
earlier, would have been the leisurely varsity of the younger son of a
Mitteleuropean Grand Duke.
I was sad to learn that Helga Vlahović died a few weeks
ago, but her central metaphor all those years ago wasn’t wrong. Any functioning
society is like an orchestra. When the parts don’t fit together, it’s always
the other fellow who’s out of tune. So the Greeks will blame the Germans, and
vice versa. But the developed world is all playing the same recessional. In the
world after Western prosperity, we will work till we’re older and we will start
younger — and we will despise those who thought they could defy not just the
rules of economic gravity but the basic human life cycle.
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