The November issue of "Global Gourmet" features an article titled "Power to the Pudding." It claims that a pudding renaissance is underway in Great Britain. This is not so strange, since a pudding renaissance is underway worldwide. There is the Iraq pudding, the Korea pudding, the Taiwan Straits pudding, the India-Pakistan pudding, the Iran pudding, the dollar pudding and so on. It seems we were lucky to be spared the pudding of a closely contested U.S. presidential election.
The hot pudding, of the moment, is the dollar pudding. It bears on all the others. On Friday, Nov. 5, gold hit a 16-year high. The euro rose to about $1.30 - the highest euro value against the dollar since inception. At present the dollar may be described as "plummeting," having dropped 36 percent in four years. This should not have come as a surprise, given the U.S. trade deficit. And as America totters, there are those who'd like to give an added push! It has been reported that Russia, India and China are getting rid of their dollar assets. They are either preparing for a serious financial storm, or they are welcoming it. The head of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, winces at the dollar's decline. Economies that export to America are terrified. The United States has to cut its trade deficit and that signals pain for a host of countries. Since the politicians are too weak to act, and the American public is too spoiled, nature will take its course. And it won't be pretty. The American economy is shaping into the biggest pudding on the planet.
And who made this pudding?
Americans seem to have lost their economic good sense. One is reminded of G.K. Chesterton's comment about state insanity, when wild "things are being received in silence every day...." This madness produces "a paralysis, a refusal of the nerves to respond to the normal stimuli as well as unnatural stimulation." America is a commonwealth that prefers sweet half-truths, and like other fallen nations before it, is likely to "pass from prosperity to squalor, or from glory to insignificance or from freedom to slavery, not only in silence but with serenity." The American people have given birth to fantastic fashions and foolish laws. As Chesterton described, "they do not start or stare at the monster they have brought forth. They have grown accustomed to their own unreason; chaos is their cosmos...." It is the moral chaos of post-Christian "civilization." One might call it "our moral pudding."
Then there is, next to this, the Iraq pudding. Newsweek magazine has alleged that Secretary of State Colin Powell is privately pessimistic about Iraq. The attempt to construct a pro-American and democratic government in Baghdad has come to grief as thousands of insurgents have infiltrated the ranks of Iraq's new armed forces and police. Iraqi hostility to America apparently goes deeper than Washington initially expected. If recent reports are to be trusted, Iraqi recruits are unreliable. Islamic indoctrination and Arabist propaganda have taught Arabs to distrust America. Given this situation, how can America overcome decades of political and religious programming? If a reliable Iraqi army cannot be assembled, President Bush's program in Iraq will fail. Without a pro-American Iraqi security force the U.S. Army and Marines will be permanently stuck. If America were to remove its forces, Iraq's fledgling democracy would collapse and a new totalitarian state would emerge in its place. America's prestige in the region would be irreparably harmed. (Should we take Colin Powell's alleged pessimism seriously? The pessimists chatter continuously and no victory will stop their mouths. This, in itself, might be dubbed the "defeatist pudding"!)
The next four years of American history promises to be a trolley of puddings. Already commentators are thinking about "a second-term pudding" for Mr. Bush. It is a pudding born of scandals whipped up by the opposition press. For example, Halliburton, once run by Vice President Dick Cheney is being investigated by the Justice Department regarding alleged bribes made in Nigeria. Why this should form a cloud over the vice president is unclear, but constant media drumming can connect the most unconnected events in the public's mind into a pudding. From now on, whenever an article appears in the mainstream press hinting at scandal, the decades-battered Watergate rag-baby will be dragged from the political closet and kicked about, with stuffing flying and sticking to the "usual suspects" of the Republican administration. It is a sad thing to win public office in a democracy. Those who win are frequently hanged in effigy, pilloried in magazines, slandered by the opposition and stewed by special prosecutors. This may be called the American policy-making pudding.
All of this leaves untouched the various regional puddings that include the disguised enmity of Russia and China, terrorism and Europe's drift toward Russia. Of all these, I think, the economic pudding should prove to be "the mother of all puddings." The sinister impulses of the mob, animated by trouble, bring more trouble. The submerged political structures of the far left and far right seek to exploit this trouble. They want to make a revolution and crack the world open - like a giant egg. Taking liberty with one of Lenin's favorite sayings, "To make a great pudding you have to break a fairly huge egg." And this, it seems, is where we are headed.
November's "Global Gourmet" might have stumbled upon the key political insight of our time: "Power to the Pudding." Should anyone doubt that a "pudding renaissance" is underway?
