The Special One

Antiquity has many dependants. The tribes and civilisations traipsing across the expense of time each claiming eminence, each with proud descendants who base their linage to be considered special.

Egyptians,Persians, Greeks , Hebrew tautology, Aryan/Davidian mysticism, the Renaissance in Italy and France, the British Empire, the Teutonic influence in Europe, Marxism, each has had its adherents in the sense that history defined them and gives them the opportunity feel special.

This sense of identity through a tribal attachment and the achievement born of intellectual, military and economic might makes us speak highly of ourselves irrespective of the fact  we are a poor image of the original.

Having arrived in the 21st century, economic influence set about the business of creating global markets and dissolving tribal affinity for the sake of consumerism. No longer in many senses are we different. Coke is a universal beverage, Apple and Nike are  worn and paraded everywhere, the American  influence, internationally, means that you can get by with English, at least through the airport. The emotional freeze as you recognise your  reliance on English as your lingua franca doesn’t carry you far in a bazaar in the Middle East or in the domestic affairs of Afghanistan or upper Mongolia when western influence is at a minimum and possibly counter effective, then your historical preeminence worthless.

And yet we persist in inflating our sense of worth, we insist in punching above our weight sending warships into potential war zone situations when in reality we can't fix the potholes in our roads. Is it possible with our history to down size our psych to be a onlooker not a combatant. I'm not talking of our valour in standing up to fascism but nations like Sweden who were a force to be reckoned with in the 17th/18th century learnt to accommodate the world as it was and not try to mould it into what it thought it should be. We can never break the back of religious intolerance or a secular ideology, nor should we want to unless they threaten us and what we believe is just and fair.

Even the might of the American fighting machine is being questioned as the worlds policeman, not least by its own people who question the economic cost and the relevance of nations who it is being asked to defend. The move away from the compartmentalisation of nationhood towards the assumption of commonality in practice and purpose has lead to a distortion of the aims and needs of countries who have not thrown out traditionalism for consumerism. The mullahs of Iran for instance are not at all convinced by western symbolism, their history goes back  through the brilliance of academic achievement known as the Persian Empire. The tolerance of American capitalism, a very recent event, is as hard to swallow as the brash GI was on the streets of London during the war. The phenomenon of the Trump supporter gives credence to the claim that the American mentality is a cut and paste character, more tied to Hollywood than the reality of the world we live in.