Archives

by Hana Ibrahim

My friend Julie, a high flying executive with a Kansas-based company recently became an X mark for outplacement in a liberal, (not as in radical, but excessive) rightsizing drive that has emerged as one of the conspicuous features of post World Trade Centre development in corporate America.

A full fledged native American (part Crow, part obscure tribe from Mississauga) married to a Pakistani national who is off studying law in Glasgow, Julie has a left-of-centre penchant for chapatti with uppuma, an immutable interest in baseball, and as an adventure seeking rambler with hippie tendencies, ventured east towards the UAE to make her fortune.

We were colleagues for a while, contemplated being flatmates and together proved that losers shouldn't be written off - at least in the baseball circuit. How we won the inaugural Falcon Trophy for the Gulf News is another story.

However, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, and the US of A flexed its pectorals, threatening to beat the ghenna out of the usurpers, Julie packed her bags and decamped with great ado, proclaiming home was after all the safest place to be.

Since then we've been sporadic correspondents, communicating in fits and starts when mood and inclination struck us. But last week she e-mailed the news about her bit-part role as a 'nonwaged, involuntarily-leisured' in the great American 'negative employee retention' blockbuster and in typical politically correct corporate patois, indicated she was 'in an orderly transition between career change' , but that given the 'meaningful downturn in this post Trade Centre period of negative economic growth' she may have to consider herself as being 'indefinitely idled'.

What I gleaned from all the gobbledygook was that she was out of a job, and didn't have any prospects of securing a job in the foreseeable future.

Julie's tale of garbled woe and the global 'interruption of economic expansion' that we are currently experiencing (zero growth, recession, mass retrenchment elsewhere), has me arriving at a portentous conclusion about the New World Order (NWO) that Bush, Blair and the rest of the world leaders are taking about.

Forget the crapola (lies and exaggeration) that's being frothed out about re-alignment and re-structuring and re-everythinging the old order and consider the NWO in the current context. In a post World Trade Centre, post 'Afghanistan' Enduring Freedom period, doesn't the age of the Idle Poor, where poverty gets upgraded to prestige status and unemployment glorified to an even higher elevation, make more sense than an age of the rich proletariate?

And my reasoning stands to reason when one finally sits down and count the cost of war, not just the big one orchestrated by America, but even the little one flaring up even in our own backyards. Millions running into billions and trillions and perhaps even zillions... what else can the world leaders do, but exalt the nobleness of poverty, and invite the rich, the striving to be rich and the wanna be rich to burn their wallets and liberate themselves from the stigma of becoming a maligned species.

So, what if it means goodbye to vulgar ostentatious habits of credit cards, designer suits, valet parking, champagne breaks and caviar brunches. The new order will seek to instil pride in unemployment and teach the rank and file not to look upon the state for assistance, during times of adversity, like now.

This will mean, no job, no health care, no housing, and no subsidies and may be no Samurdhi either Initiative, the spirit of adventure and resourcefulness will be on the decline. But this will be a small price to pay for the glory and the squalor of being unemployed and poor without being an anti-social hobo.

In the post war new order world, it will, no doubt be hip to be poor. People may have to start wearing their poverty in their buttonholes and might even end up transforming their plight into a new form of snobbery.

Of course in order to achieve this lofty state of absolute post war poverty, states will have to resort to a bit of rethinking. A rethinking of perspectives so as to allow the trade unions to take over the business of government and expedite the process of penury.

In case you are wondering why trade unions and not some bunkum charity organisation, take a look around and see how well they've succeeded in transforming flourishing concerns into impoverished wrecks with their unique style of management?

And also, I've been told by economic experts, that trade unions do a better job of making the masses poor and miserable much more nimbly than any form of recession or bad government.... that is, they have the ability to make you poor that much faster and without any real hard feeling.

And you've got to admit, all post war recession-tinged governments will be hard put to show a good front when they walk around with the proverbial holes in their trousers, remorse in their souls and begging bowls in their arms.

Rethinking will also mean concocting a way to eliminate inequality. This will call for a great deal of levelling up and down. Perhaps it will start with education.

Someone once said that if everybody cannot be properly educated nobody should be.

Perhaps, the NWO will implement this theory and ban education. So what if the NWO nurtures a group of new world bums. Here at least you can guarantee that all the bums would be equal. Or to put it in politically correct terms, we can consider ourselves differently advantaged, underhomed, nonspecifically destinated individuals.

News | Business | Features | Editorial | Security
Politics | World | Letters | Sports | Obituaries |

Produced by Lake House
Copyright 2001 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
Comments and suggestions to :Web Manager