I wrote this before the magnificent conversation at the César Manrique Foundation between Iñaki Gabilondo and Sami Naïr. I'm not changing a comma.
The China of the Great Wall opens to the world. The USA, those of that idea of democracy, globalization and free market, begin to build their great wall. The Chinese built theirs to protect themselves from the Mongol nomads who, again and again, attacked them; the Americans to protect themselves from the poor, from the marginalized of their empire.
The Chinese wall becomes a world tourist symbol of the globalization that the Americans wanted. The American one, the new anti-globalization symbol of what they no longer want. The Chinese interweave photons and information through space; and the others, accustomed to what they consider inferior races, now do not know what to do with these yellow people, ha!, and they bring out a president to do pure and hard yellow journalism.
Meanwhile, those who know about the roots, culture and capabilities of China tremble. Because they know that if they made gunpowder in the past, what will they bring now, with those entanglements. The Chinese now dream. They don't care if they are put in a depression as the US one didn't matter at the time. The Chinese dream lightly with their minds, the Americans the heavy dream of a stuffed stomach.
And here, what I fear is fading for everyone is the concept of democracy. And you see how much I could enjoy it, from twenty years old until now, and with spectacular script skips, you know that separation of powers and so on. In reality, a transition that is increasingly spoiled. Ha! the one of the Greeks lasted longer, and it seems to me that I pointed out when recent they were going for them with monetary methods that that was a very bad omen.
And I leave the second part that is the same, but I can't finish intertwining it.
The poor Chinese children
When I was a child we used to take money, I seem to remember to school or church, to help the "poor Chinese children". Every year, just as the spinning tops or hopscotch or marbles or sarantontones arrived, campaigns arrived to raise money for the "poor Chinese children". Because for poor children nothing would have been understood, because Spain was full of them. And my island. I don't know if in what remains of my life there will be collections in China for the poor Spanish children. Or they will send them electronic games as a gift, already inaccessible to these.
I received them from Venezuela (we were poor for them). Battery games, which ran out and puafff. But it had its point to sit and see that fish throwing lights and stumbling with the corners of the room and, magically, bouncing towards another random direction. Until the lights went out and the little fish with wheels remained inert giving the last headbutts, already useless and without strength, with the leg of the table and without energy to turn. Things from Venezuela. And of civilizations.
From golden gold to black gold to let's pray for her. What I do know is that, although it does not seem like it, things change and how they change. And that a human's life gives to see a lot. Of what the changes are. In my life, for example, a fact has happened that is going to modify the face of the earth and humanity and that is that a millenary culture opens for the first time to the world. And with it drags the whole area. Asia.
Towards where? It will be the totally new experience of those who relieve us. And even for me, if I continue long enough. What happens in these next 20 years is going to be worth telling. It is normal, then, that the United States retreats: they know they cannot compete. So I sense that they intend to create an American world, with the Pacific on one side, the Atlantic on the other and all of America for them. And take shelter, isolate themselves. Wall themselves.
That isolation sounds strange, but that's more or less how we perceived Asia until the other day. I imagine they will say to the Chinese: keep the rest of the world and let's not hurt each other. And since the Chinese have the patience of the Chinese, they may accept it and wait quietly. Just as the USA waited for Venezuela to be a ripe fruit, they will wait for the isolation to dry the Yankee fruit.
What I can't finish explaining is what Europe is doing in that world. I imagine it will be that exotic place to travel to as we still do to India, for example, and millions and millions of Asians will visit us for tourism and adventure and many will discover a strange religion with a gentleman hanging on the cross. And those poor mestizos so nice, poor, exotic, noisy, corrupt and creative. Entering and leaving those temples.
But I think that the great change, the one that will mark a new era beyond the political, will be the day that the Chinese men and women get rid of the nonsense and start mating with the African and European people massively. With the others. After all, it seems that it was there where different hominids were mixing (some still unknown) to create the sapiens. Of all I think the most impossible, but you see the one I tied with the half hard that I had for the marbles and sent to the poor Chinese.
And if so, in the history of human time the Americans will remain as a nation created by a great flow of conquerors, colonizers, emigrants and African slaves brought to work in a newly conquered territory, and that, like the ancient Greeks, created a democracy and a magnificent army that vanished in very few years, less than 200, few for such a great empire. And point out that 2000 and more years later, democracy was still struggling to sustain itself without slaves and the democrats, beyond the very recent vote, did not know what to do with women.
So we have next to climate change the chinatic change. Almost nothing. Even more, if we take into account that here nobody changes. A strange stupor of pond, of puddling it.
