I bought myself a globe of the world last week, and whether I knew it or not, it was about time.
One minute, after months of refining down my living spaces, I was browsing a shop of well-chosen furnishings and ‘objects of desire’ in Newmarket. The next, a sinuous, tactile globe was silky under my hands, the familiar continents and oceans in the gold and rich, lapis lazuli blue of the high Renaissance that I once saw in the ruined ceiling of a chapel on an island in the middle of Lake Trasimeno.
Conjuring up the age-old, bone-deep mystery of the heavens, it is also the Earth itself as we now know it from near space. Mesmerisingly beautiful. Astonishingly moving. Infinitely precious.
The orb was an object of desire, yes, but my new desk companion promises a more immediate grasp of geography, modern boundaries and important city names.
Which opens up hidden powers. Every whodunnit, novel, play, film, travel plan and real-life experience would have been better comprehended if I had looked up their inevitable loose ends about locations and significant geographical relationships.
I am not sure why it took me so long to find my forever globe, although the carefully maintained charts and maps of ocean sailing probably oriented us towards open spaces, small ports and islands. The big land masses and geopolitics to the north of the trade routes across the Indian Ocean and around South Africa touched us only as they affected navigation.
And the world has changed beyond recognition from the days of my faded wooden globe on a high shelf in the spare bedroom from which the copious red printer’s ink of the former British Empire nations had long since faded.
In my time, I have flown at 35,000 feet over St Petersburg, the Silk Road and Baghdad. If the pilot hadn’t mentioned it, I would not have worked my way through former New York Times Baghdad bureau chief, Barbara Coker’s agonising The Spymaster of Baghdad, at the time an agonising insight into what modern day civil war between sects looks like in real life.
From knowing comes caring, relevance, connection, collaboration, respect and solutions – at least at the level of individuals and the habitats we’ve crafted for ourselves on this compact, infinitely intricate sphere hurtling through space.
Face to face, we’re mostly nice, generous, gregarious, innovative and fair-minded. None of which is holding its own against the forces abroad on the planet at the end of yet another tumultuous year and the prospect of high-level challenges in the next.
As The Guardian commentary noted this week, an exultant American president-elect joining hands with big tech oligarchs will take some managing, not least because, between them, the tech bros of Facebook, Google and Amazon have destroyed the genuine bulwark against autocratic leaders – local journalism – and now control the digital ad industry while cosying up to actual autocracy.
According to one recent research report, if they paid news organisations what they make off them by standing as a middleman between readers and writers, they would be handing over between $12bn and $14bn a year.
This while journalists and the news organisations we rely on for fact-finding and fact-checking work are under the threat of being shadow banned – the social media practice where a platform limits the visibility of a user’s posts without their knowledge.
How quaint it seems, looking back to 2022 when UN secretary general António Guterres described the record $100bn profits of oil and gas companies as “grotesque greed”.
“It is immoral for oil and gas companies to be making record profits from this energy crisis on the backs of the poorest people and communities, at a massive cost to the climate,” he said. “Household budgets everywhere are feeling the pinch from high food, transport and energy prices, fuelled by climate breakdown and war.”
He urged all governments to introduce a windfall tax on their bonanza.
They didn’t, of course. Any more than the Democratic president of the US seems able to set about shoring up his legacy against Donald Trump’s blatant jungle roar.
Nature abhors a vacuum and democracy – only ever the best of a bad lot when it came to citizen representation – is becoming structurally unworkable, helpless in the face of big tech’s financial reach and resources, and the clout of monster intergenerational fortunes.
So where to from here?
“Trust in the Almighty but tie up your camel” is my favourite reminder to put in the effort, while also letting go of expectations about the outcome. It comes to mind as my eyes wander over the globe’s golden Middle East. Ancient and modern. Magic.
• Liz Waters
© Waiheke Gulf News Ltd 2024
