By Biodun Jeyifo
President Trump, please get us out of here, get us home”. This distress plea came from an American trapped in an ocean cruise ship in the sea of Japan. Together with hundreds of other Americans, the woman and her husband had been confined for the coming two weeks to her cabin in the ocean liner because it had been discovered that a few of the other souls on the ship had contacted the Coronavirus disease. Wisely or otherwise, the captain of the ship, following orders from medical and local authorities on land, had issued the order confining all passengers aboard to their cabins. The last place anyone would pray to find themselves in an outbreak of a looming pandemic plague like the Coronavirus disease is a ship because, if cases of the disease increase on the ship, the ocean liner becomes like a death prison from which one cannot escape. That is the source of the absolute terror in the voice and the demeanor of the woman who radioed her desperate plea to Trump.
There is a profound irony in the harrowing tale of this woman and her co-passengers looking for Trump to save them. Like all modern or, more precisely, recent global pandemic diseases, the Coronavirus disease is both a symptom and a manifestation of globalization, the very globalization against which Donald Trump is the contemporary world’s most implacable opponent. Trump has taken America out of almost all the major international treaties intended to secure cooperation and solidarity among the nations and regions of the planet. He has boasted again and again that while nearly all the other parts of the world are facing dire economic prospects, American prospects under his watch are excellent.
The list of countries and regions that Trump wants to ban from sending immigrants to the United States keeps growing. And Trump is the greatest among all the climate change deniers among the rulers of the world. Against science and incontrovertible evidence, he has stoutly maintained that climate changer patterns that we are seeing all over the world are not happening and require no joint action by all of us denizens of the planet. Thus while the Coronavirus plague is a grim reminder that, for good and ill, we are all together on our planet, desperate souls in the ship in our tale are turning to Trump, the ultimate anti-globalist, to save them. There is an ironic, cautionary tale worth exploring in this encounter. Permit me to elaborate carefully what this tale is.
One of the most telling signs of globalization and its relentlessness in our world is how quick and pervasive the movement of people, goods, services and contacts have become in our world. This is within and between countries. For instance, when I was growing up, letters and telegrams that we sent to other countries took ages to get to their destination. There were only two major airports in Nigeria, one in Lagos and the other in Kano; now, there is an airport in every one of our thirty-six state capitals. A travel out of the country in those days to Europe or America was like a journey to the moon, with all of one’s relatives and friends at the airport to see one off to what was thought to be another world, another planet. Flights out of the country were about three or four, at the most. Today, there are many flights a day and people make journeys to every part of the world as if every part of the planet is just a stone’s throw away from home. Perhaps the most astonishing is the state of nearness that social media has created between and within all the communities of the world. In my youth, you didn’t get to read newspapers from abroad until three or four days after their date of publication; now you see and read them online within minutes of their being published. Thus, globalization is arguably the driving engine of the modern world and the trends clearly indicate an intensification, not a diminishment, of this motive force.
More pertinent to our cautionary tale in this piece is the fact that of all the nations of the earth, America, Trump’s America, has benefited the most from the forces of globalization. The roots of American hegemony in globalization go back to the moment when the American dollar replaced gold as the ultimate standard of exchange between and among all the currencies of the world. This was tremendously augmented by the fact that America achieved considerable power of control over the two foremost multilateral financial institutions in the world, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Before Japanese brands in cars and Chinese supremacy in the exchange of cheap consumer goods arrived on the global scene, American corporations and products had saturated world trade – Xerox, IBM, IT&T, American Steel, blue jeans, movies and movie stars, chewing or bubble gum. Indeed, when America became the biggest donor nation in the world, its donations, its charitableness, was strictly tied to the American dollar and American goods and services. In effect, this means that if you are given two billion dollars in aid, you must spend all or most of it buying American goods and services. This point is absolutely incontrovertible: globalization has been enormously good to America. Yes, the country has an internal market big and rich enough to be almost self-reliant, but historically, America has depended a lot on drawing continuously from the peoples and economies of the whole world to augment its might and influence.
And the pleasures and gratifications of its people. This leads us back to our opening story of the woman in the ocean liner and her distress plea to Trump. Travelling as a leisure activity was not invented by Americans but it became a global, multibillion-dollar business under American involvement in the global trade in the hospitality industry. The turning point was the emergence of the credit card system of buy now and pay later. Transferred into the operations of the global hospitality industry, this means travel now, see the world and take your time in paying for your travel and your gratifications while travelling. Ecotourism, medical tourism, sex tourism – whichever tourism you want, go for it, don’t worry about the cost since you can take your time in paying for it. This could only have come into being under the American introduction into world economy of the credit card system. Since this system has been globalized, everyone around the world is travelling now and paying for it later. Like Americans.
Actually, the last statement is not exactly accurate. Not all Americans travel around the world as ecotourists, sex tourists or plain pleasure-seeking, footloose adventurers. Most Americans travel only in their country; after all, it is a vast subcontinent of a country. More importantly, as generalized as the credit card system has become, tens of millions of Americans remain unintegrated into the system. For such Americans, they cannot buy now and pay later; they must necessarily pay now for what they buy, what the consume now. These are the Americans who globalization has left behind and who, because globalization has left them behind, are passionately anti-globalist. These are the Americans on behalf of who Trump has launched his ferocious anti-globalist, nationalist crusade. The irony is that just as Americans who feel left out of the benefits of globalization seem unaware of the immense contribution of globalization to American prosperity at home and abroad, so does Trump himself seem forgetful that as a businessman, he built his business empire on the opportunities made available by globalization. His hotels and his golf courses came from reliance on foreign partners; even his hotel staff, kitchen and cleaning hands came from his heavy reliance on grossly underpaid foreign or “guest” workers.
History, including contemporary history, is not an abstraction. It is first and foremost the lived reality and experience of people, living and suffering human beings. The woman and her husband who sent that desperate plea to Trump in the face of the threat of the Coronavirus pandemic disease could hardly have had globalization on their minds. Every country must look out for and cover the back of its citizens, that’s all she was probably thinking about. At best, we can justifiably hope that it may have occurred to her that she was appealing for help from a president who has steadfastly turned down appeals for help from climate refugees seeking refuge in America. Trump cannot be absolved of guilt, terrible guilt and hypocrisy, for making the most out of globalization while basing his political career on the most pitiless and vengeful turn away from globalization in the era after the Second World War.
American exceptionalism – the belief that America is so self-reliant, so replete in its achievements and endowments that it can and should stay away from the affairs of the world whether in war or in peace – did not start with Donald Trump. At several moments in world affairs in the last century and half, Americans have had bitter and divisive debates on whether they should or should not get involved in the affairs of the world. In the moments when they chose to get involved, they did so only or primarily because they realized that American national self-interest was at stake and that if they failed to get involved, they stood to lose much of things they cherished in their country – like democracy, freedom, peace.
To which we must now add health. Like all the global pandemics before it, the looming Coronavirus plague shows how deeply and inextricably connected we are, thanks to the forces of globalization. Yes, like global warming and environmental change, this is globalization in its darker, more menacing aspects. Viruses and plagues do not need visas to cross borders and range freely over the entirety of the world. What they need is ease and regularity of travel between and within the nations of the world. Who thinks for a moment that we can stop travel and contacts between the peoples, nations and regions of the world? Don’t we all know that the panic measures now being put in place to enforce restrictions and constraints on travel and commerce in response to the existential threat of the Coronavirus plague can only be temporary, not permanent?
Which and how many of us will die with this pandemic disease? A terribly grim question. The answer is, we do not know. Like the woman who sent her desperate plea to Trump, we are all hoping that it will not be our fate to go with this plague. I add that may it not be our collective fate to rely on an evil powerful ruler like Donald Trump who will be at the helm affairs in our world as the decisions are made, the decisions about globalization and its discontents, together with its growing ranks of malcontents.
Why did you engender me? – An apocalyptic epilogue
As a sort of prologue to globalization and its specters in this piece, the following dialogue has been culled – not quoted verbatim – from Samuel Becket’s play, Endgame. I suggest that it should be read as a symptomatic confrontation between a generation that has utterly failed the world and the generation to whom the task of saving the world now devolves:
Son: Scoundrel, why did you engender me?
Father: I did not know.
Son: Did not know what?
Father: That it would be you
Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
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