28 November 2006

The American Century

It is a little unclear if it is really his phrase, but Henry Luce is credited with first popularizing the term the "American Century." He was the publisher of Time Magazine, which in its day had a hard political slant to its editorial line. He included the phrase in piece written in 1941, which was the last year that the isolationists had anything meaningful to say as the Continent fell into the hands of the Fascists.

Russia, Africa and Great Britain looked like they were not far behind, and the Japanese war machine rampaged across China.

That meant a lot to him. Luce was born in the century before the last one in Dengzhou, China, the son of a Presbyterian missionary. He never saw America until he was fifteen, being educated in the classical manner in sundry boarding schools in China and England.

He was no stranger to the ways of the world, and waited tables on the way to graduation from Yale, where he was a member of Skull and Bones, which also extended membership to all the Bushes.

In this particular editorial he was calling for a new crusade. Those were the days when no one cared if the word grated on the ears of other cultures. The West was supreme, even if the face it presented in Europe was that of a monster.

Luce thought that the spirit that had conquered a sprawling continent should now turn its attention to the wider world, and spread democracy and good works.

If one is to date the commencement of the American Century to the Second World War, there are still thirty-odd years to go, and I appreciate the opportunity to have lived at the Zenith of this particular cycle of history. I imagine the citizens of Rome felt the same way, or the sleek British in the year of Victoria's Jubilee.

I was thinking about that over a lunch of Vietnamese soup yesterday, talking to an old friend. The Vietnamese family that owns the place got out of Saigon in 1975, the last time there seemed to be an end to the American Century. We pondered the consequences of the election of leftist Rafael Correa as Ecuador's new Presidential election, and if he would terminate the lease on the US-operated Eloy Alfaro military air base at Manta.

Sine the loss of Howard AFB in Panama, that was the only facility from which to conduct anti-drug patrols in Central and South America.

Howard was a fabulous asset. We could fly there on a flight plan alone, landing on the US base, and the just walk out the gate into another sovereign nation, free as birds.

I don't know what we will do without Manta. I expect the campaign rhetoric that Correa used, saying he would simply allow the ten-year agreement to expire in 2009, is the least confrontational position he could take and still attain his objective.

Correa intends to use the facility as a major international airport and hub for flights originating in Asia and Australia and headed to destinations throughout the Americas.

It makes perfect sense, if you look at things through the great routes over the South Pole.

There was a Chilean officer on our staff at the THIRD Fleet. We had responsibility for the glittering waters of the eastern Pacific that adjoin North and South America, from Pole to Pole. It seemed reasonable that we should have representation from Allied Navies on the Staff.

Accordingly, there was an Australian, a Canadian and a Brit, and we all used the same maps. The difference was in the center point, not the orientation. On the ones produced in St. Louis, the Continental U.S. was in the middle. I think the Royal Navy charts used the Prime Meridian at Greenwich as the reference to the rest of the world.

Using the States as a world center-point lead to all manner of distortion the further away you moved away from Kansas, just as Dorothy observed in the Wizard of Oz. The earth is not flat, after all, and to keep everything in the proper perspective the poles become artificially vast and elongated.

One day our Chilean colleague gave us an informative briefing on his navy's capabilities. He was an interesting fellow, German by nationality, though his new first language was Spanish. The first slide in his presentation was a map.

We all leaned forward, trying to figure it out. I got a little dizzy in so doing, since the perspective was looking down at the Pacific from a position above and to the left of the South Pole.

>From that perspective, Chile seemed to cradle the Pacific. America was no where to be seen, and the great circle routes from China ignored the Northern Hemisphere altogether.

Our Australian officer squirmed visibly, since he apparently was aware that the world looked a lot different from Down Under. Not at all like the maps in the British and American Centuries.

As we finished the soup at the Vietnamese restaurant, my friend noted that the only realistic strategy for dealing with Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's feisty Latin ringleader of the left, was to ignore him and hope things work out.

We are too busy elsewhere to do much about it, on another map altogether.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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