Remora

The terrorists are the ones eating mango mousse.

Two reports in the Village Voice today on the plutocrat's ball, otherwise known as the World Economic Forum. Usually this enclave of the disgustingly wealthy and unintelligently powerful meets at Davos. Unfortunately, we live in a world where loopholes in environmental regulations sometimes allow the importation of alien species -- the tiger mussel has invaded the Great Lakes Ecosystem, and the WEF has migrated to NYC. Anarcho protesters are going to try to make the place hot for them -- mais alors, there is the problem that in the USA, right now, dissent is automatically equated to terrorism. Prepare to read about anarchos vandalizing Starbucks and such; the word vandalize won't be used about the police use of water cannons and nightsticks on the fragile skeletal structure of protestors, since presumably one skeletal structure can be replaced with another, while the destruction of a Starbucks is an attack on a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

An article entitled, appropriately, Schmooze operator, contains a report by one Sasha Frere-Jones about attending the Davos confab, and fab it was to the participants:

"Accompanying my wife (invited by the WEF to attend because of her work to level the playing field for women in corporate America), I attended Davos in January of 2001. For a week, the approximately 2000 assembled players participated in panel discussions and schmoozed over mango mousse. Attendees were issued "smart" name tags and wireless iPaq computers. African nationals often outnumbered Americans in the conference hall lobby, English was not the default language for small talk, and people were unfailingly warm.

The point of being there, if you average out the participant testimonials and official press releases, is to be Somebody With a Good Idea for the World, Somebody With Money, or both."


It must be nice to be leveling the playing field and playing in a field so manifestly unlevel -- but of course, you have to be inside the establishment to change it, as the Clinton era liberal would say. But Limited Inc locks onto the mango mousse. Yes indeed, reader, here, here we surely have stumbled upon the master-sign, much as jungle explorers, in some old Tarzan flick, immediately recognize the shed panties on the forest floor and look up in anguish, exclaiming Jane!. Coding third world fruit and first world cuisine, but hedging against a too exotic third world culinary vernacular (termite mousse would have been, I suppose, outre, and Sperm Whale mousse would have given away, well, the fact that these are the inheritors of the biggest killers on the planet... and they still are) and, at the same time, against anything too, well, ancien regime for the American pups -- this is where the anarcho element really starts. People throwing mango mousse have bankrupted Argentina, contrived a system of derivatives trading that will eventually blow up national economies, as it is now blowing up corporations, and systematically promote an economic system in which they are awarded in such disproportion as to make the slave owners of the ancient world blush.

So, who do you think we are going to arrest? Well, another VV article reports on the expected cop crackdown on the protestors:

"In the post-9-11 world of law enforcement, cops see these brick throwers and car burners as almost Al Qaeda-like, down to their transnational wandering, their leaders' wealthy backgrounds, and their fundamentalist message. The anti-globalization movement objects to the unfettered migration of capital in search of the best deal on labor, and holds the not-unreasonable paranoia of a global corporate oligarchy.

Of course, that same migrating capital�as with arms maker Krupp, explosives king Nobel, and yellow-journalism baron Hearst�is what fuels its yang. By 1996, one of the movement's funding organizations had banked more than $34 million to fuel its agenda, according to Internet versions of a Left Business Observer essay. The publication goes on to report that the founder of this group has an Ivy League M.B.A., a track record at the U.S. Agency for International Development, and money provided by well-heeled parents from the retail trade. "

Life, baby. Sometimes I can't stand it.