....IF IT´S OPEN / GEOPOLITICAL FUTURES

... If It’s Open

Thoughts in and around geopolitics.

By: George Friedman

I returned from a trip to South Korea about three weeks ago. Since then, I went to the bank once and to the supermarket on a mad lark. I have reached the point we used to call cabin fever but which I now call the Corona Crouch. 

The Corona Crouch is a defensive posture that decreases your risk of getting a disease but increases your chance of going mad, and not in a good way. It does not lead to brilliant insights on the nature of the universe; it leads to a seething rage at a world out of control.

My wife and I have discussed doing something daring. 

It begins with leaving the house, getting in the car, driving someplace and doing something, preferably surrounded by people also doing something. 

There is a town west of us called Fredericksburg, which I may have mentioned before. 

It was settled in the 1840s by German liberals fleeing a failed rebellion. 

Its residents spoke German until after World War II, and it is still filled with German restaurants and flags. 

It was also the birthplace of Chester Nimitz, commander of U.S. naval forces in the Pacific during World War II. Fredericksburg has a main street to walk up and down, stores and restaurants. 

It also has the National Museum of the Pacific War, which is both appropriate and superb, a rare combination.

We live in a region of Texas best described as lovely. That by definition precludes interesting things to see, unless seeing a hill two hills over counts. No matter how comfortable our house or how welcoming our land, life requires that there be more. 

And thus the discussion of where to go. My wife suggested the Pacific War museum, which we have seen many times but not since the Corona Crouch began. 

Only after we started planning the trip did she qualify the visitation with “… if it’s open.” 

She then suggested our favorite hotel in San Antonio adding, “… if it’s open.” It hit me that the banner above the Corona Crouch should read “... if it’s open.” 

Every thought of living differently for a day ended in what must be the motto of our time: “… if it’s open.”

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a book called “No Exit” about an endless conversation from which there was no exit. I have been a part of such discussions, where I considered hurling myself from a window as a reasonable alternative. 

There is also a French term known as “ennui,” a sense of listlessness and indifference to all things that arise out of the emptiness of life. The French were well prepared for our time with a philosophy and a name for what we experience.

My wife and I have lived in places where we had only each other to talk to but never in a place where there was no exit, and where the question is not whether we can leave but whether there is an exit. Whether or not we might be prepared to take risks, the world is now designed to prevent us from doing so. 

We are responsible not only for ourselves but for the rest of the world, and so the world has shut its doors. What else can we do, save read Sartre again and hope we have become sufficiently sophisticated to be in the grips of ennui rather than ticked-off and bored.

There is a dimension of freedom I never considered until now: the right to assume that things that should be open are open, and the right to enter them if I have money, and no other qualification. That is gone. I cannot assume that a place is open because it should be, nor that I am free to choose. 

I am now assuming people to be infectious and must act as if I am, and the places I go may no longer welcome me or no longer exist. In the past half-year or so, the landscape of my life has shifted so much that it is difficult to navigate. The buildings are there, but what they mean has changed.

COVID-19 is real. Aside from the Crouch, the medical establishment has no solution for it yet It’s as if sergeants were training bots how to move and shoot. It is all they have, and it’s what we must do. But it should not be thought for a moment that we are being kept safe. We are safe from the virus perhaps, but the Europeans, having been praised for their rigor, now have also discovered that doesn’t mean you have an exit. 

I have a powerful and odd marriage that has endured far worse and this is no challenge, but I wonder how many other marriages will find that there is an exit, how many friendships will wither, how many hopes for the future collapse as businesses built with hope close their doors forever. 

As we crouch from the disease, we must be aware of the price that is being paid. The casual chat in the usual bar is gone, and with it boasts and flirts. 

Of course we can all return to it … if it's open.