The news of the American surveillance aircraft impounded by the Chinese on Hainan Island in the South China Sea brings us brightly back, after so many lean years, to the fabulous business of spies and spying.
There you are on a mild April day, minding your own business - just the opposite of spying - doing your day's work and coming home. After a satisfying dinner, or your "tea" if you have not reached certain levels of sophistication, you pick up your paper and fall into your armchair and a state of zombie-like contentment. Though disturbing news abounds as ever, you are oddly comforted even by the worrying spread of foot-andmouth, the suspension of county council executives, Liam Lawlor's difficulties in locating documents, and Mrs Robinson's conscience, budget and job problems; not to mention the supreme indifference of The Irish Times's front page to Lottery winnings of £18,052, the excess figure blithely disregarded when it told us about the fortunate Swords couple who won "more than £5.25 million". Why, for the discounted amount, one could buy the newprice Irish Times daily for close on 60 years.
But these humdrum considerations are about to be blasted away. The next thing you see is that "Chinese-US tension grows over impounded US plane." What is this? Your nerves are quickly a-jangle. You had foolishly presumed that when the Cold War ended (was that when global warming began?), and old enmities were being buried, and all sorts of cheerful intercountry relations were being happily developed, and the EEC was a bouncing baby, the whole business of spies and secret agents and undercover activity had died the death. You thought it was all now safely relegated to fiction, the odd re-make of 1930s movies and the amusing diversion of James Bond and his fabulous gadgets.
How wrong you were and how innocent you have been. You read on to discover that the US surveillance aircraft (i.e. spy plane) is packed with sophisticated and very expensive monitoring equipment (i.e. spy stuff) and manned by a crew of 24 spooks who by now may well have destroyed as much as possible of their spying equipment in order to stop the Chinese investigating their findings.
All this is presented by the global media in a spirit of barely controlled excitement. This is the real thing - macho stuff. Goddamnit man, d'you realise how long the Gulf War has been over? We need this. Very quickly, the international news organisations swing into action. Reporters are scrambled. Positions are taken up. The cameras whir and the wires buzz. Things are happening.
An entire army of commentators is now given a new lease of life. Out come the military experts and the political analysts and the armaments specialists (seriously disturbing people, with their subscriptions to Jane's Defence Weekly) and the warplane spotters and the vast, vast complement of Sino-US relationship counsellors: directors, professors, lecturers and research students from spookysounding colleges and institutes, vaguely addressed and funded by God-knows-whom. From the shadowy depths of these murky Asia-Pacific institutions they emerge blinking into the sunlight, deliver their gnomic analyses and burrow back in again.
The letter-writers get busy too. The America-haters are in their element, though many find themselves in an uneasy standoff with the human rights defenders taking the opportunity to lecture China once again for no other reason other than it being in the news. Some joker pops up in defence of Taiwan - poor brave little Taiwan, wanting only a few secondhand Kalashnikovs or perhaps a nuclear-strike apparatus supplied by the US if it wouldn't mind. . . Someone inevitably mentions Falun Gong, someone else feng shui, a very foolish contributor facetiously confuses the two, all hell breaks loose and suddenly the red herring inserters are running amok through the correspondence. Tibet! Tianamen Square! Yeah, and Kent State University, executions in Texas! How dare you? And what about Japan's attitude of studied neutrality? Yeah, fence-sitters!
Meanwhile the debate goes on about a US government plane being inviolate US sovereign territory, but perhaps not when it is sitting on a runway on Chinese sovereign territory, and armed Chinese soldiers are perhaps at this moment admiring the aircraft's generous leg-room, the inflight entertainment facilities, the catering arrangements and in particular that lovely computer-like box which fills half the fuselage and contains - well, let's see, shall we?