A word to all those eco-warriors on the streets outside the Democratic Convention in the US - nothing is for ever. As McDonalds and Microsoft seem to gather the young of the world into their vast corporate arms and an entire generation seems doomed to become internet-obsessed fatties, remember: all things pass. McMicrosoft might seem to rule the global imagination and the global alimentary canal, but the lesson of world history is that the only thing which is forever is the rule that nothing is forever. We cannot predict the future. All we can say is that whatever we say about it, will not come to pass; but McMicrosoft will.
So all those demonstrators in Los Angeles this week protesting against the global market are expending their energies in vain. I doubt if they loathe McDonalds as much as I do. But choice is choice and freedom is freedom; so what are these ecowarriors going to do to stop people eating foodstuffs they personally disapprove of? Are they going to close down hamburger bars by force of law? Will they seek to impose their vision of a greener world by edict and proscription of outlawed foodstuffs, rather like the splendidly successful campaign against drugs which has achieved nothing but the filling of the prison cells of the western world with drugs- takers?
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away."
Plague of sameness
For Ozymandias, read McMicrosoft. We are in a peculiar stage of world capitalism in which we are infested with a plague of sameness: every high street and every shopping mall in the world seems identical - the same shops, selling the same clothes with the same brand names, and magazines everywhere selling essentially the same popular culture, with local dialects to cater for certain regional tastes. It seems deplorable, because it is. But it will change. You don't think so? Ask Ozymandias.
Who a century ago would have thought that the British Empire would be no more than a memory a century later, with London trying vainly to wriggle out of its last overseas territory, a few boggy and unproductive fields in northeast Ulster? Who 76 years ago this August would have foreseen the deaths within four years of the great imperial houses of Europe? Who 15 years ago would have forecast the imminent extinction of communism, right across the globe, including, now and at last, in North Korea? Who then could have foreseen that in the summer of the year 2000, the last Tsar would be canonised, amid the acclamation of the Russian people? Only the ghost of Ozmandias, that's who.
To be sure, it is dispiriting to see the tornado of popular culture and global enterprises sweeping through every corner of the planet: identically chic coffee shops abound in Reykjavic and Rio, Birr and Birmingham. Vast glossy yardage in Korean and Finnish, Arabic and Polish, might be expended on Posh Spice and Jennifer Aniston and Leonardo di Caprio; but their hour will pass. And not just their hour, but the hour of a world popular culture will pass too. Do you doubt it? Ask Ozymandias.
Early McDonalds
There was once a single world culture before. It was called the Catholic Church. It didn't actually cover the world, but it thought it did - well, the bit that counted, just as the Chinese emperors thought they had the bit that counted, and the moguls of India thought they had the important bits. The Catholic Church was like an early McDonalds. It was a franchise operation, which insisted that franchisees stick to the head office rulebook as regards company clothing, diet, design of outlet, and company language, which was called liturgy. There were some schisms - the equivalent of Burgerking, Wendy - in the east, which remained separate, but smaller, and certainly unthreatening. Of course, the Catholic Church is still around, but not recognisably as it was. It doesn't dominate popular discourse as once it did; and nor, indeed, does Ozymandias. And the world of secular social democracy, the one which is so confident of its theology and its creeds that it declares itself to be the end of history - did not the popes once before see an eternity of a papal imperium, reaching until the crack of doom and the final Apocalypse?
Freedom to change
What ensures the very change which the eco-warriors want is not restriction, prescription and proscription but the very opposite of those things. Freedom will sooner or later be the death of McMicrosoft and identical shopping malls across the world. Those who foresaw the death of the book in the triumph of the computer might have argued for compulsory literacy classes. But without coercion or tyranny, we have seen J. K. Rowling revive the book for another generation of youngsters.
No-one predicted her or her sublime triumph, any more than one could have forecast the rise of totalitarian communism or then its utter eclipse, or could have predicted the Internet, or fast-foods, or Hello magazine, or the abysmal failure of manned interplanetary travel, which has been the most confidently repeated, and the most completely inaccurate, forecast of all. We do not know what will happen next, except that a generation will one day have never heard of Microsoft or McDonalds. What will the eco-warriors be protesting about then? Ozymandias, as they always have been.