快猫短视频

All Connected Now: Life in the first global civilisation by Walter Truett
Anderson, Westview, $27.50, ISBN 0813339375

A COLUMNIST from California surveys globalisation. Don鈥檛 fret, he says, it鈥檚
been going on a long time.

But how homogeneous are we? If Walter Truett Anderson were French or
Vietnamese 鈥攐r Swabian or Pathan鈥攈e would see the origin of
nation-states differently. His main sources are newspapers and think-tank
reports鈥攐verwhelmingly from one state.

Were he a little more globalised, he might have queried a local journalistic
convention that devotes equal space to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change and global warming doubter Fred Singer (about three pages each), and to
almost the entire medical community and HIV sceptic Peter Duesberg (one
each).

This is the Walt Anderson who wrote a book called The Truth About the Truth.
He also apparently edited (in 1969) The Age of Protest, with contributions by
Martin Luther King and Black Panther Stokely Carmichael.

These days he dismisses protests about the McWorld strand of globalisation in
a couple of pages鈥攍argely quoting another retired activist, Paul Gilding
late of Greenpeace, who has also come to love the free market. The world has
problems? Just wait to see whether science solves them, or the market, or magic.
It鈥檒l be exciting.

I plan to bury this book鈥攖o sequester the carbon in it so that the tree
was not felled in vain. If you want to know about globalisation, go to
www.economist.com and to www.schnews.org.uk鈥攚丑颈肠丑
is shorter, funnier and subversive. Oh, and www.newscientist.com.