No Planet B - Part Three
or, The History of the World Backwards
July 2006
1950’s British Foreign Policy
BACK-PROJECTION: SHAH OF IRAN
Britain topples evil dictator the Shah of Iran allowing Iranians to vote for their own democratically-elected government.
BACK-PROJECTION: MOSSADEGH CARRIED ON SHOULDERS IN STREET
... Britain then magnanimously hands 51% of BP to the Iranian people and gladly watches the poverty gap decrease, thus ensuring good Anglo-Iranian relations for years to come! Have the oil, we say, we’re using less and less of the stuff every year. Oh, look at them, still with the oil! That’s so 2006.
John and Teresa 1
ROB: What about the everyday lived experience of people in the history of the world backwards? What of love in reverse. Here begins the tale of two unknown lovers John and Teresa, an ordinary couple of no interest to historians of the rich and powerful, John and Teresa speak to us now of how their relationship began with cold disinterest for a decade...
JOHN: We slept in separate beds for the first ten years. We made love rarely because the act would leave both of us overcome by sorrow at time passing.
TERESA: It wasn’t that we argued. No, it was more that for the first ten years there was a formal cordiality between us. We seemed like interpreters of two world leaders in that moment before the negotiations begin when the leaders are out in the lobby having their embrace photographed by the world’s media, and we’re in a side-room taking tea together, careful that our small words and trivial voices do nothing to unduly influence the destinies weighed in the words the leaders will have us translate. But even mere interpreters fall in love... When Mao asked me to translate his warning that: “We wish to apply a doctrine of economic influence to South East Asia” I looked into your eyes and said I loved you. Nixon was surprised by this and told you to reply that come what may energy security was not negotiable. But instead you disobeyed his orders and said you loved me too. While Mao and Nixon went off to find a quiet cupboard where they could be alone, you and I stayed talking and found that the world had shrunk to include just we two.
JOHN: And to be honest I didn’t fancy her at first. Everyone said she had a beautiful face but I found its smooth inscrutability made me nervous. It was only when some lines appeared that I felt I knew her, like holding a letter written in invisible ink to the fire and finding words from a friend who trusts you and no-one else with her secrets.
TERESA: But then came the war. I hope the war ends in time for us to have a child. I’m 37, he’s forty-one. It may not.
War!
It begins in the sweet sylvan glades of Bretton Woods, where John Maynard Keynes announces the abolition of the World Bank and IMF. This leads to the outbreak of war in 1945 as the plunder of the southern hemisphere is now without rules.
The tragedy of it all is that just a few short months before, the major northern industrial powers had been getting on so well at Yalta.
Who wants Ghana?
No, I couldn’t possibly. But I wonder whether you would care to accept Namibia.
No, you’re too kind.
What if I gave you Kenya as well? Come on, you’ve already got Tanzania, and you can’t build any hotels on it until you’ve got Kenya too!
Oh no, that’s too much.
I insist.
I would love you to have Algeria.
Well, all right, then, but tell me you’ll at least take Ceylon.
Oh blimey... yes!
And India?
No, I couldn’t possibly. No really. I just wouldn’t know what to do with it.
Oppenheimer - The Missing Years
Alarmed by the imminent outbreak of war, in December 1945 Dr Robert Oppenheimer hatches a plan with Major Eatherly, pilot of the Enola Gay, named after the Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark song. They sneak into the air hangar and and tip-toe past all the other bomber-planes in the hangar: the Tainted Love, the Don’t You Want Me Baby, Hungry Like The Wolf, the Blue Monday and the Love Shack and Rock Lobster which are, of course, the B-52s. The two men secretly remove the uranium from bombs primed for use against the civilians of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Late one moonless night in, with a torch, a spade and a softly glowing rucksack, Oppenheimer buries the uranium for the entire US nuclear arsenal down a single mine-shaft in the eastern Congo called Shinkolobwe.
But the threat of nuclear weapons is only finally removed from thanks to the long-running crisis of the age, Technology Collapse. In the History of the World Backwards inventions don't stay invented. There is a Fourth Law of Thermodynamics: the Law of Technological Collapse, which states that ‘inorganic elements may not by any continual process be brought together in a more complex but only ever simpler forms.’ Or to put it in plain words: all technological inventions are parked on the slope of time with the hand brake off and a crumbling brick under the wheel.
Each day Einstein gets an emergency call-out to the scene where a familiar piece of technology has begun to fail. He rushes to Fleming’s laboratory where the last batch of penicillin is going off, but can think of nothing to arrest the process as it turns into live yoghurt before his very eyes.
EINSTEIN: Technology collapse means that we have uninvented the atom bomb, but we will lose also X-ray and radio by the 1910’s, and I shall miss hearing Woody Guthrie sing the Rob Newman classic ‘There’s No Planet B’.