Cornucopia

by John Kinsella

  O’Connelly smiled when he remembered a Russian TV news report with pictures of lines outside Parisian bakers on Sunday mornings entitled ‘Bread shortages in Paris’. If it helped Muscovites reconcile themselves with the then desperate state of their country, why not.

  Traditionally, the French invited their families for lunch on Sundays and pastries were always a favourite on the desert menu. As Russians queued for bread, Parisians queued for pastries, it was as if the words attributed to Marie Antoinette were as fitting as ever.

  The six and a half hour Are Lingus flight to New York was scheduled to arrive at JFK International at two thirty, which meant O’Connelly would be in town about four; giving him time to check-in to his hotel and freshen up for dinner with Jason Hertzfeld.

  He peered from the window of the business class cabin hoping the clouds would clear over the west coast of Ireland. He was in luck, suddenly green patches started to appear, then came a weak silver flash reflecting the watery sun on the Shannon. He scanned the countryside laid out like a patchwork quilt for the airport, which had once a refuelling point for Aeroflot on its regular run to Cuba from Moscow; when Nikita Khrushchev sent his men to build missile bases there; and later Leonid Brezhnev’s soldiers, when the Cold War got several degrees hotter with proxy wars in Vietnam, Angola and Central America.

  Shannon Airport had marked the history of transatlantic aviation. Many celebrities had made a refuelling stop in Shannon: presidents, politicians, film stars, writers and even El Lider Maximo: Fidel Castro. Many of them dined in the Lindbergh Restaurant, where they no doubt shared their tales of adventure in the skies.

  In 1919, Alcock and Brown crash landed in a bog after having set out to cross the Atlantic from Gander in Newfoundland in a Vickers Vimy. They were greeted with words: ‘Welcome boys. Where to, and where from?’ announcing their landing in Ireland, not England!

  In 1937, the Transatlantic Flying Service opened the first transoceanic passenger line, with a whole series of refueling stops, one of which was on the banks of the Shannon at Foynes. It was there Irish Coffee was invented when an enterprising local publican softened the coarse gustatory sensation of Irish whisky for the ladies with a dash of coffee, cream and sugar, making it an instant hit in fashionable London and New York salons.

  O’Connelly dozed half thinking of Colombia, a country he had never visited, and conjuring up scenes for his next book. He was invited as a guest writer at the Hay Festival, thanks to Hertzfeld’s tireless promotion, with the writers’ books translated into Spanish and Portuguese, distributed in an ever growing number of Latin American countries.

  O’Connelly was grateful, though he found himself on the road with an increasing frequency and under a relentless pressure to produced. His smart phone had become an indispensable tool, one he could use literally anywhere and with which he not only made notes, but found himself using it more and more for actually writing, storing his texts on Google Drive, communicating with his other devices and correcting his drafts for grammar, spelling and factual details such as dates, places, names and events, recent or historical.

  B

  oeing Clipper Trans-Atlantic Flying Boat 1939

  So much had changed since James Joyce completed Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in his own hand. Nearly half a century after Joyce’s death, when O’Connelly had first commenced his efforts as a budding writer, he had frequently destroyed his notes and early drafts, imagining that others, if they came across his multiple corrections, side notes, erasures, scribblings, grammar and spelling errors, would see him as a poor amateur or even worse a semi-illiterate.

  It was only when, many years later, he came across a collection of manuscripts written by Jean Cocteau, exhibited in a Left Bank bookshop, near Saint-Sulpice in Paris, did he realise many a writer’s manuscripts were an almost indecipherable a maze of what seemed at times delirious outflowings of their imaginations. Some time later at a Sotheby’s auction preview of letters and manuscripts of famous authors he discovered many manuscripts were chaotic, others near perfection. Some talented writers others had personally corrected and rewritten their works; many others depended on their publishers’ correctors, readers, assistants and typesetters to put order into their meanderings.

  This discovery was confirmed once and for all when the manuscripts and notes of James Joyce were made available to the public by the Irish National Library in 2004, when a new exhibition centre was opened on Kildare Street in Dublin. The inaugural theme was centred on James Joyce and his celebrated work Ulysses with many of the great man’s manuscripts on display.

  From that moment O’Connelly never looked back. The art of writing, that is to say putting a story on paper, or some other support, was not an exercise in style or a manifestation of grammar skills. It was the telling of a story. Naturally it had to be readable, capable of stirring the emotions of the average reader. But it was the story that counted. Joyce had experimented in style, which meant that many readers past and present found certain of his works difficult to read. However, Joyce believed the ideas he put on paper were inseparable from the manner in which they were written. He was a Modernist and his styles included experimentation with structure, dialogue and characterization: interesting for certain, but lost on less appreciative readers.

  O’Connelly, as a writer, was unconcerned by such considerations. In Joyce’s time the literary world was narrow, for the few, it was a world of experimentation, where most mainstream publishers were dedicated to what they determined was good literature, that is for the educated classes, where commercial values were seen as vulgar, a concept reserved for paperbacks, for the common man, the masses, most of whom had no access to good modern literature, for them it was the style of Micky Spillane, which was judged as cheap, lurid, fiction. Paradoxically Spillane was admired by Ayn Rand and recompensed late in his life with an Edgar Allan Poe Grand Master Award.

  Hertzfeld was all business, and Bernsteins, of which he was a partner, even more so. That did not worry O’Connelly, who saw posterity as no further than the pleasure of seeing his next book on the New York Times best sellers list.

  THE BUND – SHANGHAI

  The speeches had ended and the cocktail reception slowly winding down when two young bankers ducked out of the Peace Hotel to the Shanghai Bund. The day had been long and boring as a succession of bankers, financiers and ministers droned on about investment, growth, currencies and banking technicalities in general.

  Seth Elis led the way across Nanjing East Road to Zhongshan East, otherwise know as The Bund. There he pointed to a building, which with its Ionic pillars, architrave, frieze and cornice, resembled an impressive early twentieth century bank. It was the former Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China, built in 1923. Since then a lot of water had flown under the Waibaidu Bridge and the staid looking edifice had been transformed into Bund18, a very trendy, very upmarket, shopping emporium where its customers could enjoy a nice cup of tea in the Joël Robuchon salon de thé, or a meal at the Bund Hakkasan, or the French chef’s restaurant, after browsing in the luxury boutiques that included Cartier, and all the rest of bling, which was not the priority of the two young bankers. Instead they headed for the seventh floor where the Bar Rouge was situated.

  As the night was still young with few party-goers in the fashionable discotheque and bar, they opted for the rooftop terrace where they ordered drinks and enjoyed the spectacular view across the Huangpu River to Pudong and its gaudy skyline.

  Elis was a young up-and-coming investment analyst at the Blackstone Group, whose linguistic and relational talents had pointed him towards a career in international relations. He had been hired, more than a year before graduation, whilst still studying for his MBA at Wharton, during the investment house’s annual search for new talent.

  Over drinks they exchanged career experience. Elis told Liam how he had been called to interviews by a frenzied pack of competing banking and investment house recruiters, often with little or no time to prepare himself for th
e interviews.

  Clancy’s background and business experience was far removed from Seth’s, whose wealthy New York parents had ensured his place at the Wharton Business School, one of the oldest, and most expensive in the world. Wharton was classed fourth in the Forbes’ list of leading business schools, where the average graduate’s starting salary was one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars - which seemed to Clancy a mind blowing sum for a novice, whatever his diplomas, and on top of that was a twenty five thousand dollar signing on bonus.

  Schools like Wharton or the London Business School had been so far removed from Liam’s world that he had never even been aware of them. Such schools had become businesses, especially the latter, which to men like Francis was a profit making enterprise disguised as a seat of learning. Unlike Wharton, the London Business School was not exactly a venerable institution, rather a parvenu, founded in 1964, opening its doors when the socialist government came to power, led by the colourless Harold Wilson, a prime minister as uninspiring as a Soviet apparatchik, who as the last rays of sun faded on the disappearing rump of the once glorious British Empire, led his country down a road to devaluation and deindustrialisation.

  The school’s Marylebone campus was situated in a grand John Nash terrace, built in 1822, and described as ridiculously fantastic in Mogg’s Visitors guide to London of 1844. Under this grandiloquent neoclassical façade it was inaugurated by Elizabeth II in 1970.

  Its recently created extension in Dubai was evidence of its pursuit of money. Francis, as a leading professor of economic history at Trinity College Dublin, found the school’s pretensions greatly exaggerated. It was nothing more than a modern emanation of the University of London, itself founded in 1836.

  The creation of the school, he like to point out, coincided with the death of Winston Churchill, one of Britain’s greatest ever figures, who, if he were still alive, would have despaired at the hollow men who succeeded him to lead his once great nation.

  In short LBS was an imposter and an upstart compared to his own proud Alma mater, which was founded in 1592 by the first Elizabeth.

  After graduating in business studies at Cornell University, Elis had spent two years as a junior investment banker with Morgan Stanley before following in his father’s footsteps and completing a two year residential MBA programme at Wharton. Clancy on the other hand had no MBA, he had not even gone to university, entering investment banking by pure chance during Ireland’s spectacular boom years.

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  ed Bar on the Bund

  At precisely the same moment as Elis was applying himself at Wharton, all paid thanks to dad, upfront, a senior partner in one of Morgan Stanley’s law firms, Liam found himself in a Dublin pub looking into a half empty glass of Guinness, unemployed, on the street so to speak, licking his wounds, another victim of the Irish banking debacle.

  In 2010, when markets started to recover and Clancy was still struggling to make ends meet in his start-up as a financial consultant in Marbella, he was contacted by INI and hired on Pat Kennedy’s recommendation. Kennedy, who besides preferring a home grown Irish lad, believed in hands on experience and innate talent rather than academic qualifications alone.

  The London prime property market had started to accelerate and Clancy’s experience as an ex-trader with the bank’s Dublin unit, along with his hard earned knowledge gained through untangling the property problems of UK expatriates in Spain, as well as the incumbent financial and legal questions, seemed to him a good choice.

  It was after midnight when the Bar Rouge finally started swinging. The two up-and-coming bankers quickly forgot their careers after latching onto a couple of attractive Chinese girls … or was it the other way around?

  PART NINE

  A REFERENDUM

  Politicians in search of a quick solution to stave off defeat had often pointed to external demons to divert the discontent of their voters. Economists like Friedman had offered more novel solutions to hard pressed governments, such as monetizing debt … helicopter money, as he put it.

  In 2015, David Cameron, to ensure his re-election in the face of a growing numbers of discontented Britons, especially those on fixed incomes, had witlessly offered a scapegoat: Europe. And what better than a referendum on the UK’s continued membership of the EU, where each and every adult could have his say by marking a cross on voting slip.

  Ever accelerating changes were taking their toll in British society where ordinary Brits like Geof and Helene were seduced by Little Englander ideas, seeing Europe and Europeans as swindlers, thieves and villains. It never occurred to them their own politicians were responsible, at least in part, or the fact that almost two million fellow Britons lived outside of the UK in EU countries.

  On the one hand they rejected their fellow Europeans in favour of immigrants from the sub-continent or Africa, and on the other they railed against the islamisation of Briton. The two were of course incompatible.

  It was in a sense a return to Victorian Britain, when ‘rabies began at Calais’, something confirmed by the ‘Jungle’, and where the Commonwealth appeared like tempting but fading mirage of Empire, leading many into believing it was a credible successor to Europe, offering a seemingly happy alternative to Balts and Bulgars.

  Elizabeth II, God bless her, was not Victoria, and stirrings in that strange association called the Commonwealth, and elsewhere, including China, murmured revenge, pointing to England as a nation of imperialists and slave traders to whom they owed no favours.

  Immigrants brought with them their own cultural identity, which Samuel R. Huntington described as an idea of self: a concept that was most meaningful to most people. It was not therefore surprising that the newcomers clung to the symbols of their cultural identity. Symbols that clashed with those of the host country; how could the new arrivals not reject their family, heritage and culture, in the same way Britons at home or abroad could not abandon theirs.

  Francis agreed with the prediction of John Maynard Keynes, who said in his essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, that by 2030, thanks to technological advances, the working week would be reduced to fifteen hours as workers were replaced by machines. It corresponded with Francis’ own vision of Cornucopia. What Francis found more problematic was Keynes’ notion people would enjoy far more leisure as their material needs were satisfied.

  Why? To his mind there were a number of reasons. In 1930, when Keynes wrote his essay, the world was a different and simpler place where leisure had a different meaning. In 2015, leisure was a business, and enjoying it cost money. The cost of a ticket for a football match, or a concert, was not within the reach of large segments of the population. The cost of a trip to Disney, or to Ocean World, could be counted in hundreds of dollars for a family. If a working week of fifteen hours in industry existed in developed countries, it would most certainly be for the few. For the rest, those in lower service jobs, it would be business as usual with at least forty hours a week.

  In 2015, money in the form of cash, plastic or credit, was still king, and work ensured its distribution. A world without work, where the people could enjoy the benefits of Cornucopia, had yet to be invented. As to the billions of poor knocking at the doors of rich nations, that was yet another problem.

  The idea that all of humanity would benefit from a robotic revolution was very debatable. In the same way if human life could be extended to one or one hundred and fifty years, the advantages would be be reserved for the rich and powerful. Workers in developed economies would ineluctably suffer as the labour pool grew and cost of production fell. The unemployed and unemployable would be assisted, but would they have access to Cornucopia?

  Beyond the frontiers of affluent nations, the revolution would result in the fall of productive employment and the world would sink into dystopian chaos, with the unemployed and their families setting out on a perilous journey, in a desperate bid to reach Cornucopia, only to be met by trenches, moats and steel barriers.

  Francis taught three waves
of revolution had taken place in modern history: first was the Industrial Revolution that commenced in the Middle of the 18th century, with innovations like the steam engine and the spinning jenny; with the second, in the latter part of the 19th century, came mass industrialisation; followed by the third wave, the development of information technology in the second half of the 20th century.

  With the start of the third millennium the fourth revolution was at hand: the age of robotics, not the humanoid form as imagined by early science fiction writers, but one that replaced human intelligence and in a multitude of physical forms; on land, sea and air; in homes, offices and factories; in schools, universities and hospitals, in agriculture, animal husbandry and the food supply chain, all at the service of humanity … that is to say those fortunate enough to live in the developed or the nascent Cornucopian world.

  Francis asked his students whether privileged nations would ring-fence themselves, building physical barriers, in the same way as European nations were building fences and setting up frontiers to keep out the tired, poor, huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of teeming foreign shores1. Abandoning them to their dysfunctional universe where wild ideologies converged in a Mad Max like mosaic of societies, which resembled those of the Middle Ages in the dark days that followed the Pest.

  Science fiction writers had not been wrong when they imagined humanity having to find another role; being a mindless consumer was never on the books, nor that of a Renaissance courtier: drinking, dancing and fornicating as warring princes plotted.

  But what? In the age of discovery men had left home in search of riches and new worlds to conquer, but when they were rich and had all they wanted that urge faded. In 2015, few wanted to fight the savages at their gates; it was a task for sophisticated machines beyond a desolate no-mans-land.

  Talk of productivity, the distribution of incomes and technology’s impact on the labour share was patent nonsense in such a society, Francis explained, as for bargaining power the idea was absurd, how could you bargain with machines?