"Bruce Sterling - My Rihla" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

reality, and fractals. Fair enough. A month later I'm
sipping Coke and puffing Dunhills in tourist class,
with a bag full of computer videotapes crammed in the
overhead bin, outdistancing Ibn Battuta with no effort
more strenuous than switching batteries in a Walkman.
Aboard the plane, I strike up a discussion with
a young Italian woman--half-Italian, maybe, as her
father is an Iranian emigre'. She calls herself a
"Green," though her politics seem rather strange--she
sympathizes openly with the persecuted and
misunderstood white Afrikaaners, for instance, and she
insists that the Ayatollah Khomeini was an agent of
British Intelligence. I have a hard time following
these arguments, but when it comes to the relations of
the US and Europe, her sentiments are clear enough.
"After '92, we're going to kick your ass!" she tells
me.
Unheard of. Europeans used to marvel humbly over
our astonishing American highway system and the fact
that our phones work (or used to). That particular
load of manure is now history. The Europeans are
happening now, and they know it. 1989 was a pivotal
year for them, maybe the most momentous popular
upheaval since 1789.
This century has not been a good one for Europe.
Since 1914, the European body-politic has been
wheezing along on one lung, a mass of fresh scar
tissue when it wasn't hemorrhaging blood and bil

e. But
this century, "The American Century," as we used to
call it in 1920 when there was a lot of it still
before us, is almost gone now. A lot can happen in a
century. Dynasties rise and fall. Philosophies
flourish and crumble. Cities rise, thrive, and are
sacked by Mongols and turned to dust and ghosts.
But in Europe today, the caravanserais are open.
National borders in Europe, which provoked the brutal
slaughter of entire generations in '14 and '44, have
faded to mere tissues, vaporous films, riddled
through-and-through with sturdy money-lined conduits
of trade, tourism, telecommunications. Soon the twelve
nations of the European Community will have one
passport, perhaps one currency. They look to the
future today with an optimism they have not had since
"the lamps went out all over Europe" in World War One.
(Except perhaps for one country, which still remains
mired in the Cold War and a stubborn official
provincialism: Britain. The Dutch feel sorry for
Britain: declining, dirty, brutalized, violent and