Within 24 hours, Belshazzar is slain and Darius the Mede is king. In Banquo’s Ghosts, it’s the West that hath been weighed in the balances and found wanting, and the Persian pun refers to the nuclear mullahs’ plans to advance the finishing of the Great Satan. That’s Meaning No. 2: the geopolitical writing on the wall. As the Iranian scientist crows to the pitiful American: “We are close to taking our place in the sun”—and you can’t stop us. His once sonorous platitudes ringing ever tinnier, President Obama was still traipsing from one Euroschmooze to the next—G20, NATO, EU—when the North Koreans lobbed their latest rocket over Japan, a “provocative” (in diplo-speak) act to which the Hopeychanger-in-Chief responded with a plea for “a world without nuclear weapons.”
Oh, phooey. North Korea is assisting the Iranians with their delivery systems, and the Iranians are promising to share their nukes with Sudan. Far from “a world without nuclear weapons,” we face the prospect of a world in which some of the wealthiest societies in history, from Canada to Norway to New Zealand, are incapable of defending their borders, while impoverished Third World basket cases, from North Korea to Sudan, go nuclear.
We’ll see how long that arrangement lasts.
A day after reading that passage in Banquo’s Ghosts, I encountered yet more writing on the wall. René Servoise, France’s former ambassador to Indonesia, issued a wake-up call to his somnolent compatriots about “la stagnation démographique”—that’s French for “hang on, isn’t that the crazy Steyn thesis that got those hate-mongers at Maclean’s hauled up last year before three of Canada’s many fine human rights commissions?” Why, yes, it is. Ambassador Servoise was attempting to contrast the “demographic stagnation” of the French with the resurgence of Islam:
“Warning. If native Frenchmen fail to be the most numerous, we will see that our days are numbered. If we fail to limit the number of immigrants, we will be judged as wanting in the scales of History. If we fail to affirm our national ambition, we will set the stage for the bursting apart of our nation.
“Remember. One day, in Babylon, on the wall of his palace, Belshazzar saw letters written in fire . . .
“For us today the warnings come daily on our TV screens. But no prophet dares translate them.”
Let us put aside the question of Islam, if only to ward off the “human rights” commissars for another week or two. The demographic question is the third and most important “writing on the wall.” Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, became one of the first Western leaders to raise the subject publicly, in the course of objecting to the Obama administration’s demand that its allies follow Washington down the path of massive spending and a ballooning national debt.
“Over the next decade,” Frau Merkel pointed out, “we will undergo a massive demographic change, and, therefore, borrowing is a greater burden for the future than in a country with a much more continuously growing population, as in the United States of America.”
Translation: America can rack up multi-trillion-dollar deficits and stick it to its kids and grandkids. But in Europe there are no kids and grandkids to stick it to—just upside- down family trees: in Germany, Spain and Italy, four grandparents have two children have one grandchild. The Financial Times noted last week that the demographic death spiral is a far greater threat to fiscal solvency than the present economic downturn. And yet, despite Germany, Japan and Russia already being in net population decline, the G20 had not a word to say about it.
The sums are bigger than in King Belshazzar’s day: mina mina, shekel, half-mina. Now it’s trillion trillion, billion, half-trillion. But throughout the advanced social democracies the upshot’s the same: demographically, the days of the kingdom are numbered; fiscally, we’ve been weighed in the balances and found wanting; and geopolitically, the Persians and others (no sign of any Medes) are beginning to divide up what’s still supposed to be a “unipolar” world.
Bertie’s Aunt Dahlia is right: once upon a time, you were certainly an ass if you didn’t know where “the writing on the wall” came from. It was part of the accumulated cultural inheritance: Handel and William Walton wrote oratorios about it. It was routinely alluded to, hither and yon: “No more his eager call / The writing’s on the wall,” as Judy Garland sang in A Star Is Born, music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Wodehouse’s pal Ira Gershwin. Rembrandt’s painting of Belshazzar’s Feast hangs in the National Gallery in a London all but oblivious to its significance, not least in G20 week. Today, I doubt one in a thousand Canadian high-schoolers would have a clue whence the expression derives. And one sign that the writing’s on the wall is when society no longer knows what “the writing on the wall” means.
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