On an Ancient Broadway – Norman Metamorphosis

There were royal Ludwigs so poor that they had to pump their chamber pot attendants.

What made them so impoverished?

People who had the knack for shortening their lifelines. Jesus had only just risen when Parisians had to defend themselves against the Romans. The Romans displayed their superiority by opening a theater on the Seine. On an ancient Broadway, the Romanization of the Celts took place. From 465 onward, the Merovingians under Childeric I and Clovis I performed on the open-air stage with thermal operations. The hype men of the Carolingian Renaissance made Paris the capital.

The Franks had to deal with Danes, whom they managed—through detours of defeats, arrangements, surviving plagues, denied key handovers, tribute payments, and intrigue—to keep at bay enough that Paris never fell under Scandinavian rule. Considering how successful the Vikings were at dismantling existing power structures, it is remarkable that their conceptual double-edged approach—trade where possible, plunder where necessary (or vice versa)—did not take hold in Paris. They settled in the area and gradually became Norman.

As a Side Note – The Coincidence of Geological and Political Fault Lines

Afghanistan is part of Peter Sloterdijk’s “Pangaea of the Regularly Irregular.” One year before his death in December 2010, the “Bulldozer” drove toward a meeting with Afghan clan leaders in the expanses of the Third Pole. A series of terror attacks shaking Kabul, and suicide bombings in other parts of Afghanistan, may be due to the presence of the rough-hewn, sleeves-rolled-up U.S. special envoy Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke. Because of his blunt manner, some call him “Dick.” He prefers to be called Richard—the “architect of the Dayton Accord”—and he made this clear to his boss, Obama.

Holbrooke’s mission could hardly be more delicate. His convoy, additionally secured by a diversionary maneuver, crosses a geopolitically and geologically explosive territory. Arizona Jakarta leads the security team.

The emissary is to survey conditions whose fatality Sloterdijk formulates universally. One observes “intersections of partial energies, none strong enough to win, and none resigned enough to lay down arms… (these are) regions without hegemony, without court, and without compensation… in-between worlds of infiltration, subversion, and clumping… streams of strategically directed resentment and fake news.”

“The Himalayas and adjacent regions… experience continuous compression due to the ongoing convergence of the Indian and Eurasian plates.”

The Interested Neighbors

On the geographic periphery position Pakistan, India, and Iran. Pakistan only ostensibly supports the “war on terror.” From the Pakistani perspective, Taliban terror serves to wear down American resolve for intervention. The hegemons watch one another. Pakistan fears an increase in Indian influence, while simultaneously the Taliban attempt to bring Pakistan under a caliphate.

Alexander Kluge speaks of “frozen and virulent conflicts.” Sloterdijk speaks of a gray-zone globography. He says:

“No civil war atlas, no lexicon of deficits, can encompass the gray-zone realm; none of the usual worldviews capture it. Historians of empires share the tendency to overlook the existence and extent of gray zones… No foreign ministry really knows what is happening out there, where irregularities are left to themselves. Over a hundred quasi-state-like half-anarchies hatch on the planet, largely ignored by their surroundings, in the half-shadow of brighter conflicts, midterm fixed in the measured pace of rising and falling corruption indices. The most well-meaning cosmopolitan eventually grows tired enough to throw the mantle of benign neglect over regions, whose conditions are too complex to know in full—knowledge that would only produce unhappy awareness, i.e., mental stress without options for action.”