A single day's news sometimes looks like the distillate of an irony factory. It's there to remind us of contradictory human behavior on almost every scale, reaching back into history and projecting paradoxes for tomorrow.
On the broad scale, we get Argentina. It has defaulted on $140 billion in bonds outstanding to the private sector, and faces now its debt to the International Monetary Fund. The news is that that's being worked out, a rescheduling of a debt that reflects the profligacy of Argentine policies dating back to the reign of Juan Peron. It seems nowadays incredible that only 50 years ago, Argentina's level of income exceeded that of France.
Sharing the news is Brazil's impending election of a far-out leftist as president. Brazil's socialists have working for them the starkness of the contrast between those who prosper and those who suffer dire poverty. But Brazilians are being ushered into one more chapter in attempts at political alchemy, the substitution of political for economic means of achieving economic progress.
Yes, and the same day gives us Venezuela, with 1 million protesters against the socialist and autocratic rule of Hugo Chavez. Populist revolts against left-minded government rule are unusual, because the structure of leftist policies is designed to appeal to the appetites of the many, leaving us with another political cauldron in Latin America.
Meanwhile, China is exhibiting its two faces in its attempted evolution into a mercantile state with fundamentalist Marxist passions on the matter of religion. We have a 15-year sentence handed out to a banker charged with bribery, and life sentences handed out to three leaders of an underground Christian church. The new China seems to be saying: We will not tolerate crimes by businessmen because that inhibits the growth of capitalism, which we are encouraging. But do not mistake the new China. We are not sentimentalists who tolerate the single true enemy, the cultivators of religious faith who hold entities higher than the leaders of China as the sources of moral authority.