Shall We Dance?

When Deborah Kerr (Anna Leonowens) asks Yul Brynner (The King of Siam) "Shall We Dance" in the 1956 film The King and I, the ambivalent encounter between West and East turns into a romantic dance of the literate school teacher and the exotic king. In a sense this 1956 film incorporated many of the high culture assumptions of enlightened colonialism and the civilizing nature of free markets and free societies which pushed sleepy exotic backwaters into industry and prosperity.

The romance depicted in film didn't not materialize as the romantic dance with the school teacher turnout to be a dance with the currency markets. A dance that destroyed the Thai Baht in 1997 and with it the economy of Thailand and effected most of the economies of Southeast Asia. Since 1997 Thailand the modern incarnation of the peaceful Siam, has been a society teetering at the edge of the abyss. In the past two weeks the country has fallen into bloody chaos.

There is growing popular anger on a global scale stemming from the economic crisis that is testing the interest articulation ability of political systems. As the political structures are failing political violence increases and the instinctual response of the state to maintain power results in the use of disproportionate power that only a state is capable off. In our "Flat World" what had been advantages at the time of economic growth are becoming detrimental at a time of financial contagion. From the Tea Party in the US, which is still using electoral means, to the demonstrations in Greece, to the violence and death in Thailand, this is all part of the same process at varying degrees with two constant variables: there is an economic cause; and there is a test of political structures.

Shall We Dance? A Polka, a Tango or a Syrtaki?