The way US President Donald Trump is carrying on these days makes me almost sure he has boon companions. You know, the kind with whom you relax after dinner. The sort of people Ali Amin Gandapur hangs out with in the evening. The sort of people Sharjeel Memon knows, and about whom he knows that they can produce the good stuff at the drop of a hat. And drop is right. We’re not talking about tea, favoured by temperance activists once, who called it ‘the drop that cheers but does not inebriat’. Well, Ali Amin and Memon want the drop that does inebriate.
It is perhaps significant that Trump opened his heart out after dinner, by which time he was presumably pretty well oiled.
That was when he disclosed that 70 countries were, in his own immortal words, ‘ready to kiss my ass.’ One of those countries, we’ve been told by our government, is Pakistan. However, one of the countries not so ready was China. I don’t know what dizzying heights the tariff he imposed on Chinese goods had reached, though I do know that it’s a figure beyond ridiculous.
I wonder if the figure has reached the point where even the boon companions are stunned into sobering up. I would suspect the boon companions were too busy to sober up, being busy on their phones to their stockbrokers telling them to buy or sell, depending on what stock was going to be affected most.
In China, I would suspect that Chinese punters (and everyone knows how the Chinese are addicted to little flutter), would be busy phoning their bookies instead.
I must say that Trump is to be commended, or perhaps condemned, for unveiling the USA as a Third World country, one which is bothered by its balance of trade. It’s for countries like Pakistan to be worrying about foreign exchange, and worrying about individual trade balances. All the USA has had to, is print a few more dollars.
But those printed dollars would be transformed into debt, because the US Federal Reserve issues dollars against US Treasury bonds, and China buys the bonds instead of having all that cash lying around. Trump needs to look again at old ideas.
For example, an idea used in the 1970s was the Grow-More-Food campaign. It was meant to save on the import of food items, by getting people to use their backyards or lawns as kitchen gardens, and grow vegetables instead of grass. It needn’t be replicated in the USA, which exports food, Maybe the USA needs a Grow-More-Weed campaign.
But does anyone remember Imran Khan’s plan to make Pakistan prosperous? It involved giving every household a chicken and a buffalo. The household was to eat the eggs and drink the milk, and slaughter the chicken whenever a guest came, and the buffalo at Eid. Maybe Trump should try that. After all, that was like the slogan of the Republican Party in the 1928 election, when some Republican supporters took out a newspaper ad promising ‘a chicken in every pot.’ Of course, there was a stock market crash and a depression after that.
But maybe a campaign against fast fashion would work, persuading Americans to wear clothes a second time. It would reduce demand for our textiles, but it’s not as if they’re going to be exported anyway.
And that brings me to the navel-lint scheme. If every American would save the lint that collects in his navel, and sell it to the government, the USA could revive its textile sector that way, and save on all the made-ups it imports to feed its appetite for fast fashion.
I see the Pakistan Super League has started. I also see that Lahore Qalandars lost their first match. This is a relief to Imran. His nightmare is the Qalandars winning, with a match-winning performance by Shaheen Shah Afridi, who would then get on the same page.
Cricket is going to become more important, especially if a Depression sets in. During the last Depression, unemployed men had nothing to do better than watch cricket for a whole day, with the result that the County Championship flourished. That was when the UK was leading industrial power. Now we’re going to have all that unemployment in the USA, and the game is only now getting on over there. That will be a sign of depression: large crowds at American league cricket matches.
