No Time for Political Theater

If I am to believe this morning’s BBC News report, David Cameron had planned a trade mission to the Middle East long before the spirit of revolution had begun to spread like a contagion.  As I suggested in my own feeble efforts at analysis, we have no idea whether the connotation of this “infection” metaphor is positive or negative, which is why I took our own government to task for succumbing to the urge “to comment on everything, even when they really do not know what to say.”  It is bad enough that Cameron should be responding to that urge when he should be thinking, waiting, and “fasting” (as per my interpretation of that latter term taken from Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha);  but the idea that he is trying to “reprogram” a trip originally conceived to drum up business just makes the whole affair a ludicrous piece of political theater.  Worse, it may demonstrate the extent to which conservatism, regardless of its country of origin, is trying to cling to old solutions to apply to new problems with no regard to the role that those old solutions may have played in causing those problems in the first place.  The Chinese probably have the better idea, betting on the future with their $2.6 billion resort project in the Bahamas!