As fundamental reappraisals go, this one has been pretty fun. Most of us were reared on the idea of Japan and the Asian tiger economies as the free market's resounding reply to socialism; anyone not entirely amnesiac about that era's propaganda must have found last week's revisionism to be bordering on hilarity.
Only mature reflection on the consequences of the crisis for ordinary Asians would have sobered us up. Fortunately, or unfortunately, there was very, very little of that on offer on the airwaves.
The financial commentators on BBC Radio 5 Live's News Talk and News Extra told the best bedtime stories. Night after night, they related a tale about how the naughty Japanese boys and girls had strayed off the path to market and into the clutches of the big, bad wolf. The moral of the story? The market itself could not be to blame, but rather all its opposites: corporatism, jobs for life, even corruption had led Japan astray. And the formula for a happy ending? Laissez-faire, no? Uh, no, not exactly, but the commentators read on as if there were no contradiction between their cautionary free-market tale and its decidedly statist conclusions: what Asia needs is for the Japanese taxpayer to bail out the country's financial institutions, the more generously the better; for other Asian states to "sort out their labour relations" (uh-oh); and, at last, for the IMF and World Bank to shape some lean, mean economies that will start behaving the way the laws of the market intended.
I can't wait for the sequel.
Some "universal laws" are not the stuff of fairytales. Melvyn Bragg's fine science series, On the Shoulders of Giants (BBC Radio 4, Wednesday), turned last week to Isaac Newton, formulator of some of the most resilient of these laws. How, Newton was asked, did he come up with the remarkable conclusions about motion and gravity contained in his Principia? "By thinking on them continually," the scientist replied. The dedication that helped make him a genius also made him quite nasty and a bit of a looper, the programme suggested (a disturbing familiar observation, isn't it?).
When he was still a student at Cambridge, Newton conducted bizarre and barbaric experiments on himself in the name of optics, sticking all manner of sharp objects in behind his eyeballs to gauge their effect on his vision.
Once, he admitted, these experiments resulted in him having to close the curtains and lie down for a fortnight.
Later in his long life, Newton was consumed with explorations in alchemy, conducting apparently successful experiments that no one has ever managed to replicate.
While the alchemist recluse kept his cauldrons on the boil, the spreading of his sounder ideas made him the first celebrity scientist. While the Principia, in Latin, remained untranslated for decades, popularisations (e.g. The Philoso- phy of Sir Isaac Newton Explained for Ladies) and coffee-house lectures brought its conclusions to a curious public.
Ironically, it was the Newton who said "if I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants"; Bragg fails to identify any precursor to Newton, and one of the programme's talking heads suggested that if Sir Isaac was standing on his scientific forbears, it was only to stomp them into the ground.
Where I come from, hills and dales are terms from lyric poetry, not topography; ramps and malls are the markers on our New Jersey landscape.
So much for the lame excuse. Last week - as at least two readers observed - I screwed up my hills and dales entirely, when I referred to playwright Enda Walsh's alma mater, the Kilbarrack, Dublin, school where Roddy Doyle and Paul Mercier plied the teaching trade, as "Greenhills Community College". Oops. That should have read "Greendale Community School". Apologies to everyone there, and to those people at the real Greenhills, which is across the city in Tallaght, who might have bridled at the suggestion that Roddy Doyle turned their school into a "subversive literary academy" - when he was nowhere next or near the place!
