A New Start

FT: China Oilfield buys Awilco Offshore

China Oilfield buys Awilco Offshore

Published: July 7 2008 08:47 | Last updated: July 7 2008 20:00

The rig grab continues. High oil prices and dwindling resources have put a rocket under the price of equipment and services providers and triggered a wave of consolidation. On Monday, the Chinese joined in: China Oilfield Services agreed to pay $2.5bn for the equity of Norway’s Awilco Offshore.

The 19 per cent premium to Friday’s close looks disciplined, but stretches to 42 per cent based on the undisturbed share price on May 29. It is higher still benchmarked against the start of the year, when talks kicked off. COSL is paying an enterprise value of 9.4 times next year’s forecast earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation, on the rich side compared with some deals in the sector. However, several of the rigs do not come online until 2010, when the forecast EV/ebitda multiple falls back to seven times.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

CPC hopes to revive ties with CNOOC - May-06

Tight supply lets CNOOC shrug off slowdown - Jan-29

Chinese go where western firms fear to tread - Jan-28

Energy: Beijing learns to tread warily - Jan-23

CNOOC looks at Australia deal - Nov-15

Resource nationalism: State groups give majors a run for their money - Nov-09

Picking off assets now appears smart. Further deals are likely as oil service companies, after two decades in the doldrums, reap the benefits of better times. One barometer of the changing dynamics is the rental for deepwater rigs: rates have more than doubled to $500,000 a day over the past three years. Oil majors are increasingly utilising deepwater rigs such as those produced by COSL and Awilco, as the “easy” onshore resources are depleted, forcing them to explore further afield. Yet there are just around 180 such rigs, according to Wood Mackenzie, with a further 90 under construction for delivery by 2012. Long lead times and big price tags act as a natural brake against massive over-capacity. Besides, most rigs being built are already spoken for. The bigger risk is that lease rates will fall as oil majors seek to rein in costs.

The lengthy negotiation period between COSL and Awilco suggests no-one else was prepared to cough up a comparable sum. If so, perhaps the tide is already starting to turn.

FT: What drives the race to the top

It could be that potential entrants are put off by the working hours and high-pressure environment as well as the riskiness. It could also be a matter of timing. The really spectacular gains at the top are quite recent; and who knows how long they will last? Luck, too, enters into the picture. A young person starting out 20 years ago would not have been able to guess quite how large the pickings of the investment banker might be relative to that of a country solicitor or college head.

My hunch is that events will sort out many of these features. If electorates can accept the element of luck that goes into the earnings of superstars or the winnings from national lotteries, why cannot they accept this same element in the top professional and financial categories?

= = = =

What drives the race to the top

By Samuel Brittan

Published: July 4 2008 03:00 | Last updated: July 4 2008 03:00

"The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer." Such beliefs fire the indignation of critics of capitalism and provide a guilty thrill for some of the better off. If only it were as simple.

Thank heavens, then, for the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which sheds so much light on the subject, for example in its recent Poverty and Inequality in the UK survey. My only quarrel with it is that it follows the academic herd in using the loaded term "inequality".

Its summary finding is that the so-called Gini coefficient of inequality (which I should prefer to call an index of skewness) rose "dramatically" in the Thatcher period of the 1980s, but remained more or less unchanged in the Major and Blair years, when it remained at historically high levels. In the Blair period, incomes after tax and benefit rose fairly evenly, taking one year with another, over all quintiles - that is, groups covering fifths of all households. Absolute poverty, defined as income below 60 per cent of the 1996-1997 middle-ranking citizen, has fallen from 25 per cent to 13 per cent of all households. But to achieve the target of halving (relative) child poverty by 2010-2011, additional public spending of nearly £3bn per annum would be required.

The most spectacular IFS finding, however, is that incomes of the top 1 per cent increased much faster and of the very top 0.1 per cent faster still. As the incomes of the very rich are highly correlated with the stock market and financial conditions, later estimates may show a partial reversal and hence more "equality" - cold comfort to those who lose their jobs.

An illuminating discussion of the reasons for what has happened is provided by Robert Gordon and Ian Dew-Becker in their survey , Controversies about the Rise in American Inequality (CEPR discussion paper 6817) - British trends are quite similar to those of US, if in less extreme form. The authors distinguish between three types of high-level gainer. First, there are the superstars, for example in sports and entertainment, where technological developments have magnified the reach of top individuals and reduced the demand for the not-quite-so-good. Second, there are the professionals, including lawyers, bankers and hedge-fund managers. Third come the chief executive officers, whose incomes can be enhanced by the back-scratching of their peers.

The sky-high earnings in at least some of these groups seem to fly in the face of one of the most basic teachings of Adam Smith: the tendency to equality of net advantages among non-competing groups. This suggests that the real advantages in different occupations will tend to be the same through the forces of competition, such as the entry of more workers into the highly remunerated fields and their exit, or non-replacement, in the badly remunerated ones. The classic example is that of the civil servant who would earn much less than his equivalent in a commercial concern but would compensate for it by job security, challenging problems and indexed pensions.

Why, then, are the spiralling rewards not competed away by would-be entrants? The superstars do form a non-competing group by virtue of inborn talent, aided of course by determination and ambition. It is the other categories that are more puzzling. When the top ranks of banks and investment institutions were confined to a narrow circle of people in striped pants who had been to a limited number of schools, tacit entry barriers would explain a lot. But a visit to any bar in a major financial centre would confirm that these barriers are largely down.

It could be that potential entrants are put off by the working hours and high-pressure environment as well as the riskiness. It could also be a matter of timing. The really spectacular gains at the top are quite recent; and who knows how long they will last? Luck, too, enters into the picture. A young person starting out 20 years ago would not have been able to guess quite how large the pickings of the investment banker might be relative to that of a country solicitor or college head.

My hunch is that events will sort out many of these features. If electorates can accept the element of luck that goes into the earnings of superstars or the winnings from national lotteries, why cannot they accept this same element in the top professional and financial categories?

The main argument for much higher taxation among top groups would be if it could provide a large sum for redistribution. The IFS estimates that the top 0.1 per cent of UK adults had average pre-tax incomes in 2004-2005 of £780,000 per annum and on average paid 35 per cent in income tax. If their tax contribution were doubled and divided among all 29.5m taxpayers, this would yield about £870 a year or £17 per week. This is not a negligible sum; but it would not take much in the way of disincentive effects, emigration or tax avoidance at the top to wipe it out altogether. A safer but less popular way of helping the least well off would be through modest increases in taxes throughout the income distribution - or selective cuts in public spending. Admittedly this route would not provide the same outlet for jealousy and envy.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: Banks must learn to trust the word of humans too

Banks must learn to trust the word of humans too

By Gillian Tett

Published: July 4 2008 03:00 | Last updated: July 4 2008 03:00

A few years ago, Ron den Braber, an outspoken Dutch mathematics geek, was working in the risk department at Royal Bank of Scotland when he became alarmed about the models being used to price collateralised debt obligations.

Most notably, he concluded that the so-called Gaussian Copula approach then in use at RBS (and many other banks) significantly underplayed risks attached to the most senior pieces of debt - creating a danger of future, large losses.

So he duly tried to raise the alarm. But, as he tells the tale, he faced hostility. "I started saying things gently - in banks you don't use the word 'error', but the problem is that in banks . . . people just don't want to listen to bad news," Mr den Braber recalls.

Now, every corporate tale has many sides - and RBS, for its part, vehemently denies that it ever ignores challenges or stifles debate. It says it could not find any record of strong warnings about the Gaussian Copula model, is aware of its shortcomings, and, while it has recently suffered CDO losses, these relate to products acquired after Mr den Braber's time.

However, the story is worth noting since echoes of this saga now seem to be emanating from numerous banks. In particular, many other bankers have also recently told me that they knew that structured finance models were mis-pricing risk at an early date - and yet in many cases the attempts to raise the alarm were crushed.

Or as one senior risk manager writes (anonymously since he remains employed): "[My] institution has now taken multibillion writedowns - job losses result and significant share price erosion - and I wonder how this can have happened? Upfront we did express to senior management that we lacked the analytical skills . . . and highlighted deep concerns about the approach colleagues in the market risk area had taken . . . I feel responsible for not doing more, but I really did push my views, risking my immediate career."

So can anything be done to redress this? (Or prevent it playing out again now in the commodities world, say?)

Perhaps not.

Few bankers want to hear dissent about the models when they are enjoying a profit bonanza. Greed is what drives much of the modern financial world - combined with fear of getting sacked.

But, if nothing else, this saga shows the great blind spot that still haunts many banks. This decade, financiers have invented so many brilliantly clever mathematical tools to repackage risk that the industry has slipped, almost unthinkingly, into an assumption that "credit" is a collection of abstract equations, stripped from any human context.

Thus banks have become so dazzled with their powers that they have ignored how they interact with the rest of society - or how the tribal aspects of their own institutions can create dangerous traps.

Meanwhile, the cult of models has become so extreme that banks have believed them even when this collides with common sense. Yet, as any Latin scholar knows, the word "credit" hails from credere: "to trust". It is, in other words, also a social construct.

And bankers forget this human dimension to their cost - no matter how impressive the abstract numbers might seem. Or as the same risk officer says: "The billions involved were so hard to contemplate that we almost certainly lost sight of the possible consequences [of our credit business] until it was too late."

So, as the banks nurse their credit losses, they certainly do need to review why some of their clever mathematical models failed. That geeky Gaussian Copula stuff, in other words, matters hugely.

But, most important of all, they need to work out why the human processes around the models failed, too. Not just in the eyes of Mr den Braber, but also in the experience of numerous other junior employees who are now hugging their war stories, but are far too nervous to speak out.

* In the coming weeks I will be on sabbatical writing a book (about CDOs, modern banking tribes and much else.) I will return to the column after the summer.

gillian.tett@ft.com

FT: Steiff teddies head home as outsourcing is too much to bear

Steiff teddies head home as outsourcing is too much to bear

By Gerrit Wiesmann in Frankfurt

Published: July 5 2008 03:00 | Last updated: July 5 2008 03:00

In the 106 years since it was invented, the cuddly teddy bear has become a bellwether of capitalism.

The plush toy was pioneered by Steiff, the German company that claims it made the first bear with moveable arms and legs in 1902.

The mohair and felt invention came just as the citizens of the US were celebrating the humaneness of then president Theodore Roosevelt, who spared a bear on a hunting trip. Steiff was soon able to snag a burgeoning export market.

A hundred years later, the company helped swell the outsourcing wave as it moved about a fifth of production from high-cost Germany to low-cost China. Five years later, it is in the throes of moving it back, having learnt that cost is not everything.

The privately-owned company in southern Germany joins a steady stream of small, specialised western companies that have found the lure of cheap Asian labour outweighed by the added difficulties - many unforeseen - of manufacturing there.

"We have learnt our products are better if we make them ourselves," says Martin Frechen, co-chief executive of the firm in Giengen, Baden-Württemberg.

"The things we wanted to be done were not the things the Chinese were used to doing." He stresses Steiff never had problems with safety standards that some US importers have struggled with. "Things were also fine in terms of quality," he recalls. "But when we looked at whether this was sustainable, big question marks arose."

This was less a symptom of purported Chinese laxity than changing priorities at Steiff. Mr Frechen and co-chief executive Wilfried Blömke-Trox, installed in 2006 and 2007 respectively, decided to bring the brand back to its high-quality roots.

"Steiff had tried to enter the €20-€30 ($31-$47) range - before, some products had sold for €100," Mr Frechen says. "But cheapness meant an end to uniqueness. So we switched from price back to quality" - a Steiff bear now costs €30-€80.

But the high turnover of staff in China made for problems. "It takes eight to 12 months to get a seamstress up to speed," Mr Frechen says. "As sewing is difficult and making microships easier, we worried about keeping enough trained staff."

There were also the disadvantages of distance that Steiff had born stoically up till then. High transport costs and overbooked container ships meant the company had to buy pricey space in advance, sometimes to find out no shipment was ready. Outsourced production is meant to be fully in-sourced again by late 2009 to factories in Germany, Portugal and Tunisia. They employ 800 people. Transport savings and selling more expensive products are expected to cover the rise in the wage bill.

Mr Frechen declines to divulge numbers. But he says repositioning the brand and moving production is helping a bottom line hit when Steiff went down market five years ago.

He clearly feels global trends in manufacturing are a less to blame for Steiff's recent roller-coaster ride than changes in the retail front end. He notes that US department stores once accounted for 30 per cent of toy sales, but today it is just 1 per cent.

"Soft toys in the US are now dominated by the discounters. Wal-Mart, Target and Toys R Us account for over two-thirds of sales," he says. "Retailers and customers think soft toys have to be cheap - it's a trend we're seeing elsewhere as well."

As a result, Mr Frechen says, Chinese toy manufacturers "always think in terms of price and volume." Any one with "complicated" criteria should think about keeping manufacturing in-house. "We say soft toys don't have to be cheap," he says.

"For children, surely only the best is good enough - the best design, the best production, the best safety standards," he continues.

"Soft toys help to comfort children, they're vital for a child's development," he concludes. And maybe for capitalism's, too.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: Health tourism: Flying abroad for treatment takes off

Healthcare 2008

Health tourism: Flying abroad for treatment takes off

By Salamander Davoudi

Published: July 3 2008 02:56 | Last updated: July 3 2008 02:56

Where do you go if you want a sparkling white Hollywood smile for half the price? Savvy medical tourists are likely to say Hungary. What about hip and knee replacements? India or France.

Not so long ago travelling abroad for medical care was considered too risky. But attitudes are changing as more and more people choose to abandon their home countries and fly elsewhere for treatment.

A report this year by Deloitte, the consultancy, found that two in five Americans would consider travelling to a foreign country for a medical procedure if it cost half the US price and quality was at least equal.

Looking at the cost savings involved, it is easy to understand why. An aortic valve replacement costs more than $100,000 in the US, about $38,000 in Latin America and $12,000 in Asia.

A hip replacement can cost up to £15,000 ($29,845) in the UK, but is only £5,000 in Germany or £3,600 in India. An IVF package for infertility patients going to Turkey costs only £1,700.

“Globally nobody really knows how many health tourists there are,” says Keith Pollard, spokesman for Treatment Abroad, the operator of healthcare information sites.

“We know for the UK last year there were around 100,000 people going for some form of treatment as the primary reason for travel.”

The number of Britons going abroad for treatment has nearly doubled over the past two years, largely reflecting a big rise in dental tourists.

“About 40 per cent are dental patients. That has boomed due to a reduction in National Health Service dentistry and what you can actually get done on the NHS. The average spend is about £4,000 for what would have cost them £12,000 to £15,000 in the UK,” says Mr Pollard.

A study carried out by McKinsey, the consultancy, found that although medical travellers have different motives, the cheaper procedures and cosmetic operations represent only a small part of the market.

“Most of these people seek the world’s most advanced technology, better quality or quicker access to medical care,” according to the report, Mapping the Market for Medical Travel.

McKinsey estimates that the medical tourism market – excluding dentistry and including only those whose primary and explicit purpose in travelling is medical treatment as an inpatient in a foreign country – is very small, at around 60,000 to 85,000 people a year.

The Middle East is one of the biggest exporters of medical travellers, according to Paul Mango, director at McKinsey. “That will change over time, given the huge construction campaign under way there to build acute care capability and import medical competency,” he says.

Current barriers to market growth include a lack of transparency on quality, unclear malpractice jurisdiction, the unwillingness of large insurers to cover medical travel destinations in their networks, and the difficulty of travelling.

“If you pay them for treatment, you are in their jurisdiction. If you have a problem, you have to go to the local authorities or courts in that country for redress,” says Mr Mango.

“But in my experience there is zero quality difference between many of these hospitals and what you can get in a western developed economy.”

Patients are advised to check that the hospital they are to be treated in is accredited by the Joint Commission International, a division of the body that rates US hospitals.

It has so far accredited about 100 hospitals in 25 countries.

The future direction of the medical travel market has important ramifications for governments, employers and health insurers.

If US employers were willing to pay for a covered employee’s medical procedure of equivalent quality abroad it would significantly lower overall healthcare costs, say observers.

“If payers covered medical travel the potential US market would probably range from 500,000 to 700,000 patients a year, compared with 5,000 to 7,000 today. The savings might be in the order of $20bn,” according to the McKinsey report.

Mr Pollard says a health insurance product is being launched in the UK this year based on medical tourism. It will be the first of its kind.

“In the US, many of the insurers and healthcare plan managers are beginning to ship patients overseas to save on healthcare costs. In countries in South America and in Mexico, there are now purpose-built hospitals appearing to service the needs of US patients crossing the border,” says Mr Pollard.

According to the McKinsey report, 40 per cent of all medical travellers are seeking the world’s most advanced technologies and 32 per cent are seeking better care than they can get in their home countries and are often based in the developing world.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: The playwright who became president

Havel is, however, disappointed that ex-communist societies have followed the west in embracing globalisation and rampant consumerism. At our meeting he makes clear that there is little that can be done about this in free societies. "But I feel there is no reason why we shouldn't reflect upon this trend. It is a two-faced trend: on the one hand it brings people thousands of advantages and joys and pleasures; on the other, it is endangering the human race."

I wonder whether there isn't some intellectual snobbery hiding behind this anti- consumerism and put it to him that if people wished to use their freedom to go to McDonald's, why shouldn't they? He responds: "I don't want to prevent anyone from being able to do that. What I want to say is something different . . . I get the sense that we are the first civilisation in the history of mankind that is completely atheist. Human existence now isn't metaphysically anchored in any way in a code of moral conduct, from which we could then derive a legal code.

"That doesn't mean I don't enjoy the delicacies I can buy at the local supermarket . . . What I'm talking about is the underlying atheism and anti-spirituality of our civilis-ation. We don't know where it's going to go from here and what it will bring for the human race."

His book has more to say about the US than Europe, and I ask Havel about his admiration for America. He says: "The US, and especially New York, is a sort of a bazaar of the entire world. Everything is there, mixed together. It's a view upon the entire world, isn't it? I find that atmosphere appealing. It's a truly free country."

I ask him whether his fascination with the US is compatible with his concerns about consumerism and globalisation, in which American companies are prominent. He insists there is no contradiction: "Global corporations are by definition global, so it is not just a US invention or a US job, even though obviously the US plays a bigger role in this than the Czech Republic, for instance," he says. "It is a phenomenon of our civilisation. I don't think it's good to associate it solely with America or even with America as a country that invented this."

===

The playwright who became president

By Stefan Wagstyl

Published: July 5 2008 03:00 | Last updated: July 5 2008 03:00

Always a shy man, Václav Havel shuffles into view as if, even in his own office, he feels uncertain of his surroundings.

Years of fame as a dissident writer, anti-communist revolutionary and president of both Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic do not seem to have robbed the 71-year-old philosopher-king of his natural diffidence.

His welcome is warm but a little hesitant. His handshake is restrained. His voice, gravelled by decades of smoking that ended in lung cancer, is so gentle that it is hard to imagine him delivering the hundreds of speeches that he has made.

And yet the moment the conversation begins he comes alive. It is as if the mind inside this frail body has energy far bigger than the frame in which it is confined. He listens intently, pauses before speaking and shapes his answers with deliberate care - plus occasional flashes of the wit that brought him early acclaim as a playwright.

We sit down at a stylish cherry-red table in a space carved out of a period building in Prague's historic centre. It is a selfconsciously modern office with glass bookshelves and walls hung with contemporary art. Havel wears jeans and an open-necked blue shirt. Around him are scores of books in Czech, German and English.

Coffee is served - a mug for Havel and a delicate china cup for me - and a plate of chocolate biscuits that go untouched. I had asked to meet in a restaurant for lunch, but was told this would be difficult because Havel is so well known that we would be constantly interrupted.

I quiz Havel about his pictures. He says they are largely gifts he received as president and points to a colourful Buddhist tapestry. "There are small things here. But what is important is this carpet. It is a gift from the Dalai Lama, and only seven people all around the world have this kind of carpet," says Havel.

For many other public figures this would be a boast. But for Havel it is a statement of the obvious: his time as president transformed his life into what he calls "a fairytale" in which extraordinary events such as meetings with the Dalai Lama, not to mention Pope John Paul II, the Clintons and Robert Redford, became ordinary.

This year Havel published an English edition of his recollections of his presidency, entitled To the Castle and Back . It is not so much a memoir as a series of commentaries, interspersed with contemporan-eous office notes and entries from a diary he kept in 2005 while working on the book. President Havel worries about everything from the future of the planet to the half-cooked potatoes served to the visiting Emperor of Japan and the bat that has taken up residence in his summer house. "In the closet where the vacuum cleaner is kept there also lives a bat. How to get rid of it? The light bulb has been unscrewed so as not to wake it up and upset it."

As he leaves the castle for the last time, he wonders about what happens to an ex-president in a country with little experience of ex-presidents. He writes: "I have to smile to myself when I realise that people don't know how to address me. Some say 'Mr President', others say 'Mr former President', some say 'Mr Havel' and it's only a matter of time before someone addresses me as 'Mr former Havel.'"

He also worries about the failure of ex-communist states to complete the revolutions of 1989 by reforming what he calls post-communism - the domination of former communists in positions of economic power. I ask him how the reform of post-communism is progressing. He says the fight is still on, with victories in popular revolts in Ukraine and Georgia and more sedate gains in central Europe. "As the young generation grows up, society needs to rid itself of the power of the people deformed by communism, people who had succeeded in quickly establishing themselves in the new regimes and in occupying various powerful positions."

Havel is, however, disappointed that ex-communist societies have followed the west in embracing globalisation and rampant consumerism. At our meeting he makes clear that there is little that can be done about this in free societies. "But I feel there is no reason why we shouldn't reflect upon this trend. It is a two-faced trend: on the one hand it brings people thousands of advantages and joys and pleasures; on the other, it is endangering the human race."

I wonder whether there isn't some intellectual snobbery hiding behind this anti- consumerism and put it to him that if people wished to use their freedom to go to McDonald's, why shouldn't they? He responds: "I don't want to prevent anyone from being able to do that. What I want to say is something different . . . I get the sense that we are the first civilisation in the history of mankind that is completely atheist. Human existence now isn't metaphysically anchored in any way in a code of moral conduct, from which we could then derive a legal code.

"That doesn't mean I don't enjoy the delicacies I can buy at the local supermarket . . . What I'm talking about is the underlying atheism and anti-spirituality of our civilis-ation. We don't know where it's going to go from here and what it will bring for the human race."

Pointing to a mobile phone, he says: "Fifty years ago, I wouldn't have imagined this little device could be used to make calls all over the world, to make video recordings, and to send images. If someone had told me about this then, I would have thought the future world would be a wonderful one when people would have these things and would be able to communicate better. But that didn't happen. The world today is worse, and it is full of more traps and contradictions than it was 50 years ago."

I am shocked to hear him go this far. Surely, at least in ex-communist central Europe, the world is incomparably better than it was 50 years ago? Havel answers patiently: "Yes, of course it is a good thing that the Iron Curtain fell and that communism ended, but that still doesn't mean that the world is a better place. The big differences between the developed world and the developing world are deeper than ever. The unifying forces of globalisation incite various forms of chauvinism or nationalism. Terrorists almost have the capacity to fire nuclear missiles. The world is full of various dangers, including ecological ones in the form of climate change, and so on."

He continues: "I'd say that it is a good thing that the world is no longer divided in two, but new superpowers are emerging, and who knows what this will bring? China today is more powerful than Russia. Russia is witnessing the rise of a strange, special sort of dictatorship with strong imperialist demands, albeit dressed more elegantly than before."

I ask Havel why, in his book, he is so rude about his fellow Czechs. He writes of the "bitter provincialism" of the "little Czechs". Elsewhere he writes: "What they [Czechs] consider ideal is the capacity to enjoy various blessings - as far as possible with no struggle, no work and no cost."

Although Havel does not say so, a prime exponent of "little Czech" politics is the Eurosceptic Václav Klaus, his rival and successor as Czech president. Havel describes in his book how the Thatcherite Klaus made an uneasy political companion for Havel and other mainstream liberals who led 1989's "Velvet Revolution". When Havel became president and Klaus prime minister, Klaus's well-known arrogance caused repeated conflicts even over the most trivial incidents, such as Havel's decision to express officially his regrets at the death of Frank Zappa. Havel writes that Klaus would have been "happiest if I had submitted everything to him in advance for approval".

Despite these barbs, many Czechs are disappointed the book does not say more about the Havel-Klaus relationship. Havel says: "I am very much opposed to reducing the last 20 years of our history to personal tiffs between myself and Václav Klaus. And I don't like it when people get the impression that I did nothing but fight with him. I don't like that, and it doesn't reflect reality."

Havel denies that Leaving , the first play he has written since the end of communism, has anything to do with Klaus, even though many Czechs think it has. The work concerns a leader who has lost power but is reluctant to admit it and refuses to surrender his official residence to a successor named Vlastik Klein. Havel insists he conceived the idea in 1988, before the Velvet Revolution.

I ask Havel about his controversial second wife, the actress Dagmar Veskrnová. Many Czechs were upset when Havel married Ms Veskrnova, his long-standing girlfriend, in 1997 in what they saw as indecent haste within months of the death of his first wife, the widely admired Olga Havlová. I suggest that having become a moral authority far beyond his country's borders, he might have behaved with greater care. He shoots back: "Yes, but even a moral authority has the right to marry a second wife when his first wife dies, no? It was about something else . . . These campaigns [against Dagmar] had a strange element of jealousy, as though the public felt abandoned or betrayed when I remarried, as if society were an abandoned lover. It's an interesting phenomenon."

We turn to Europe. Havel, a passionate pro-European, is keen that the European Union's constitutional treaty should be kept alive despite its rejection in the recent Irish referendum. He is convinced the EU will muddle through, and, ignoring President Klaus's misgivings, says the Czech Republic should press on with ratification. Only then, he believes, should the EU consider a simpler treaty: "It would be best now to quietly select some three or four people who could create a beautiful, simple constitution that children could learn about at school."

His book has more to say about the US than Europe, and I ask Havel about his admiration for America. He says: "The US, and especially New York, is a sort of a bazaar of the entire world. Everything is there, mixed together. It's a view upon the entire world, isn't it? I find that atmosphere appealing. It's a truly free country."

I ask him whether his fascination with the US is compatible with his concerns about consumerism and globalisation, in which American companies are prominent. He insists there is no contradiction: "Global corporations are by definition global, so it is not just a US invention or a US job, even though obviously the US plays a bigger role in this than the Czech Republic, for instance," he says. "It is a phenomenon of our civilisation. I don't think it's good to associate it solely with America or even with America as a country that invented this."

A last question. Has he, I ask, since he is photographed on the cover of his book with a cigarette in hand, stuck to his promise to stop smoking? "I haven't smoked in 12 years," he says, "but about 40 times a day I feel like having a cigarette."

Stefan Wagstyl is the FT's eastern Europe editor. 'To the Castle and Back' (Portobello Books, £20). To buy it for the special FT Bookshop price of £16 plus P&P, call: 0870-429 5884.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: Dream machine

Dream machine

By Michael Skapinker

Published: July 5 2008 03:00 | Last updated: July 5 2008 03:00

In 1972, 25-year-old Tony Wheeler and his new wife Maureen bought an old car and decided to drive it as far from London as it would go. They reached Kabul, where they sold it at a profit. From there, they carried on by bus and train over the Khyber Pass and then kept going until they arrived in Sydney with 27 Australian cents left.

Wheeler had just graduated from the London Business School. The couple thought the journey would flush the travel bug from their systems before they settled down. Instead, it never left them. The trip led to their founding Lonely Planet, the travel publishing company - which means they now have more than 27 cents.

Looking back, Wheeler says their trip was part of one of the most important developments of the last decades of the 20th century: the explosive growth and spread of international tourism.

Wheeler and his wife were baby boomers, indulging in the sort of travel that became typical of their generation. They went to places, many then untouched by tourism, that would have seemed extraordinarily adventurous to previous generations, he writes in Trends and Issues in Global Tourism 2008 , a volume of papers by travel chief executives and academics from last year's ITB Berlin, the world's premier international tourism fair.

When Lonely Planet took off in the 1970s, Wheeler recalls, China was closed to the outside world. You could go to Hong Kong and look across the border with binoculars. Today, Lonely Planet not only produces guidebooks to China in several languages; it also publishes guidebooks to other countries in Chinese.

Travel has moved on since Lonely Planet began. Travellers are now more experienced. Some are still happy to trot around in groups. Others are content to return to the same villa each year. But many ask the Monty Python question: "What's the point of going abroad if you're just another tourist?"

These travellers want something further off the beaten track. Yet they also want everything to work. Holidays require an anxious investment of time and money. As one of the contributions to Trends and Issues points out: "Vacations are a scarce resource. The annual number of vacation days is limited; the anticipation of rest and relaxation for this time is nevertheless immense. And, to top it off, vacations are expensive. A family of four has to invest the equivalent of purchasing a used compact car."

These three books sum up the dichotomy. The tourism chiefs represented in Trends and Issues have to provide security and certainty to travellers if their businesses are to survive. But they need to promise adventure and romance too - the sort suggested by National Geographic's Journeys of a Lifetime: 500 of the World's Greatest Trips .

If your idea of a holiday is riding the Darjeeling Toy Train from "the paddy fields of northern Bengal to the misty tea gardens of the Himalayan foothills" or sharing a Bedouin feast ("cardamom coffee and lamb roasted in yoghurt") in a thatched goat-hair tent in Jordan, this is the book for you.

As you would expect from National Geographic, everything is beautifully photographed, but the trips themselves - "wonderful, indelible, life-changing journeys" - sound a little too charmed to be true. These essays, anonymously written in the style of elegant travel brochures, present a world in which all aromas are heady, vineyards are sun-touched, waters are crystal clear and scenes are "biblical in their timelessness".

Journeys of a Lifetime allows that western Scotland is "notoriously wet", but does that really matter when you can "follow in the footsteps of Bonnie Prince Charlie on a journey of high romance among Scotland's mountain-ringed lochs and dreamy glens"? Reality does threaten to break through on a luxury train journey from Rajasthan to New Delhi, where you are warned that all this pampering "can't shield you from the real essence of any trip to India: the hubbub of streets crammed with rickshaws, sacred cows, camels and the ever-present" - what, grinding poverty? No - "aroma of spices".

Given the weight of expectations, holidays are bound to fall short of the Journeys of a Lifetime ideal. Experienced travellers joining this summer's airport queues will discover how far short: flight delays, hotel rooms above noisy streets, non-stop rain, stomach upsets. Travel often doesn't feel like fun. Sometimes, says Peter Greenberg in The Complete Travel Detective Bible , it feels like abuse.

Greenberg is the travel editor of NBC's Today show. His book is too fat to take with you; you are probably meant to read it at home before you pack. It is full of advice about how to avoid travel's disappointments. Take stomach upsets, for example. Always carry your own bottle of water on to the aircraft, Greenberg says. Don't drink from the water bottles on the flight attendant's trolley. Airlines have been known to fill them from aircraft holding tanks, where the US Environmental Protection Agency in 2004 detected nasty bacteria. The EPA also advised against drinking tea or coffee during your flight: the airlines don't heat the water to a temperature sufficient to kill pathogens.

When you get into your hotel room, tear off the bedspread and throw it into the corner (it may harbour goodness knows what) and clean the telephone handset and television remote control with wet wipes. This is so important that Greenberg tells us twice. (This book is a little repetitive but then you are probably not supposed to read it from beginning to end. Given how much Greenberg warns you may go wrong, you might be too scared to leave for the airport if you did.)

Greenberg tells us it is no good clicking on a window seat on the web-based aircraft diagram. It may be cramped: check on seatguru.com to suss out the legroom. You may want to change airlines when you have looked at the photographs of inflight meals that helpful passengers have posted on airlinemeals.net. And don't forget to check your hotel's mattresses on bedbugregistry.com.

There are fascinating details that you probably don't need to know but can always use to enliven conversation with the person in the seat next to you. For example, Singapore Airline's Airbus 340-500 aircraft has a dedicated corpse cupboard. This is to avoid the sort of awkwardness British Airways encountered when cabin crew carried the body of an economy passenger who had died into first class, where there was more room. (A BA flight attendant told the passenger who objected to sitting next to the deceased to "get over it".)

But once he has instructed us on how not to get ripped off or let down, Greenberg is off on the usual tack of avoiding the madding crowd and finding true adventure. Here is modern travel's dual demand for safety and novelty in one book: once you have wiped all those germs off the remote control, why not pretend to risk your life?

Have you, for example, considered a storm-chasing holiday? Tempest Tours arranges for you to follow tornadoes in America's Great Plains. Dallas-based Tornado Research and Defense Development guarantees that if you don't see at least two storms in a week you can have a $200 discount on your next trip.

Adventure travel company Covert Ops allows you to "unleash your inner James Bond" with a three-day programme in Tucson, Arizona of high-speed evasive driving, crashing through barricades, running attack vehicles off the road, mastering espionage techniques and recognising explosives. If that is too tame, Air Combat USA will teach you to fly fighter aircraft and challenge fellow holidaymakers to aerial dogfights.

Behind the faux-danger, the travel bosses at ITB Berlin recognise what's happening here: Tony Wheeler's generation have been travelling for years and, as they reach retirement, they have the money, time and desire to do something different. "Individualisation in society is without doubt a mega-trend for the future," say Hans Rück of the University of Applied Sciences in Worms, Germany, and Marcus Mende, chief executive of Schober Information, a marketing group, in Trends and Issues . Many consumer goods and services industries have segmented their markets, tailoring products for different groups, and tourism is no different.

But that doesn't mean mass travel belongs to the past. While the Lonely Planet crew may have experience sun-etched into their skins, somewhere in the world new travellers are tremulously setting out for the first time, many on all-inclusive packages. The numbers of tourists from Poland, the Czech Republic and Russia are growing fast. In the early 1980s, a little more than 1m Indians travelled abroad. By 2006, the figure was 8m.

The new travellers mean there is little likelihood of tourism slowing down. Apart from holidays, millions now need to travel to see their families. Trends and Issues points out that there are 191m people living outside the countries of their birth. Unlike previous generations of migrants, who often never saw their families again, today's "global clans" can fly back home. They present the industry with new opportunities. No doubt these new travellers will one day, too, want to tack on a weekend of skydiving to their family visits.

Can anything stop the growth of tourism? The business is not immune to downturns. After 9/11, it went though a rare dip but has since grown strongly. Individual countries and regions have had setbacks: Egypt, Turkey and the UK have suffered terrorist attacks. Asian destinations were damaged or destroyed by the 2004 tsunami.

But a few quiet years dampensuch memories. And with the right infrastructure, new destinations can be conjured almost from nothing: look at Dubai, with its skyscrapers, sports tournaments and shopping centres.

The rising price of fuel might slow things for a while too, but the environment is a longer-term consideration. As Trends and Issues says, tourism both contributes to and suffers from climate change. Flights add to carbon emissions; the tourist hordes strain water supplies.

Destinations suffer too. European ski slopes sometimes lack snow. The Mediterranean summers can be unbearably hot. But if the snow melts, ski spots can become mountain resorts. If Spain and Greece become overheated in August, their peak seasons can be moved to to spring and autumn. And although European tourism has traditionally seen people travel from the cool and cloudy north to the sunny south, if global warming makes the north balmier, tourist traffic might flow in the other direction.

Throughout its relatively short history, international tourism has shown immense adaptability, and so have tourists. If their aircraft (along with cars, factories and other climate changers) make their favoured distinations uncomfortable, they will find others. Dissatisfaction and disappointment are travel's inescapable accompaniments. But travellers never stop hoping. Somewhere, they believe, they will find the perfect holiday. These books are testament to their determination to carry on looking.

Michael Skapinker is an FT columnist

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

ST; TABLE TALK: WITH FAREED ZAKARIA Political leadership for a new global order

Home > Review > Others
July 5, 2008
TABLE TALK: WITH FAREED ZAKARIA Political leadership for a new global order
How might Singapore deal with a world in which people are richer than ever before and many players are jostling for supremacy? The editor of Newsweek International, Dr Fareed Zakaria, proffers his thoughts
By Cheong Suk-Wai, Senior Writer
A SINGAPOREAN taxi driver's chance remark set Dr Fareed Zakaria thinking how best he might write about a world in which people are richer than ever before and many players are jostling for supremacy. Meeting The Straits Times in his London hotel suite earlier this week, the editor of Newsweek International recalled how the cabby pointed to the Republic's new ferris wheel, the Singapore Flyer. 'I looked at it and I said - I suppose in a somewhat patronising voice: 'How nice, you have a ferris wheel.' 'And he turns around and says: 'Sir, that's the largest ferris wheel in the world'.' A month later, he was being shown around the South China mall in Dongguan, when his host told him that the 9.6 million-sq ft complex was the world's largest. Dr Zakaria did not buy that at first. He thought The Mall of America in Minnesota still held that title. (Actually it is only the 18th largest these days). Dr Zakaria recalled: 'At that point I decided I had learnt my lesson. I began to realise these anecdotes I had been hearing about this country growing and that country growing were adding up to something quite significant.' So he decided his new book - his second after the best-selling The Future Of Freedom - would examine how the world's new thriving countries will change the character of international economics, politics and culture. Dr Zakaria's big, hawk-sharp eyes, which are very alert indeed, give the lie to his relaxed demeanour. His laptop pings away with news updates on a side table while we talk. Everything about him tells you he is his own man - from his powder purple polo T-shirt, an unusual colour choice, to his Indian-accented English, although he has been a naturalised American citizen for many years now. He was in London for the launch of his new weekly current affairs show on CNN. Called Global Public Square, it premiered on June 1, and the first episode saw him interviewing British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the Conservative Party leader David Cameron. The son of an Indian politician and a newspaper editor, Dr Zakaria is a Harvard political science alumnus. He had the ear of such luminaries as former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger from early in his career. But he really made his mark with his 2001 essay, Why They Hate Us, which he wrote just after the Sept 11 terror attacks on the US. His weekly column in Newsweek is now required reading for anyone interested in global affairs. The way forward THIRTY years ago, if anyone from Brazil, India or Mexico had predicted his country would soon be revving the world's economic engines, he would have been brushed off as a wishful thinker at best. But today, these countries are charging into the future after having embraced capitalism. As a result, three billion new players are competing for the world's ever-dwindling resources. Indeed, as Dr Zakaria points out in his new book, The Post-American World, the economies of 124 countries, including 30 African states, are now growing at the rate of at least 4 per cent a year. Compare that with the only 35 countries that enjoyed that sort of growth 30 years ago, he says, and what you have is 'the birth of a truly global order'. Singapore, he adds, is handling this brave new order very well. 'What Singapore has done very adroitly is to have moved up the value chain - to have said that 'okay, we can't compete with other countries in cheap labour, and so we're going to do value-added products, we're going to try services, we can compete (in) these areas, we're going to move to the next level'.' He applauds the Republic's 'very clever' forays into such areas as tourism, film-making and software design. And all this, on top of managing good relations with both the United States and China, he notes admiringly. But he adds that Singapore is the only rich country in the world without a fully functioning multi-party democracy. That will hobble its advance in the long run, he believes, because people 'want not only economic rights, but also freedom of association, freedom of speech and freedom of thought'. 'You may get lucky with a particular autocrat, but what happens after him?...If you could guarantee me in advance that you'll get Lee Kuan Yew, that's a whole different thing. But there's no way beforehand to know that you're going to get a leader like Lee Kuan Yew.' He adds wryly, wondering whether this would get into print: 'I think that the political system is rigged in favour of the People's Action Party (PAP). Some of it is formal...Some of it is informal. But all of it is largely unnecessary.' Singapore is already 'a very open society in many ways', he points out. 'I often say this to people because they have an image of Singapore which is essentially incorrect...It is a place where you would certainly feel as if you had many, many freedoms and liberties...It has been lucky in having very wise leadership.' But it has to widen its political outlook much more, he insists. 'Singapore's leaders have succeeded more than they realise. They created a modern society, and in creating that modern society, they must now also trust it more than they do.' He adds: 'That, in some ways, is the genius of democracy. It turns the relationship between governed and governors into a two-way street, and that will make for a much greater degree of sense of loyalty and pride in Singapore for the next generation.' He muses: 'It's funny: Whenever I meet senior Singapore government officials, I will sometimes mention this. And they'll go: 'Oh, no, no, it's not a real problem, don't worry.' And I'll say: 'You know, younger Singaporeans do feel frustrated.' And they'll say: 'Oh, I don't know if you are right about that.' 'And then, as I'm escorted out by one of the young aides to the senior government officials, they will tell me: 'By the way, Dr Zakaria, you are 100 per cent right. We are very frustrated'.' 'And these,' he notes, 'are people in the heart of the political structure.' Dr Zakaria is quite sure that if the PAP held what he calls 'open competitive elections', it would do 'quite well'. And as for Minister Mentor Lee's view that a non-PAP government would act irresponsibly by exhausting Singapore's coffers, Dr Zakaria says: 'You can produce checks and counter-checks. Nobody's talking about giving day-to-day control of Temasek (Holdings) and the Government Investment Corporation to Parliament. You can create institutions that are independent and therefore somewhat sheltered from day-to-day political control.' Tackling global crises AND political control, by the way, is what he feels the new global order needs in a big way. Great global growth brings with it great global worries. And therein lies the rub. The current lone superpower, the US, is not only being outstripped by new players on the economic front, it has also lost its intellectual and moral high ground since it invaded Iraq in 2003. On top of that, though food, fuel and weather woes have spilled over into the international arena, most countries are still thinking of how to solve these problems locally, when what is really needed is greater global consultation, cooperation and compromise. 'We have crises now. The question is whether we have the leadership.' China, he feels, is not ready to fill the vacuum America has left for two reasons. First, there is considerable scepticism about China, particularly in India, Japan and Indonesia. 'It's not as if the world is hungering for Chinese leadership.' Second, if China or any other Asian economic dragon wants to lead the world in the way the US has in the past 60 years, it would first need to present 'a compelling vision for other people to buy into and say, 'You know, we like the way Asians think about the world'.' 'It's not just about money,' Dr Zakaria insists. 'It's about setting an agenda, making people feel that there's a vision that you want to work towards.' For that reason alone, he thinks the US can still play a pivotal role. It can bring the world together to work out solutions to problems like energy and global warming. Asked which US presidential contender is better poised to lead in a post-American world, he plumps firmly for the Democrat, Senator Barack Obama. He finds Mr Obama's willingness to challenge settled wisdom in Washington - like his willingness to talk to US 'enemies' - 'refreshing'. 'And though he was criticised for it, he stuck to his guns,' notes Dr Zakaria. 'I think that was very impressive.' Mr Obama's rival, Senator John McCain, on the other hand, is 'a Cold Warrior', says Dr Zakaria, referring to the Republican's less than friendly references to Russia and China. 'That is just the wrong vision for the future.' Dr Zakaria himself is a long-term optimist about the post-American world. 'At the end of the day, the power of two to three billion people for the first time consuming, investing, producing, dreaming, inventing and problem-solving is very, very powerful,' he proclaims. suk@sph.com.sg

Home > Review > Others
July 5, 2008
Dr Zakaria on...
FIRM GROUND: PAP supporters pitching in during the 2006 election campaign. OPPOSITES?: US presidential candidates John McCain (left) and Barack Obama. -- PHOTO: THE BUSINESS TIMES PHOTO: AP   View more photos Economic and political rights: People want economic rights but they also want political rights. They want property rights but they also want freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of thought. You may get lucky with a particular autocrat, but what happens after him? The great problem with the idea that an autocracy is a good idea is that most people don't end up with Lee Kuan Yew. They end up with Mobuto or Marcos or Mugabe. If you could guarantee me in advance that you'll get Lee Kuan Yew, that's a whole different thing. But there's no way beforehand to know that you're going to get a leader like Lee Kuan Yew. I think that for societies that are not yet at an advanced industrial state, there are considerable questions as to whether introducing multi-party democracy right away produce stability. In places like Iraq we should have had a much greater emphasis on stability and order, rather than holding as we did four or five different elections. But in the long run, for a rich country, there are very few alternatives. Singapore is the only rich country in the world that does not have a fully functioning multi- party democracy. And Singapore is a very unusual case. First of all, it is a very open society. It is also a very small country that has been very lucky in having very wise leadership - and there's no way to guarantee that. One-party rule in Singapore The system needs more checks and balances. You need the prospect of losing power to produce a certain degree of discipline. The Singapore Government They've done a very good job, but younger Singaporeans do feel frustrated. They feel the society, the political system is too closed and it's too much of an insider's club. A sense of belonging What makes somebody a Singaporean in a world in which you are going to need people who have come two years, three years ago? How do you make them think of themselves as Singaporeans? Part of it has to be, I think, that they feel they are full participants in the destiny and political structures of the country. I can tell you that Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong thinks a lot about this, because he and I have had several conversations about this. China Whenever you talk about the rise of Asia, you're really often talking about the rise of China. But the rise of China produces very complicated feelings in India and Japan. So there might actually be forces within Asia that can act and counteract these things. India I feel very frustrated watching India, because I think it has extraordinary potential. Indian society is so ready for globalisation (but) the Indian state is so scared and backward-looking and corrupt and caught up with its own phobias and ideologies from a different era. The 2008 US presidential race One of the advantages of this (long) process this time around is that the crazies are out of the race. There were a lot of candidates that had very disturbing views about the world, very confrontational, very nasty and would have taken America down a very dark road. And they were all thoroughly rejected by the American public. Mr Barack Obama He's a creature of the world as well as a creature of America...So this world is not a completely alien and slightly menacing thing to him, it's something that's part of him. Mr John McCain He remains a very old-fashioned figure. He has an almost Victorian view of the world.

Economist: Michelle Obama's America

Lexington

Michelle Obama's America

Jul 3rd 2008
From The Economist print edition

Is Barack Obama's wife his rock or his bitter half?

Illustration by Kevin Kallaugher

THERE are two ways to be a political spouse. You can shun the limelight or you can grab it. Margaret Thatcher’s late husband, Denis, exemplified the former approach. He never upstaged his wife and though intelligent and rich, he was content to be viewed as a golfing, gin-swilling duffer. At the opposite end of the spectrum are the Clintons. Hillary was Bill’s closest adviser when he was president, and he would have done the same for her, had she been elected. Neither approach is right or wrong, but both have predictable consequences. If you keep your mouth shut, you are unlikely to stir up controversy. If you speak up, you may help your spouse, but you risk hurting him or her, too.

John McCain’s wife, Cindy, gazes adoringly at him on the stump but says little. If she has to introduce him, she says she loves him and hopes you will vote for him. She may favour pink skirt-suits over golfing trousers, but in her reluctance to say anything that might conceivably hurt her spouse she is unmistakably a (Denis) Thatcherite. Hostile bloggers half-heartedly accuse her of being a Stepford wife or make snide cracks about the fortune she inherited and her past addiction to painkillers. But she seldom captures the headlines and seems to like it that way.

Michelle Obama falls somewhere between the two poles. Unlike Bill or Hillary, she has never hinted that she expects to be co-president. But unlike Mrs McCain, she criss-crosses the country making fiery speeches on her husband’s behalf. In many ways, she is a huge asset to his campaign. She is clever, driven, beautiful and articulate. Even when he is not there, she draws large, avid crowds. Yet she still finds time to be supermum. She bought two laptops so her husband can see and talk to his daughters when he is on the road. She teases him about his snoring and makes him take out the rubbish. He calls her “my rock”.

Like her husband, she exemplifies the American dream, having risen from humble roots to Princeton, Harvard and a $275,000-a-year job handling “community and external affairs” and “business diversity” for a hospital in Chicago. But her story is otherwise quite different from his. His background is more exotic and chaotic. His mother was white, his father was Kenyan, they broke up when he was two and the young Barack later lived in Hawaii and Indonesia. Michelle’s family, by contrast, was hard-up but intact. It was also all-black, all-American and rooted in the South Side of Chicago. Michelle grew up knowing useful people: she was chummy with Jesse Jackson’s daughter and even baby-sat his son when she was a teenager.

When Barack was starting out as a politician, his rivals dismissed him as inauthentically African-American or even “the white man in blackface”. Having Michelle at his side helped reassure sceptical blacks that he was really one of them. Even the precise shade of her skin colour may have helped him at the polls. Famous black men often pick light-skinned or white wives. Some black women resent this. That Michelle is quite dark may have endeared Barack to black female voters who might otherwise have voted for Hillary Clinton.

Now that the primaries are over, the issues have changed. Blacks are solidly for Mr Obama, but many swing voters are unsure. Some Republicans think his wife’s habit of speaking her mind could prove a problem. For example, in February, as her husband’s campaign was catching fire, she said: “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country, because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.” Some Americans bristle at the implication that the only worthwhile thing any of them has done in the past quarter-century is to back Mr Obama.

Mrs Obama’s speeches rarely accentuate the positive. America, to her, is a “downright mean” country where families struggle to buy food, where mothers are terrified of being fired if they get pregnant and where “life for regular folks has gotten worse over the course of my lifetime”. But she was born in 1964, when Americans lived shorter, poorer lives and southern blacks couldn’t vote. Whereas her husband is magically skilled at not giving offence, Mrs Obama can be a blunt instrument. “Don’t go into corporate America,” she urges young people, denigrating what most Americans do for a living and biting the hand that pays for all the public programmes she favours. “Barack Obama will require you to work,” she says. “He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation…Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.” Some people would rather decide for themselves how to live their lives.

The bitter bit

Conservative pundits have savaged her. One acerbic blogger calls her “Obama’s bitter half”. Others mock her occasional gripes about her personal finances and her solipsistic college thesis about the woes of black Princetonians. The National Review says she “embodies a peculiar mix of privilege and victimology, which is not where most Americans live. On the other hand, it does make her a terrific Oprah guest.”

Mr Obama says people should lay off his wife. Laura Bush agrees. And one has to sympathise with Mrs Obama. She was always a reluctant political wife. Her husband’s crazy hours and long absences impose a hefty burden on her and on their children. In dark moments, she fears for his physical safety. And all the while, both she and her husband are subjected to maliciously false gossip online.

But not all criticism is unfair. If Mr Obama is president, his wife will have the ear of the most powerful man on earth. So her political views matter. And if she expresses them forcefully in speech after speech, she can hardly cry foul when not everyone likes what she says. On June 30th she appeared on the front page of USA Today saying: “I don’t want to be a distraction.” For better or for worse, she is.

Back to top ^^

ST: Marriage - an unsettling experience

Home > Our Columnists > Column
June 29, 2008
Life Lines - Anthony Yeo Marriage - an unsettling experience
In this fortnightly column on life issues, veteran psychotherapist Anthony Yeo talks about the pros and cons of saying 'I do'
People believe that June is a good month for marriage. Somehow this is the month for weddings, and with the recent series of activities in conjunction with enhancing family life in Singapore, marriage is certainly in the air. Weddings are usually much celebrated events often attended by enthusiastic guests, including single or unattached adults. Along with the carnival spirit infused into the celebration are those well-meaning married guests who inevitably accost singles with the inevitable 'So, when is your turn?' query. Single adults know all too well what this means and often respond with polite responses such as 'You'll know when it comes' or 'I guess it's not time yet'. Somehow we tend to believe that marriage is for everyone and, all too often, unattached adults are singled out as targets for prospective coupling in marriage. There is also a commonly held notion that to get married is to 'settle down', in contrast to being unmarried suggesting that the latter is to be saddled with an 'unsettled' state of life. Somehow there is a prevailing idea that this 'unsettled' state is synonymous with being uncertain, fickle-minded, frustrated or incomplete. With all the earnest drive to promote marriage in Singapore, singles tend to be unsettled by the idea that fulfilment and happiness in life is to be experienced primarily in 'marital bliss'. This prevailing idea seems to defy my observation of the many couples who have sought help for marital conflict. Each time I encounter married people afflicted with marital woes, I am reminded of how marriage tends to be an unsettling experience. I have also been left with the unsettled feeling, wondering why so many had chosen to be married when they could have had a less stressful life if they had stayed single. Of course, the other unsettling feeling is the painful journey I traverse with those who have the courage to go their separate ways. As I ponder over this issue, I sometimes wish that marriage was not held in such high regard, with less focus on the romantic ideals of a peak experience that marriage seems to promise. Those who contemplate marriage would do well to confront the reality that marriage can be an unsettling experience rather than one where couples live happily ever after. The way I see it, marriage promises to be unsettling as couples need to be prepared for a lot of adjustment to living with someone quite unfamiliar to oneself, learning to adapt to each other's idiosyncrasies, growing together as partners in life and coping with all the demands that marriage and family life brings. It is also prudent to be aware that romance, if it is ever experienced, is not everlasting and may in fact fade months after the honeymoon is over. Conflicts are inevitable and there will be many issues to be negotiated, such as relationships with the in-laws, work-home relationships and friendships with those outside of marriage. The more I work with couples with marital conflict, the more I am concerned that marriage should not be entered into lightly. It is also fallacious to believe that life will be incomplete and unfulfilling if a person is not married. There is more to life than marriage and no one should be made to feel deprived of what life offers if the choice is to be single . GET YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED If you have any questions about marriage, write to suntimes@sph.com.sg, with 'Life Lines' in the subject line. Anthony Yeo, a consultant therapist at the Counselling And Care Centre, will answer selected questions. ... more