The Chasm
A Novel by David Ainsworth
Those who like The West Wing television series will love this book. It is the only novel that dissects the growing impact of the global economy on Americans. America is a sitting duck, and the middle class is the first casualty of the trade war that has already begun.
An Iranian-American woman, her lobbyist lover, a Japanese reformer, a yakusa chieftain, a Congresswoman from Ohio, an African-American war vet, and a Silicon Valley poster boy lead a rich cast in a ballet that describes the political and economic threads tying down the American Gulliver.
Whether the reader is a Democrat or a Republican, a resident of a blue or red state, or is religious or secular minded,
The Chasm will change the way the reader thinks about the conduct of America’s foreign trade.
Book Notes
If the conventional wisdom that “United We Stand, Divided We Fall” is true in the long run, then America has a significant problem. The huge and growing trade deficit pits global capitalists and comfortable consumers against working men and women who are wage earners first and consumers second. It is the great class issue of our time.
Since the founding of the republic, Americans have known how to respond to predatory foreign trade practices. Thomas Jefferson wrote:
"Should any nation, contrary to our wishes, suppose it may better find its advantage by continuing its system of prohibitions, duties and regulations, it behooves us to protect our citizens, their commerce and navigation, by counter prohibitions, duties and regulations also. Free commerce and navigation are not to be given in exchange for restrictions and vexations, nor are they likely to produce a relaxation of them... Principles... founded in reciprocity appear perfectly just and...offer no cause of complaint to any nation." (Report on Foreign Commerce, 1793.)
Why then do American voters remain passive as the made-in-China pillow is pushed against their faces in the 21st century? In the tradition of Mark Twain, Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, John Steinbeck and other authors of social criticism in the American literary pantheon, The Chasm tells the story of the profound human impact of the current globalization phenomenon upon American working men and women and their families. Accelerating along with the technology that enables globalization, the free flow of capital around the world and the absence of any effective management of America’s trade lanes are eroding the American middle class and the most central aspect of the American way of life—the American Dream. Most of it is occurring in trade lanes that are characterized by unfair, immutable, predatory and even war-like trade barriers erected by our trading partners to exclude American goods and services.
In the telling of this story, ensemble-style, The Chasm reveals the everyday practices and policies that cause this highly unconventional phenomenon, places them in context and points to the way out of the inexorable downward spiral toward a two class American society. It is a story of the exaltation of consumerism and things over the human values of citizenship, fair opportunity and the consent of the governed. Unless a political tipping point is reached in which American voters (and consumers) demand that a proper balance be restored between the gods of commerce and American political traditions, the American soul will be surely lost. Even those Americans who profit from globo-capitalism will become victims as the breakdown of law and order progresses and the middle class driven economic miracle that is the American economy flounders.
Warren Buffett, aka the “Oracle of Omaha,” warns that the U.S. trade deficit is a bigger threat to the domestic economy than either the federal deficit or consumer debt and that it could lead to political “turmoil”. (AP report on a Buffett speech in Reno, NV January 17, 2006)
About the Author
David Ainsworth practiced international maritime law in San Francisco for three decades and spent many years participating as an industry observer and informal negotiator in bilateral trade negotiations between the United States and several Asian countries. He also represented his clients in combating foreign trade barriers in litigation and in private negotiations with these trading partners. In each case, extraordinary effort was expended as the American side sought trading opportunities for American businesss abroad that America extends to foreign entities in the United States. It was this experience that taught the author the true nature of America's trade position and provided the genesis of this, his first, novel.
David Ainsworth resides in the Napa Valley and is pursuing new careers writing politically oriented fiction and making wine.
Excerpt from the Book
When Shiro Mori thought about the war, it was often about Nanking. It had been sixty years since the December day the occupation had begun, but he remembered it clearly. He was a corporal in the 50,000-strong Japanese force that advanced, essentially unopposed by organized Chinese army units, into the Chinese capital. The officers in his unit had given explicit orders that the forces of Imperial Japan were to show no weakness in destroying the Chinese will to resist. Any Chinese men suspected of being army deserters and trying to blend into the civilian population were to be killed.
As Mori’s squad moved through the go-downs and houses of Nanking, they were careful to note the locations of houses where young Chinese women could be seen. Such places could be invaded at will and the women used for “comfort.” The women were often killed after being raped as a matter of course, though the rapist had no fear of being reported to his superior officers and disciplined. On the contrary, soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army were entitled to satisfy themselves with the local women as a reward for their military successes and the ferocity with which they fought. Mori availed himself of this license many times. The occupation of Nanking had been a good opportunity for the warriors of Japan.
Mori recalled the morning his unit commander ordered a halt in his squad’s advance just outside a portion of the city center that had been cordoned off by yellow banners. Orders had been issued that Japanese army troops were not to cross the yellow banners that demarcated the “International Safety Zone.” The incongruity of a yellow fabric stretching around many square blocks of the inner city purporting to act as a barrier to the Japanese Imperial Army was laughable. Mori’s commander expressed his fury at this unexpected development to his superior, but the orders stood.
The general staff of the Japanese army had been asked-told really-by the German businessman who headed the Foreign Diplomatic Association that all persons and property within the “International Safety Zone” were to be respected as off-limits to the Imperial Army. The Association’s German director guaranteed that there would be no hostile fire from the safety zone directed against Japanese army troops. As preposterous as this directive was on its face, the fact that it came from the ranking citizen of Japan’s German ally in Nanking conveyed a need for caution until Japan’s diplomats could confirm its efficacy.
While they waited, Mori’s squad commenced its bivouac in the ruins of two buildings opposite the safety zone. After a soup of bok choy and some cured pork liberated from a farm the night before, Mori had walked back toward the northern edge of the city. Opposite a small rice paddy, he stopped and leaned on a stone wall to watch a stooped Chinese man working purposefully. Mori remembered shouldering his rifle, carefully sighting his target, and shooting the man in the left temple as he bent over with a fistful of seedlings. A Chinese woman at the edge of the field screamed and half-ran, fell, and half-crawled through the calf-high water to the man’s body. Still screaming, she had lifted up the head of the fallen man from the muddy water of the paddy. Mori took aim a second time and shot her in the chest. She lurched away from the man she was holding, and the two bodies slipped into the water together.
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