Books in Airports Make for Strange Reading

Killing time in transit at Hong Kong International Airport, I was drawn as usual to the bookshop. Hong Kong being a business mecca, the front tables were predictably lined with titles like “The Three Principles of Success”, “Business Etiquette in China” and “Business, the Richard Branson Way”. Men in suits, mostly Asian made up the customers and interest oscillated between the business prep books and the pornographic magazines in mandarin wrapped up in plastic on the shelves at the back.

Confining my interest to the books that were being pushed on the customers on the front tables, I was struck by the incongruity of the themes. First of all, a newcomer to the best seller lists are the doomsday books which feature scenarios of climate change and economic plight. “The Last Great Oil Shock” and “A Game as Old as Empire” were two of the leading titles that caught my eye, the first articulating the forthcoming energy crisis and the second detailing the economic rape of the planet.

Yet by their sides were piles of shiny books celebrating the multinational corporate dream, “The Starbucks Experience” and “The Wal-Mart Effect” the most brazen of them, spilling all the secrets on how ambitious readers can rape the planet for themselves.

Bookshops stock whatever sells. Publishers push titles on them but books won’t stay on the front tables if they’re not moving in considerable numbers. So it got me wondering whether there are two kinds of customer buying these books, one hoping to emulate the corporate giants of the world and one hoping that there will be some kind of world left once the corporations run out of steam.

Or is too much to imagine that the same people who sign contracts to dump industrial waste in the rivers of Mainland China and decimate the forests of Laos to grow rubber, are also up in arms about the stranglehold of third world debt and the madness of the modern dependency on oil.

It’s been a long road from the first Greenpeace hippies trying to save whales and rainforests in the 70’s to the eventual emergence of global awareness about the environment. For the better part of a century, capitalism has wanted to have it’s cake, eat it too and then toss the plastic wrapper in a landfill and let the next generation deal with the consequences. Now that the marketing people have discovered there’s a big dollar in trying to save the world, even the likes of BP, Shell and Wal-mart claim to be in the front line when it comes to looking after our futures. Any notion that these kinds of corporations are responsible for the shit we find ourselves in is still regarded as poorly thought through extremism.

The thing is, the looming energy crisis, world wide water shortages and the chronic inequalities of wealth on this planet aren’t an accident, not a mere blip on the face of centuries of free market economies. They’re direct results of the way society has seen fit to exploit natural resources and poorer people for their own ends. As long as we persist in believing that the price of the products we consume is contained only in the bar code tagged onto it, we fail to recognize the consequences of each product made, sold and consumed. A bag of salad that travels 3000 miles to reach your local supermarket costs far more than the cash it takes to pay for it. Just ask the drought-ridden country whose water was appropriated to grow your rocket leaves.

“Look honey, this one’s all about the people who founded Starbucks – you said you want to be a businessman when you grow up. This one might give you some inspiration.”

I actually heard a painfully loud Australian mother say that whilst I was reading “A Game as Old as Empire” and learning how third world countries have their arms twisted behind their backs to sign disadvantageous trade agreements. That’s right, let’s inspire the boy. Then once he’s read the book let’s send him to work 15 hours a day on a coffee plantation on Guatemala where all the workers drink Nescafe on their breaks.

Looking around the bookshop, the Dalai Lama’s words were segregated to the Spirituality section, numerous tales of time served on drug sentences in Thai jails lined the South East Asia section and books with flowers and suspenders on the cover made the Chick Lit shelves.

But people struggling to eat and drink in the Third World will never read those books. And if the continents flood from global warming then land itself will become a jail, one that shrinks with each year. Since when did saving the world become a market, a category to line up neatly next to corporate success stories?