Welcome to The Global Village

By LANCE MORROW

A new world has developed like a Polaroid photograph, a vivid, surreal awakening.

The effect has been contradictory: a sense of sunlight and elegy at the same time, of glasnost and claustrophobia.

Whenever the world's molecules reorganize themselves, of course, someone announces a new reality -- "All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born," in W.B. Yeats' smitten lines about the Irish rebellion of Easter 1916. Seventy-three years later, the Irish troubles proceed, dreary, never beautiful -- an eczema of violence in the margins.

But the world in the past few years has, in fact, profoundly changed. In Tiananmen Square last week, many of the demonstrators' signs were written in English. The students knew they were enacting a planetary drama, that their words and images in that one place would powder into electrons and then recombine on millions of little screens in other places, other minds, around the world.

The planet has become an intricate convergence -- of acid rains and rain forests burning, of ideas and Reeboks and stock markets that ripple through time zones, of satellite signals and worldwide television, of advance-purchase airfares, fax machines, the miniaturization of the universe by computer, of T shirts and mutual destinies.

The planetary circuits are wired: an integrated system, a microchip floating in space. Wired for evils -- for AIDS, for example, for nuclear war, for terrorism. But also for entertainment, knowledge and even (we live in hope) for higher possibilities like art, excellence, intelligence and freedom. Justice has not gone planetary and never will. But the village has indeed become global -- Marshall McLuhan was right. No island is an island anymore: the earth itself is decisively the island now.

Travel and travel writing are enjoying a sort of brilliant late afternoon, what photographers call the magic hour before sunset. But the romantic sense of remoteness shrivels. Even the trash announces that the planet is all interconnection, interpenetration, black spillage, a maze of mutual implication, trajectories like the wrapped yarn of a baseball.

A scene: blue plastic bags, bags by the thousands, struggle out of the Red Sea onto the shores of Egypt.

The wind dries them, and then they inflate like lungs and rise on the desert air. They come out of the sea like Portuguese men-of-war and then, amphibious, as if in some Darwinian drama, sail off to litter another of the earth's last emptinesses. Reverse Darwin, really: devolution, a flight of death forms.

Those who actually read Salman Rushdie's notorious best seller The Satanic Verses may have absorbed Rushdie's brilliant perception of what the planet has become: old cultures in sudden high-velocity crisscross, a bewilderment of ethnic explosion and implosion simultaneously. The Ayatullah Khomeini's response to Rushdie is (whatever else it is) an exquisite vindication of Rushdie's point. Khomeini's Iranian revolution was exactly a violent repudiation of the new world that the Shah had sponsored. The struggle throughout the Middle East now is, among other things, a collision between Islam and the temptations and intrusions of the West. In the new world, everything disintegrates: family, community, tradition, coherence itself. The old community perishes in deference to a new community not yet born.

So the world is exactly Salman Rushdie's Indian characters passively seat- belted in their flight from Bombay to London, then blown apart by a random, idiot bomb and soon seen pinwheeling down to a soft landing off the English coast -- the England where Kipling comes home to roost and the empire will implode and intermingle.

A media tale: American television correspondent covering a unit of government troops moving against a guerrilla post in El Salvador keeps eyeing his watch and asking the commander when he will order the attack. Distracted commander says, "Not yet, not yet." Correspondent finally explodes, "Goddammit, I've a bird ((satellite feed to the network)) at 6 o'clock!" The leader, understanding perfectly, orders his attack immediately.

The definition of conquest has changed. Japan has proved that territory, sheer acreage, means nothing. The Soviet Union's geographical vastness has availed little in productivity.

The deepest change may be a planetary intuition that military war is pointless. Except in atavistic places like the Middle East and Ireland, conquering territory is a fruitless and counterproductive exercise. Why conquer land? The Soviets have more trouble than they can manage with their nationalities. The new world's battlegrounds are markets and ideas. The Japanese and Germans, having learned their military lessons the hard way, re- entered the war by other means.

Cities like Cairo, Lagos, Nairobi, Mexico City are slouching toward the new world in the darkest way. Life and death struggle with one another: great birth rates, great death rates. This is the new world's suffocation, of population, poverty, pollution. The country people crowd into the cities. Their continuities are broken, their communities, their village frameworks wrecked, with nothing to replace them.

In the new world, America has lost some of its radiant pride of place. Japan has risen. Europe is organizing itself into a new collective power. The Soviet Union is struggling to escape the dustbin of history. Gorbachev, a magician of much elan, attempts to rescind the hoax of Communism without denouncing its idea. It is fascinating to watch a smart man trying to defend a premise that is beneath his intelligence.

What is the meaning of the new world? Like the older one, it goes dark and then goes light. It flies through the air. It is perhaps too intimate to be heroic anymore. It is, on balance, better than the one before, because it is more conscious.