THE ANTI-MIDAS TOUCH:

The Very Modern Prince: Satellite geek, military fetishist, future king. Make way for the irrepressible cybervisionary of the South Pacific! (Jennifer Kahn, December 2002, Wired)

When the Crown Prince of Tonga visited Mongolia last year, an eagle attacked his hat. At the time, the prince was making a documentary, filming eagles while a Mongolian porter dragged a dead fox on the ground as bait. Footage of the incident - which he plays for me later on his home computer - shows the prince gazing upward moments before the assault. He's wearing riding breeches, aviator goggles, and a Russian fur hat - an outfit appropriate to the frozen and windswept terrain. "Under the circumstances," he explains drolly, "the hat may have been a mistake."

South Pacific royalty does not regularly venture to the Asian steppes, but in this and several other respects, the prince of Tonga is unique. New Zealand tabloids describe him, variously, as a lounge singer, a military fetishist, and a crazy genius. Along with a degree in international law from Oxford, he has a fine collection of Japanese art and is an avid musicologist (the documentary is scored to Mozart's Horse Concerto). He can also dance the mambo - reasonably well, by all accounts - and speaks modestly about his unpublished 1,500-page historical novel set in czarist Russia. As a government leader and businessman, he has pushed to reform the country's corrupt parliament, promoted computer literacy, and founded a brewery. He is the very model of a modern crown prince.

By comparison, the Pacific island chain that is his birthright is less than up-to-date. Where Africa has diamonds, the Middle East oil, and America rippling fields of grain, the South Pacific has sand - and not even much of that. Remote, scattered, ringed by jagged lava rock, the islands exist far outside the world of global commerce. Only recently has technology penetrated this isolation. Aided by virtual commerce, satellite offices, and cheap airfares, other small nations in the middle of the ocean have managed to commandeer an economic niche. Oversize Fiji got the tourist market. Solitary Nauru learned to launder money. Even tiny Tuvalu scored a coup by licensing its .tv domain and later selling its international telephone code to phone sex companies. In the digital age, where technology trumps geography, it would seem that any island nation can find a path to prosperity.

Any island nation, that is, except Tonga.

Every morning that you wake up on American soil is a very good day. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 9, 2002 9:08 PM