Absurdity, Allegory and China

It’s midnight here in China, and I’ve just finished listening to Secretary of State Clinton’s “major foreign policy speech,” though I must say that I am really unsure what just happened. I am tired and about to go to bed, but my assessment is that it felt like a lot of big and very fluffy pillows being thrown around. Someone on Twitter described it as “anodyne,” and I have to agree. Obviously if this was the delivery of a major foreign policy pitch, the details are somewhere down the road. Yes, there were shots at China, Tunisia and Uzbekistan, to name a few, but there were very few specific points to grab and hold onto.”We’ll be talking with them,” is what I took away, which is nothing that I hadn’t already expected. There was talk of funding mobile devices that would be able to rate governmental performance within a host country, but I’m not seeing a lot of air under those wings.

I think I’ll go to bed and see if something comes to me in sleep, since not much is coming to me at the moment, other than Hillary looked fashionable in red (for the Chinese audience) and she spoke very well, though there is nothing new there, either.