Absurdity, Allegory and China

Last March I wrote a post anticipating the Olympic protests in support of a ‘free’ Tibet. Nothing prescient, mind you; anyone with a tooth in their head, and a lot of folks without, could have anticipated attempts at extreme displays.

If your plan is to make a scene, I am asking you to review your reasons for coming here. If you are coming here to free Tibet, don’t bother coming. More often than not those who do the loudest wailing have no idea what that means to the lives of all the poor Tibetans in China who have no idea why things just got worse. All they really know is that things just got a whole lot worse. They don’t need your self-righteousness being played out in China. They don’t need your Olympic plans to make the world a better place. What may sound like a good idea in a well-lit meeting room in a comfortable Student Center, may, in fact, be the absolute worst thing you could possibly do.

To exacerbate an already bad situation, then hop on a jet and fly back home, is not helping anyone at all. No one needs false ‘heroics’ now, especially the indigenous Tibetans who are, more often than not, disregarded by everyone when it comes to promoting outside agendas. … The reality of life in the countryside is a lot more difficult than what you can possibly imagine it to be. Remember, it’s not about you. It’s always about them, so learn who they are and how their lives go down every day, which, at the moment, is difficult, to say the least. You should ask yourself if what you are planning to do would make life any more difficult for the lives of those who you believe you are helping. The saying, “First do no harm,” is actually not a cliché. Pay it some attention. There are other, more effective ways to make your voices heard.

One week into the Games and we’ve seen the self-righteous waving, swinging and unfurling of one thing and another by those with a higher message. It’s tiresome, counter-productive, and irksomely self-promoting. And now in what appears to be a piss poor piece of journalism, a story by the Guardian’s Jonathan Haynes, accompanied by an incriminating photo, tells us all that it has happened again, this time along the East Third Ring Rd. The accuracy of the story is highly questionable.

The photo shows a couple of folks swinging from ropes from the wall of giant billboards along the what appears to be the western perimeter of the CCTV Bldg. property, not the actual building as Haynes reports.

The pair abseiled down the building’s glass facade and hung their banner over an Olympics billboard with the slogan “Beijing 2008″ at 5.45am local time.

If, in fact, I am correct about the location of the pair – on one of the billboards along the East Third Ring Rd. – it would be virtually impossible to abseil down that side of the building and end up on the billboards. Tower 1 leans 6 degrees to the east, not the west, and to abseil from the building to the billboards would be a real trick, one that would have needed a boom, some expensive and cleverly rigged wires, and the creative direction of Zhang Yimou. It appears to me from the photo that the pair of self-promoting rope folks were near the new Jintaixizhao subway entrance, close to the CCTV Bldg, but hardly on it. I expect better of the Guardian. And if I am wrong, I will be more than happy to apologize to Mr. Haynes, though I think that the apology will be owed by them for their shoddiness of reporting.