Since his release from prison in 2010 Chen has been under a form of house arrest that has succeeded in reaching a level of official meanness that can only be expressed as vile. Chen’s house arrest has included not only the subjugation of a blind man who served four (4) years in prison for jaywalking, but also the systematic beating of innocent women – his wife, mother and any number of others who have humanely tried to help the family – by lowbrowed muscled men who may or may not be police, but who are doubtlessly in the official employ of the police and local officials in Linyi, Shandong province. And let’s not forget child abuse. The officious men of Linyi had refused to allow Chen’s daughter to attend school, though once the pressure became too great she was ushered back and forth to classes by brutes. That she also was forced to live under the conditions that were imposed upon the family can easily be classified as child abuse. These are only the brash highlights. The everyday details were much harsher, including various degrees of torture, food restrictions, electrical outages, sheet-metal covered and steel-barred windows, and spotlights that kept their small home lit up like Saturday night on the midway. Yes, this is the China that many have predicted will rule the world. Perhaps this is what it takes, a page torn from the savage’s playbook. Remember this when you get all warm and fuzzy about the Confucius Institute, another Party-sanctioned program that’s spreading through the world. This shameful affair points out yet again – and the second striking time in the last few weeks (the Bo Xilai affair) – the wholesale moral bankruptcy that permeates the entire Party system. This is the final work of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, whose ten-year reign is caving in on them and defining their ignominious end. And I haven’t even mentioned what they’ve managed to do to the ethnic minorities!

So, let’s see how the Obama folks will respond to China’s demands for Chen to be released from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, a story that is still, officially, speculation, since there has yet to be official acknowledgement that he is there. This is obviously not a Wang Lijun no-brainer where asylum was, perhaps, denied to a man who was part of a criminal conspiracy that included, among a host of other serious crimes, more than a few murders. In the case of Chen Guangcheng I’m sure there is a great desire to resolve this issue without it reaching the asylum level. But the only thing short of asylum would be verifiable guarantees that Chen and his family will be free of further inhuman harassment. If he is released back to China without meaningful guarantees Obama may as well kiss a second term goodbye. The wave of detentions in China over the last two days that has swept up many who are perceived as having helped Chen escape also must be addressed. Will China be able to go that far, the interference by a foreign rival in their domestic affairs? Will Team Obama have the stones to do what it must do? And all of this is happening on the eve of a China visit from Sec. of State Clinton who in an earlier visit to China played down the role of human rights in the U.S./China relationship,  and Treasury Sec. Geithner, who I’m pretty sure doesn’t give a donut hole about the blind activist unless he can figure out a way to get his Wall St. buds to make a killing marketing a “Chen Sunglasses” campaign! Keep your eyes on the digital billboards that flash-up Times Square.

But I am waiting for Rectified.Name, who pitched the Bo Xilai affair, to do the same with the Chen affair to the Coen Bros, who have yet to do a Chinese film. They could weave this into a tale that would end in the twisted depths of hallowed bunkers beneath Zhongnanhai, where murder will take place, though, if they were going to keep it culturally correct, the retributive dead victims would probably all be women. Or maybe Zhang Yimou for failing to bring home the bacon with Nanjing Lite.

And China keeps wondering why they can’t win an Oscar. It’s not because they don’t have the material for a good script. It’s just that they won’t allow it to be written.
________

Further Readings

On Chen’s detention and the infusion of security cash into the local economy see ChinaGeeks’ In Chen Guangcheng Case, Follow the Money

For Chen Guangcheng as a “genuinely Mencius-like figure,” see The Useless Tree’s Stand With Chen Guangcheng

For a more detailed background on the Chen case see Tania Branigan’s piece in The Guardian: Chen Guangcheng: how China tried to lock down a blind man

For a further look at the political implications from both the U.S. and Chinese perspectives see Jane Perlez in the NYT: A New Pawn in China’s Two Tugs of War 

The relentless public humiliation that we are witnessing brings to mind Errol Morris’ brilliant five-part series The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is, which appeared in the NYT’s Opinionator blog in the summer of 2010. Among many other things, Morris focuses on the Dunning-Kruger effect, the phenomenon, recognized by others – Charles Darwin and Buckminster Fuller to name but two – that “our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence.” In other words, “how can we possibly know what we don’t know?” It’s not as simple as you might think. And despite all political hot-wiring, it’s a lot more complicated than “pinning the tail on the donkey.” Here is an excerpt, the opening of Part 1.

___________________

1. The Juice

David Dunning, a Cornell professor of social psychology, was perusing the 1996 World Almanac.  In a section called Offbeat News Stories he found a tantalizingly brief account of a series of bank robberies committed in Pittsburgh the previous year.  From there, it was an easy matter to track the case to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, specifically to an article by Michael A. Fuoco:

ARREST IN BANK ROBBERY, SUSPECT’S TV PICTURE SPURS TIPS

At 5 feet 6 inches and about 270 pounds, bank robbery suspect McArthur Wheeler isn’t the type of person who fades into the woodwork.  So it was no surprise that he was recognized by informants, who tipped detectives to his whereabouts after his picture was telecast Wednesday night during the Pittsburgh Crime Stoppers Inc. segment of the 11 o’clock news. At 12:10 a.m. yesterday, less than an hour after the broadcast, he was arrested at 202 S. Fairmont St., Lincoln-Lemington.  Wheeler, 45, of Versailles Street, McKeesport, was wanted in [connection with] bank robberies on Jan. 6 at the Fidelity Savings Bank in Brighton Heights and at the Mellon Bank in Swissvale. In both robberies, police said, Wheeler was accompanied by Clifton Earl Johnson, 43, who was arrested Jan. 12.

Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight.  What made the case peculiar is that he made no visible attempt at disguise.  The surveillance tapes were key to his arrest.  There he is with a gun, standing in front of a teller demanding money.  Yet, when arrested, Wheeler was completely disbelieving.  “But I wore the juice,” he said.  Apparently, he was under the deeply misguided impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to video cameras.

___________________

There’s a lot more than stupidity going on here, and Morris covers quite a bit of territory in revealing his glimpse into the nature of reality, and the larger question of what do we really know? Like everything Morris does, it is well worth your time to delve into this series. I won’t attempt to summarize it here, because I can’t. My summary would be exponentially longer than Morris’ tight poetic vision of anasognosia and the problems it presents to all of us. In an exchange with David Dunning (of the Dunning-Kruger effect), Dunning zeroes in on the problem: “[W]hen you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is. In logical reasoning, in parenting, in management, problem solving, the skills you use to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate the answer.  And so we went on to see if this could possibly be true in many other areas.  And to our astonishment, it was very, very true.”

Can we make the jump and apply this level of incompetency to nation states? I understand that this sort of question lives in the same category of inquiry as Buddhists wondering if nation states have karma? Within the limits of certain frameworks it’s a legitimate question, though quantification is a little hard to figure. In the end, I have no idea about either, but when it comes to soft power and China. gov it seems like the incompetency and the lack of self-awareness undercut all basic PR models. When the nominal intent is to win over the world through positive effort, it is best not to disappear, via  secret committees, citizens who are deemed problematic. It sends a bit of a mixed message, that maybe, just maybe, you’re blowing stacks of smoke in all directions. It doesn’t seem as if it would be very hard to understand that, though apparently it’s much harder than I am able to imagine. It’s that “juice” thing all over again. How do you tell the party boys that lemons don’t hide them from the world, that despite their best efforts they still appear exactly as they are. The Bush-Cheney presidency promoted the same sort of disappearing acts, but there are/were still enough people who doubted the redefinition to keep the lemon factor somewhat in control, though it is a constant struggle to balance, made more difficult by societal insecurity and the wave of narcissism that together maintain a high level of self-focused timidity. Add an unhealthy dose of economic instability coupled with a well-planned and vigorous redistribution of wealth, and we’re all teetering at the edge of a pool of lemonade whether we want to be or not.

A great friend, a psychiatrist, once told me that a sane person has a pretty good idea of how he/she is perceived by others. By all accounts Herman Cain is not one of those people. Maybe he’d do better here in China where the political field is littered with guys just like himself, none of whom have to worry about regional caucuses of the screaming, unwashed  masses.  And if that doesn’t work for Herman he can always fall back to pizzas. Everyone loves pizzas, even the Chinese. He’d need to readdress some of his other appetites, but I’m pretty sure with enough cash the Chinese government can make some accommodations for someone as equally unaware as they are. It’s a world made for lemons, and nobody can see what you’re doing.

But then, there he was, wheeled quietly in from the wings, down front and low down, a virtual non-presence, avoiding and avoidable. I believe his entrance via wheelchair was a compromise, an anti-pollution maneuver, an attempt to not spoil this day. A sneaking in and sneaking out. His final official slither.

“I’ve got a lot of rivers to fish,” he said. “So I don’t think anybody will feel sorry for me. They shouldn’t.” And I won’t. Never even crossed my mind. My wife, a Wyoming native and fisher-person, mentioned something about slippery rocks, fast currents, things happening before you even know they’re going down. I said that I’d thought that, too, but didn’t want to say it. Twenty years I’ve been thinking that: a hat and a sneer, somewhere downstream.

And yes, I think they should go after him. You can’t step back from the fear of future partisan retribution. That’s going to happen anyway. It took a quarter century to strike back for the Nixon debacle, and to think that this will not happen if we just let them fish and mountain bike into the future is naive. Screw ‘em all, and screw ‘em good. And screw their defenders. And then send them off to The Hague and let them sit behind a thick glass for the world to see and judge. That’s where they belong. That’s the way we get this thing back to where it so desperately needs to be. This is how we do our best to resuscitate the world. You walk away from this, you let it happen again. If our history tells us nothing else, it sure as hell tells us that looking away is a recipe for future disaster. Slavery and the inability to address it from the very beginning told us that. And it’s still telling us that, how much we need to not look away. How much we need to take a stand and make it stop here, so we can get our feet. Nunca Mas.

I wrote the following piece back in 1993, right after the Clinton inauguration, and it was published in a small journal (also now no longer with us) called The Free Cuisenart. Dick Cheney has been on my mind for a lot of years. I lived in the Bighorns nearly three decades ago, and I was onto him then, while he was still on the rise. He is our greatest public stain. And yes, today is full of lots of wah wah-pedaled hope, and maybe the lines of tribes may, in fact, dissolve (though I’m not looking for it in my lifetime), but the future will always have to deal with the mutants among us. So enjoy it tonight, but tomorrow’s a workday, and there’s a lot that needs to be done.  Obama knows the Constitution, and he knows how it’s been raped over the last eight years. And you don’t let that one get by. You never let that one get by. If you do, pack it in and give it back to the mutants and hang on to your hat as it all spins down into a glorious wreckage. We owe more to our kids than to let these criminals walk.  So, yes, I’m happy, but not stupidly so. It’s already tomorrow here.
________

On the afternoon/early evening of Sunday, January 17, 1993, as President-Elect Bill Clinton was walking in procession across the Memorial Bridge on his grand entrance into the capital city, Dick Cheney, the Secretary of Defense under the direction of the outgoing president George H. W. Bush, was coordinating a Cruise missile attack on Baghdad.

This from the January 18, 1993 NYT – Raid on Iraq: Bush Launches Missile Attack on a Baghdad Industrial Park as Washington Greets:

But Pentagon officials said tonight that it was possible that one of the cruise missiles had slammed into the Rashid Hotel, a favorite of foreign journalists in Baghdad and the site of an Islamic conference. A Pentagon official said that some missiles had been routed near or over the hotel.

A Death
(1993)

It’s not the sneer as the Secretary of Defense talks of bombing Baghdad, and how he’ll miss his job after Monday; it’s knowing that he owns a ranch in the middle of Wyoming, is “Boss” to men with bad teeth who pinch snuff and know the kind of cold that freezes snot before it hits their ear-waxed upper lips.

In the warm sanctuary of his kinder East, comfortable and balding, he tells his colleagues who jog the Mall for the requisite chiseled look, tales of wind and ranching, of wild life and wilder men who age leathery like their saddles beneath the clear high-plains sun, for wages and the warmth of winter fire. “Real, by god, men,” he claims slapping his creased leg, then tells of how they call him boss, trust him implicitly, and believe, too, that Baghdad is full of dark and godless thieves.

There is never any mention of the families and the children; not the young woman, someone’s beautiful daughter, who went to work as she did each day at the al Rashid Hotel, dreaming of life. Of love. Of going home in the cool of the evening. But who, instead, died before the world’s eye, a numberless stray frozen in some awful blizzard.

When he leaves it will be with victory tales of war rooms not the war, of colored lights seductively winking across a plexiglas wall, of how they clapped each other’s backs long into the safe suburban night.

Tomorrow he’ll parade about in custom-fitted boots and tell the hired hands who jump to his orders and offer him the whiskey bottle as the cold sun falls into the Bighorns, that this is what right is, this is why wars are, this is what needs to be done to keep them free to ride.

© Jim Gourley, 2009

The fund would help save 600 villages out of severe environment problems and award 100 others which play exemplary roles in ecology. The program would directly benefit 4 million people, the ministry said.

The money would be mainly used to address problems of drinking water contamination in rural areas and pollution arising from household livestock raising, and to build polluted water treatment facilities.

The ministry said the money was being distributed to rural areas, which was expected to stimulate another 100 million yuan of local rural environment investment.

This reminds me of a story – one that I happened to be involved in, dating back all of three weeks – of a privately funded water project in the countryside to address this very issue: contaminated water where the villagers had no other choice but to use it. I will not mention where it was, though I will give you a hint: the villagers live in the high mountains of western China and have a long history of dealing with yaks.

In 2002 the local government installed a water system in this area. The source of water is a clean spring beside a stream that often floods in the spring and summer. The money was given and a system was installed, though the work that went into it was subpar – the typical MO: get in, do as little as possible and get out with the cash. When the seasonal floods came the holding tank where the good clean water was collected quickly silted up, and within two years the unprotected system was rendered useless. So, for the locals it was back to hauling water from the polluted stream, a task that fell to the women. A view down the valley at any time of the day always included at least a few women hauling water up the steep hills to their homes, a task for the young and old and usually several times a day. Often these were women too old to herd and young women who should have been in school but were kept home to do the critical chores. In these communities the sexual division of labor dictates that water hauling and fuel gathering is women’s work.

In the two years that the original water system worked the community had good, free water, but, the quality of the work ensured that the system wouldn’t last. After we went in last year and assessed the problem, privately raised the funds to redo the system and worked with the villagers to dig water lines, build wired stone dams to protect the source, rebuild the catch tank so that it would be higher than the highest water of the seasonal floods, redirect the flow of the stream and, with the help of a backhoe, protect the buried water line with the strategic placement of large rocks in the most critical area, 90 households now have running clean water into the walled yards of their houses. A current view down the valley now shows no one hauling water or washing clothes in the polluted stream. All good, right?

Well, two days after the water began running the local government showed up, saw the progress that had been made and decided to take action: everyone would now have to pay a water tax, despite the fact that there had not been one even during the two years when the old system actually worked, and despite the fact that the government had nothing to do with the expensive repair of the broken system. The tax for yearly use of the water is now assessed at 27.3 RMB per household – the local minority primary school was assessed as six (6) households and the local medical clinic was assessed as three (3). So people with very little money – and who had no water prior to our project – now have water but also a yearly bill, payable to someone who, most likely, is not accountable to anyone else.

At first the villagers refused to pay, arguing that the local government had done nothing to help their situation, and to tax them was unjust. The officials told them it was fine if they didn’t pay the tax, though the consequence was that there would be no further development projects that would come to their village. “So, think about it!” The result will be that the villagers will pay, and that someone, most likely, will pocket the money. That’s the way things work around here. There is an unspoken rule of thumb that all development projects have a 40% “skid greasing” fee, money that goes into official pockets. So when I read that the government is distributing money to rural areas I do the math, and then I wonder how much of money will actually get to the projects and the people in need of the very basic services, as well as wondering how much it will end up costing the rural folks in the end. What sounds good on paper (and in the papers) often ends up being just the opposite.

So, when I read articles like the one in Xinhua, I always look for the strategically placed, less direct and very mushy “would.” In the above article there are two: “The program would directly benefit 4 million people, the ministry said,” and “The money would be mainly used to address problems of drinking water contamination in rural areas….” If only it were so. A simple, more confident will would have pulled this off in a more direct, inspiring fashion, though apparently that would also have been entirely too hopeful. Someone’s choosing his/her words very carefully while providing a conveniently placed rabbit hole to hop into. Which reminds me of Mengzi’s (Mencius) exhortation to the poor ruler: “When people die, you say, ‘It is not owing to me; it is owing to the year.’ In what does this differ from stabbing a man and killing him, and then saying — “It was not I; it was the weapon?”

Some of these lessons are as old the hills that the women trudge up with their water.

Obviously politics is still on my mind. Though I am happy about the Obama win I am still smarting over the depth of the American plunge over the past decade, which I have spent in China in a permanent state of Cringe. From what I’ve heard from many friends in the US is that they too have been hunkering down. When I left America in 1998 the country was feeding on a young, hapless Jewish woman, an indiscreet Democratic president, a cigar and a stained dress, all of which combined to nearly bring our country to ground. As if that debacle weren’t enough, the General Election of 2000 did it’s best to dig the hole even deeper. The Bush presidential response to the tragedy of 9/11 and the subsequent lack of response to the near annihilation of New Orleans by hurricane were two of the incalculable travesties that not only took the winds out of the sails, but appeared to also consciously take a sword to them in what can only seem like a deliberate attempt to turn the ship of state into a dead-in-the-water creaking hulk. In the name of democracy and its criminally misguided neoconic programs of global “democracy” promotion I, along with much of the US and the world, have watched in horror as the senseless gutting of the nation’s ethical core seemed to stumble forward unchecked. My country, which I love and have fought for, appeared to be driven by a numbing fear, intent on utter wreckage. No matter how the first eight years of this century are eventually spun, there will no doubt be a consensus that it was the most incompetent and noxious White House in US history. The Bush/Cheney axis of disruption will forever be pointed to as the low point to which a democracy can plunge and still manage to officially spew. This administration has become the most convincing argument against the spread of democracy in the world. Why would any country, other than the most boorish, want to emulate a muscled executive branch as vulgar and mean as this one has been (and will continue to be for another two-and a half months). Their supercilious disregard for the Constitution has driven their national approval rating through the floor, and their unhinged shamelessness in pursuing what can only be described as a vigorous plutocratic global agenda has earned them, and, by national association all Americans, an international disrepute. We are lucky that there is no gauge to measure how far we have fallen in the minds of the global community. That this administration will soon be gone is, unfortunately, not soon enough. When they slink off to their respective secured ranches they will have left in their wake a country where only a privileged few will be able to say that they are better off now than they were eight years ago.

What we saw and heard in Grant Park on the evening of November 4th was the beginning of our recovery from national and international shame. It will be neither an easy nor a quick recuperation. And, unfortunately, it most likely will be hampered by the low-browed sniping from the permanently disgruntled and goofball extreme, which, I might add, is not the same as the Conservatives. This is what respectable Republicans know. And this is what they will have to confront in order to redefine themselves as more than just a magnet for the wing nuts.

I was raised in a large household that was politically divided: my father a Republican, and my mother a Democrat. I have no recollections of any parental political knock-down, drag-outs; there was a respect as well as diplomatic silence that allowed the two to not only live together in the same home, but to attend the same church and propagate at a baby-booming, Irish-Catholic clip. Personal politics rarely clouded the atmosphere within the home; there were other more pressing and urgent familial issues that managed to provide enough other weather to downgrade politic disagreements to sporadic drizzles. Though I consider my parents’ differing political opinions as both having come from reasonable – though not always highly reasoned (they were Catholics, not Jesuits) – interpretations of events and personal experience, I ended up leaning in the direction of my mother’s take on things. In 1972, when I briefly returned home from four years in the military, my father, a WWII vet, was so appalled by the Watergate scandal and the Nixon Administration’s mishandling of Southeast Asia, he actually voted for George McGovern, a seismic rip that afforded me a critical insight into the man who, from the crib forward, I had spent my lifetime battling, despite having inherited his love of baseball and the Phils. His admission on election night that he had pulled the Democratic lever (one of eight McGovern votes from that single household) taught me that change is actually possible, even if, at times, it seems more miraculous or humbling than we could have ever dreamed. It’s both the benefit and the cost of thinking. In the next two subsequent presidential elections I feel quite sure he went back to voting straight GOP. He didn’t make it to Reagan’s second term, though I cannot imagine him casting his vote for Walter Mondale.

The critical question for the Republican party now becomes how to deal with Sarah Palin, a self-promoting, revisionist fundie. How they handle this one will tell us if they will be able to recover. If they choose to continue sheltering and pandering to those who pride themselves on fundamentalist, anti-intellectual, and intolerant methods of understanding both politics and religion – “The way I see my god (and foreign policy out my window) is the only way to see god (and foreign policy), and if you don’t see it my way then there’s no need for further discussion” – will doom them to further muddling. This is not the basis for responsible political discourse. Haven’t we yet learned that hypocritical religious zealots are responsible for an inordinate amount of pain in this world? This sort of intolerance implies a basic fear of imagination, rather than the embracing and understanding of imagination as a tool that must be kept finely honed in order to responsibly respond to the constant changes that define all times. I expect “You betcha” and a wink at a county fair, not in the rooms where the serious business of governance and diplomatic negotiations take place. If the Republicans can’t see that they will deserve everything they will get. If they do not distance themselves from the whacko fringe then they will lose even more of their good faithful followers. This is not a secret.

So, that’s what I’m rehashing on my way to bed, listening to the wind.

The one topic I have not dealt here has been the US elections, though not from lack of want. I’ve wanted to badly. In fact, so badly, I have exercised enormous restraint in order to remain nominally within the “Chinese box” that I have set myself in. But sometimes you just have to step out and swing at something else. Restraint has been particularly difficult for me over the past two-and-a-half months, particularly after John McCains’ cynical selection of his running mate, a choice that proved to the core that they didn’t “get it.” And ultimately this was their undoing.

A further mark of this disconnection was deeply embedded in John McCain’s concession speech.

“This is an historic election, and I recognize the special significance it has for African-Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight.”

The implications of this victory go far beyond the African-American community. They go to the very ideal heart of what America has imagined itself to be, even while it has not been. To explain that this victory has “special significance for African-Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight,” proves that John McCain was fundamentally disconnected from what the United States has so desperately needed for as long as it has been a union. This was a victory of finally … finally rising above the empty rhetoric of high ideals. The United States can now say that it has squared itself with it’s Declaration of Independence where “all men are created equal,” and the subsequent terrible ‘silence’ of the Constitution where it was agreed that a slave was valued at three-fifths of a white male, and then only for the white male’s benefit: as a deflated number to tax and choose representatives in a single race, single sex national congress. (This is hardly judging the past from the comfort of the present; our history tells us very clearly that the voices who railed against these terrible inconsistencies were vocal and many at the time that this was all being hashed, though for the sake of ‘unity’ they swallowed their tongues.) It’s not often that we get to clear an ‘ideal’ and say, “Finally, we’ve gotten over this one.”

Here in this time of national crisis, we ended up electing an African American as president, the son of an immigrant, the most qualified of those who desired the position. It’s taken 221 years and millions of lives tragically lost to acts of unspeakable inhumanity, in order to make the critical correction at arguably the lowest point in our history – after eight years of executive pillage and crimes – to reach the point where we can look past the chains that the founding fathers shackled all of us with, not just African Americans. We have all, every shade and color, been diminished by a belief in an ideal that fell critically short of realization. This victory was of “special significance” to all of us, even for those who don’t yet understand it as such. We have all, finally, been freed, and that speaks to the possibility of America, where a member of a 13% minority can be elected by a clear majority to lead us into a very shaky future.

Now begins the real work, which I hope we are all up to.

I voted today, but it wasn’t easy. I’m going to try to make this short and sweet, but I want to preface this by reminding you that the previous 3 times I’ve tried to vote, I’ve been turned away by the election workers who state my name has not been on the registration rolls. I thereupon wrote to several newspapers telling how I was disenfranchised as a voter. I received a letter from the Secretary of State with notification that I was indeed on the rolls.

1. I was the only voter in the place. I was beset upon by a grumpy old man when I approached the table at the polling place. He demanded to know if I was 10 or 11. Demanded my photo I.D.
2. Replied, “I’m much older.”
3. He said I had to declare one or the other or I could not vote. I had no idea what he meant.A lady at the table said “It has to do with how you’re going to vote.” A lady at the table said “It has to do with how you’re going to vote.”
4. “You mean my party affiliation? I’m a democrat.”
5. I was sent to table 11. Another grumpy old man challenged my identity and made me produce 4 more pieces of ID.
6. I was told my name was not in the registry. I told them to look under my maiden name. They would not, seeing no cause to, whereupon, I pulled up a chair and declared I was not leaving until they let me vote. Memories of the 60′s and sit-in at the administration building at my university fill my head.
7. Staredown for 20 minutes while I urged them to find my name in the rolls.
8. Finally a woman looked under my maiden name (because my last name is hyphenated) and of course, there I was.
9. I was told they were out of ballots, though it was 8:30 a.m.
10. I sat down again, “I don’t believe you. It’s only 8:30 a.m. I know how folk in this county try to prevent democrats from voting. I’m not leaving until I vote.”
11. Staredown for 10 minutes.
12. Woman appears from behind a curtain with a ballot. The ballot is very large, larger than a menu, but the writing is very small. I can’t see it even with a magnifier. “I’m going to need help reading and marking this ballot. I’m visually impaired.”
13. “We can’t help you, we don’t know how,” said grumpy pants.
14. Surely you went to orientation and were shown how to help people with disabilities.
15. “Yes, but I can’t remember what they said to do.”
16. “Doesn’t matter,” says I. “I’ll show you how to help me.”
17. Staredown 3 minutes.
18. The lady who offered me the ballot, then offered to read the ballot to me and help me mark it.
19. I voted. It was 45 minutes later. I was still the only voter in the place, but I voted.

At the same poll, earlier that day, D. had no trouble. But he’s a man, and didn’t hobble in like a rickety old soul. Imagine what they do to elderly democrats who don’t face them down. — J. (Reprinted with permission.)

The post-liberation government has been pretty clear that things is about as deep as it gets. But is there religion? You betcha. Always has been. And money and wealth has been what determines access. Look at the Shang tombs that weren’t looted, and you’ll see that the wealthy, indeed, took it with them. There are always things you need on the other side, the same as there are on this one, and some of those tombs were packed with lots of bronze stuff: essential chariot parts, heads of weapons and lots of ritual vessels, some of which probably weighed more than a Tata Nano. Bronze was what you used to talk to those in the afterlife who had a say in how things were going down in this one. It was all part of the political-religious landscape. And bronze, the stuff of kings, wasn’t cheap to get.

Tomorrow is Qing Ming Jie, tomb sweeping day, when folks visit ancestral grave sites – if they haven’t been lost to development – and pay their respects and homage to those relatives who have moved on into the greater qi. This holiday dates back to the Tang dynasty, 732 CE, when the emperor Xuanzong saw that the wealthy held elaborate and expensive private rituals to keep in touch with those who had gone on ahead, and he made the decision that enough was enough. Give it a single day on the calendar and have it over and done with. I can imagine that it must have been a relief to some of those who were dropping serious cash keeping the lines of communication open. If the emperor said that it was so, then that’s the way it was, and no one on the other side could fault you for following the words of the Son of Heaven and distilling it all into one day a year to clean it up, and do the things you needed to do to keep the world whole.

This year this traditional holiday has morphed into an official holiday, a day-off for those who can afford to take it. I have the feeling that many construction workers who are under Olympic deadlines will still be hammering away tomorrow, building this new country, while those who can take the break will be sweeping the graves clean. As far as holidays go, I think it’s a good one. So tomorrow the burning of fake money and the eating of memorial picnics are part of the official plan.

But this year there’s an additional bonus; the Olympic torch is making the rounds, and perhaps that might have had something to do with the official resurrection of this traditional memorial day. Also, it was not, I think, purely coincidental that the Tian’anmen stage that was the focal point of the private torch lighting event this past Monday was a mock up of Yuanqiutan, the Earthly Mound, the Altar of Heaven, where emperors would visit twice a year to petition Heaven for good harvest as well as good weather, one of which is very much an Olympic concern. There was more than just a little religion in staging of that scene.

If you’ve been paying any attention to the official Chinese media you’ll notice that they are using words charged with religious meaning when referring to the torch and it’s traveling travails. Today Xinhua referred to the shuttling about of the Olympic flame as the sacred torch relay, and the job of at least one particular torchbearer, Feng Jicai of Tianjin as “this holy task.” Yesterday there were also at least a few mentions of religious words in regard to the flame and the tour. Clearly this is more than just a sporting event.

But this evening I just read that due to security concerns India has just shortened the relay route through New Delhi from 9 kilometers to 2.5 clicks. That’s some serious reduction! That’s akin to whacking a limb off god, like downsizing Yao to a midget. Man, this is getting downright profane. Religion can be hell sometimes, whether you have all the money or not.

Technorati Tags: gourley China Olympics

Technorati Tags: gourley China Tibet Olympics