There is a little
persimmon tree in our back yard with dozens of squat, oblong orange fruit
hanging off, all 果实累累[1]. Climbing up the tree is a sturdy vine that
remains green, off which a few enormous squash dangle and a Virginia Creeper
that has gone all red. A few dusty
chickadees are there, standing midway up, picking at the fruit until a bullyboy
blue magpie, lands and they all scatter.
I’ve had some time to consider this scene as I’ve just stood
for the past hour with my face pressed up against the screen window. It’s the only place in the house where you
can get reliable cell phone coverage and so I was pinioned there, smelling that
zinc screen smell considering the chickadees and the fruit. The moment you turn away from the window it
seems, the other party says “John? John
are you there?” So you’ve no choice but
to resume the position.
It’s Halloween here in Beijing and orange fruit, the green
vine, and the blood red leaves are the right, evocative color combination for
the day. Orange in ascendency, our Jack
O’ lantern out there grinning atop the leaves set beside all this fallen
fruit. The kids will be home early from
school today. They’ll get costumed up
and we’ll head out into the wild autumn night, armed with pillow cases to
conduct their villa compound plunder.
American soft power, American gluttony, waxing full. What kid with a choice would forgo a night of
costumes and free candy with the world turned on its head? Will China’s indomitable rise one day mean
the soft power projection of Chinese holidays on to the rest of the world?
Dragon Boat racing in every city with a river? Ancestor Grave Sweeping Day on
the rise the developing world?
The U.S. version of the holiday goes global because things
like packaged candy are mass-produced early, Hollywood reinforces the ethos
with a thousand films and children are indoctrinated with this irresistible
ceremony of youthful mystery and consumption.
America had some of these commercial possibilities first and established
their version of ceremony as a modern norm.
Riffing in the “Seven Deadly Starbucks” (7DS) off a poster
of John Hurt of Caligula fame in an airport, I had this to say on the topic of West’s
tradition of defining modernity and of what it might mean when that baton is
passed to, or snatched by China:
Rome forever amoral because
Christianity had to happen, to destroy it, in order to save it, and properly
frame it. Caligula, for one, had
absolute power and was absolutely unhinged from moral constraint. The lesson for all good Western children is
that power freed from an ethical framing is vile. There is a clear rupture in Western history,
restart the calendar with the introduction of Christ and a millenarian promise. A progressive march from the darkness,
through much greater darkness to the reclamation of Greek and Roman thinking,
applied reason, scientific methodology toward a future that is an unerring
waddle towards quantifiable betterment.
And with each lurch, each notch of clear progress the renewed tension to
reconcile or evolve our ideas of what is moral, even if formal religion itself
is largely disposed of in the process.
We drive the future. We will be
first to articulate what electricity should mean for people, what an atomic age
should mean, what an Internet should operate like.
How different the Chinese view of
history! For all but the last hundred
years the past was the ideal type. The
Zhou had harmony, the Han had dignity, and the Tang had territory. [2]
Answers to all questions concerning statecraft could be found in the past. Tune properly and enjoy the mandate for a
longer time perhaps, but know that it must pass eventually and your line will
one day fall and the cycle will begin again. The best ruler can only aspire to
what has already been achieved. Defeats,
indignation, scientific reasoning, dialectical materialism, altered the gaze
forward. Modern China, progresses now,
linearly, with the rest of the world.
Catching up, overtaking has been an irrepressible theme for the last
hundred-year dash. Belief systems then
again, play catch up as they are lapped and lapped again by technological
enablement. China wants to drive the
future, but still must craft beliefs in reaction as others secure and
articulate ever, new technical vistas.
The CCP will try to fashion a new articulation, of modern Chinese
dignity, drawing expediently from the vast tradition, but it will never dispel
the notion that the mandate must one day pass.
How will Chinese ethics explain
things when the breakthrough belongs to them, as it soon will? They’ll need to assert what this means for
the world. Not simply react to another
Western realization of progress. How will
the West grapple with disruptive innovation, and ethical catch-up to an
entirely non-Western power? Can the West
and China articulate a new, hybrid ethical paradigm to buttress their shared
responsibility for stability’s stewardship?
Richard Oppenheimer reached to the Bhagavad-Gita when he welcomed the
dire responsibilities of the Atomic age.
The West has long enjoyed sole authorship of progress’
articulation. The CCP increasingly
allows the nation to debate and define what a Chinese authored progress, that
long sought dream, will mean for the nation and the world. Whether you're a Confucian who believes in
dynastic cycles or a Marxist who knows that every economic system develops
internal contradictions that lead to its’ demise, you know that this
conversation is looming. It will stretch
the nation terribly and compromise stability and quite possibly, one Party rule
itself.
A “Chinese authored progress”: Is this really pending for the world? Depending on where you’re sitting you might be
seen as a Snickers bar treat or a rotten egg trick. The West’s ability to solely define what
progress is, appears to be passing though, like this autumn day into the
exiting night ahead.
The Geraldo Pino & the Heartbeats song “Heavy, Heavy,
Heavy” came on the mix this morning. Fine
repetitive resonance that, for meditation on the theme of gluttony. Photographs of Geraldo suggest he could
certainly have set out trick-or-treating as a convincing James Brown. This song is on a bunch of West African
compilations. The groove is tight and
the organ driven break is catchy but I never considered it for much beyond
that. With lyrics like “the way she does the funky dances, she’s really, really,
heavy.” I’d assumed I’d plumbed where it was Geraldo was coming from.
And geographically speaking, I’d assumed that was
Nigeria. And I was wrong. He and the Heartbeats are, in fact, from Sierra
Leone. This was curious, as Ghana and
Nigeria always get all the attention, certainly musically at least, within
English-speaking West Africa. Nigeria
has by far the largest population.
Sierra Leone is only one fifth the population of Ghana and one
thirty-fifth the population of Nigeria.
Rdio has the album “Heavy, Heavy, Heavy” that must have all
must have been recorded at roughly the same time as the aforementioned track,
which is roughly 1972, so I dug in. I
hadn’t been aware of his afro-centric, black power agenda, beyond the heavy
dancing bit. Nor did I understand his
influence on the apogee of West African popular music, Fela Ransome Kuti: http://www.retroafric.com/html/sl_notes/20cd-3.html
As Fela told the author Carlos
Moore in his 1982 biography:
"I was playing highlife jazz
when Geraldo Pino came to town in '66 or a bit earlier with soul. That's what
upset everything, man. He came to town with James Brown's music, singing,
"Hey, hey, I feel all right, ta, ta, ta, ta. . . " And with such
equipment you've never seen, man. This man was tearing Lagos to pieces.
Wooooooooh, man. He had all Nigeria in his pocket. Made me fall right on my
ass, man. Ahhhhhh, this Sierra Leonean guy was too much. Geraldo Pino from
Sierra Leone. I'll never forget him. I never heard this kind of music before-o,
I'm telling you. Only when I went to Ghana shortly after that did I hear music
like that again, soul music. Shit! If you could have seen him, man. And his
equipment . . . something else!
I never got to visit Sierra Leone. Shortly after I might have there was a
terrible civil war. I remember meeting a
British woman who was teaching Freetown and she told me that she’d write her
tests in the morning and give it to one of her staff to mimeograph and then
find it for sale in the market, in the afternoon. I hadn’t realized that the nation, or
Freetown, the capital, at least was a city of immigrants with a long tradition
of higher education, not to mention heavy dances. With slavery abolished in 1808, it became a
melting pot of various West African people’s, freed slaves and returnees from
the West Indies and elsewhere.
Twenty-five years later the first European style university in
sub-Saharan Africa was opened there, anchoring the city as a regional center of
learning.
A few posts backed I’d talked about the soft power flow of
American Rhythm and Blues returning to West Africa and shaking performers like
Fela. But it is important to remember
that welterweights like Sierra Leone could also export disruptive, “heavy” soft
power.
So which nation will be the next one to assert soft power so
convincingly, that the children of the other nations all begin to celebrate
their holiday? This may beyond the
capacity of a flyweight, or even a middleweight to achieve. This ‘heavy, heavy’ testimony of
civilizational prowess will likely go to whoever is most convincingly driving
the arc of modernity.
[2] The Zhou Dynasty was the paragon of harmonic
virtue for writers such as Confucius during the Spring and Autumn Period. The Han have been popularized as dignified
through and San Guo where Liu Bei fought to restore the Han line’s dignity as
they slipped into the chaos of the Three Kingdoms period. Ask ten Chinese people what Dynasty would you
like to have lived in, if you could have lived in any, and nine will reply “The
Tang”. Usually the reason has something
to do with size and strength. The Tang
territory was Han Chinese and bigger than any other until the Qing, which was a
non-Han, Alien controlled dynastic period.
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