Gee, This is Butrressing

One airplane ritual is to pick up a copy of a whatever Chinese language paper is available as I walk on the plane and the English language “China Daily.”  Reading the Chinese language paper I’m forced to slow my progression to a crawl, discerning meaning, character pair by pair. Can I discern the main topic?  Can I follow the general thread?  I’ll confess it’s an awful lot easier when there’s a photo Xi Jinping shovelling dirt to guide me.

Having pushed through with the pushups, the English language China Daily is certainly clearer.  I noticed this morning, reading a brief article entitled “China’s Smart Cities to Number 500 This Year” that I was responding to the article on a few levels:  Gee, that’s a lot of smart cities, gee, this is buttressing my sense of China’s “inevitable” tryst with hegemony, and gee this is precisely why this article was written, to make me feel this way.  The New York Times article would be titled “Obama Administration Smart City Initiative Plagued with Inefficiencies.”  I would imagine that I was looking passed the rhetoric into the “real” story about how once again something we tried to do at a national level, was a failure.

For many years I wondered when it would be that a critical mass of tens of millions of educated Chinese would become so cynical with state sanctioned propaganda that it would be effectively made redundant and be disposed of like so many Flying Pigeon bicycles.  But people suckled on a good-news-only diet tend to like and expect good news.  And as it concerns national development in a place like here that has a national mission there is utility in reminding everyone where the Party wants you to know the nation is heading.

We don’t seem to have a national mission any more.  “Free markets and democracy” has been weathered down to nub from the Reagan_Thatcher rhetorical pillar they enjoyed after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Our domestic narrative is a vortex of division and loathing just now.  War or natural disaster will likely be what arises in the jungle and forces us Darwinian,-like to evolve our sense of national or human purpose.

Saturday 04/22/17