How Wrong Everyone Was

Last night I dinned with good friends at their place.  If you search the name Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, or NHOP, in Dustybrine you should find an entry from a few years back, describing another night I’d dined there.  This friend cooks well.  He made the same frittata last time and it was just as delicious.  The BBQ was done well, the wine was to savor. 

It was an evening you could be smug about being in Beijing.  How wrong everyone was who characterized this place as a hardship.  Sure we had our polluted days.  But nights like this, well, this was Mediterranean.  The whole table agreed that we liked the capital better than Shanghai.  How wrong everyone else was who thought otherwise.   The young son of one of the guests came and sat on his lap and I couldn’t help but comment as to how much his eyes resembled those of this father.

Is the state more prevalent here or in northern Europe?  In northern Europe, the state will send someone to your home after you have a child to ‘see how you’re doing’ and ‘make sure everything is under control,” and in doing so they probably improve child care and protect some percentage of children from neglect, but they also clearly push the eye of the state into people’s lives in a way that would never be possible in Wyoming or indeed, Beijing.

It took a suggestion from me, I think, to let everyone know that we could talk freely about Trump.  Once I made it clear that I loathed the man and considered him a national embarrassment the flood gates opened and they sighed and new they could leave caution behind and speak freely with their American guest.  Did this suggest the durability or the fragility of the U.S. system?  If this were a parliamentary system he’d be out by now, but regardless they only gave him one more year max before he was removed.  And this, was important, that they had to ironically thank Donald Trump for providing Europe and opening to finally assert more leadership than had otherwise been possible.   America would survive this president, but American unipolar hegemony may not.  They found it unexpected and fascinating that it was not a rising China which had forced this issue, but rather, a retreating U.S.

Saturday, 06/10/17