Dreaming in the morning. Half asleep, half awake. Trying to read a Chinese article. No, it really was fascinating. Dreaming, my mind conjured
an old black and white movie set in an apartment that looked like something the
Honeymooners, or Lucy and Ricky, might have resided in. There was a woman in a dress, with a big hat
on, singing a song by the fire escape. It
was oddly a-contextual as it seemed she was singing the national anthem, but in
a comic fashion.
Then on the third
line of the song, through the window by the fire escape in came Frank Sinatra and
he sang this line and it was ironic and funny and if I recall correctly there
was canned laughter at this. And my
dreaming mind hadn’t had much time to plan all of this: To make the third line funny. It just, seemingly worked that way.
Later, going in
the laundry room to grab a tee-shirt, I marveled at how my sleeping mind had
done that and it was then that I thought to write about this incident and
capture that epiphany. But now, thirty
minutes later, recalling the anthem to illustrate the point none of the lines
of song work to illustrate much of anything. “What
so proudly we hailed” has no ironic poignancy. Maybe a smidgin? Neither would “And the rockets red glare.” Perhaps the song wasn’t the national anthem at all. Or conversely maybe my mind was queued up to
consider this absurd entrance through the window as funny and assigned “proudly
we hailed” as a knee-slapper. Whereas, regarded with a conscious mind, it isn’t very
funny at all. Somnambulant, perhaps I just needed the atmosphere of levity.
Read, once again, in
the Chinese press about Meng Wanzhou and Huawei. A Canadian ambassador to China had tried to critique
the arrest of Ms. Meng and then later was forced to retract his statement. Within this article they mention of the U.S. Colombia
professor Jeffery Sachs, whom I’ve seen speak before and whose books I’ve read,
and his article criticizing Meng’s treatment and illustrating the hypocrisy of
the U.S. position. He points out that
numerous U.S. and E.U. institutions like J.P. Morgan were also caught up in violations of U.S. trade restrictions with regards to Iran. They paid heavy fines. But no one is pulling Jaimie Daimon off a plane. He lists two dozen such institutions. This is the first of any such
company where corporate leadership has been imprisoned. Why begin that practice with China and not
with a domestic company? https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-war-on-huawei-meng-wanzhou-arrest-by-jeffrey-d-sachs-2018-12
Apparently he got
so much criticism for the article he closed out his Twitter account and was
accused of being a shill. The China article I was reading rightly, if
hypocritically, question if this is was differing views and free speech look
like. The other point Sachs makes is
that, while Meng was on a flight to Canada, and changing flights to Mexico, she
was held, extraterritorially at the request of the U.S. as if China should have
such a right to arrest Americans on Thai soil with regards to its' domestic laws.
Odd, that I had to learn about this article,
reading about it in the Chinese press.
My niece is studying there at Colombia.
I must remind her to take one of Jeffery Sachs courses. I did and she is considering it.
I also sent her a
link to Joe Wong on the Late Show with Steve Colbert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36v9GSOFMFc We caught him last night here in Beijing. We don’t usually get out too much of anything
as a family in this city, as I’ve previously lamented, but my chum who was
hosting it graciously invited us and in as much as my son and his wife had
already bought tickets I rallied the family.
At the last moment my wife bailed.
My older one then complained: “nobody told me.” My son and I agreed that the older one and
her mother are alike. Once they say “no,”
the position isn’t likely to change.
But I'm set in my ways as well and I don’t give up easily at all. Thwarted
through the front door I returned to suggest that she invite a friend since her
mom wasn’t coming. A crack had been
opened, clearly. And in the end we
invited two of her friends and the little one. The material was gentle enough that I didn’t
have any regrets brining my fourteen year-old.
I looked over more than once to find them all laughing. I guess I liked my chum’s MC-ing as much as
anything. Wong was disarmingly endearing
and I found his material funny if not uproariously so. He touched upon matters of race, and trade,
though gingerly. Throughout I
appreciated the difficulty of timing and double-entendres in a foreign
language. Humor is always the final
frontier in foreign language acquisition.
I wondered to myself if he was also funny in Chinese or whether or not I'd have what it takes to discern this.
Sunday, 01/27/19
