Stories
that don’t get captured in my New York Times perusal, wind up being the thing I
read most of. Today I found an article
about a coal mining accident. The mine
had outsourced digging to a group of miners.
The shaft collapsed. Sixty of
them escaped or were rescued, but twenty-one miners did not. Five deaths at a bank in Florida merits front
page coverage. But twenty-one miners in Zhengba
County in Shanxi province are presumably one of dozens of stories that the
editors must pass on.
This
was set up as a sorrowful tale of wives and kids who were waiting for men to
return for holiday season, who were left with nothing but tragedy, instead of
their husbands. I read the article over
and over and someone was held accountable, of course. Someone was arrested. Someone will be made to pay for this loss. But it all feels, reading across languages
like so much theatre. And the repetition of the sad vocabulary magnifies the misery of the tale.
I
finished off one, updated syllabus today.
It always takes longer than you think.
They want me to teach the same course, for fewer hour, and of course
less money, this year. What to cut
out? What to update? Some pieces of information published in the
calendar year “2018” are already stale.
Some things I’d used last year written in 2016 had seemed fresh. Now, reading them over, discussing Obama’s
approach to U.S.-China relations seems like ancient history, two years into the
Checker-Player-in-Chief’s regime.
It is supposed to be about
the “Asian Century.” I have taken that
to mean the one that proceeded and the one that may follow. If we’re going to talk about China, we should
start in the past. Let’s begin where the
revolutionary period begins, with a new foreign ideology and a medieval war,
back in 1850 when the U.S. was having its rather modern civil war, the Chinese
waged the last medieval war. I will try
to suggest we begin there, before we can say much of anything about the rest of
this young century.
Thursday, 01/24/19
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