Thursday, January 24, 2019

The Sad Vocabulary Magnifies





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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