Loud, Abject Denial

A friend has written expressing exasperation with Louis C.K.  It seems that every morning I wake up these days another man has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior.   Normally this group of friends is free with absurd commentary, puns on top of puns and irony smeared with abandon, but the mood among this group of mostly men is rather sullen in response to this female friend’s note. 

I’ve never been a big fan of Louis C.K.  Everyone I knew adored him.  He is certainly funny, and there have been a few things I’ve seen that were meritorious.  I enjoyed the bit with him in the car with his kids singing “Who Are You’ and nearly swiping someone and to be fair I haven't seen much of his work.  But the few bits of his T.V. show that I saw seemed forced, implausible, as when he confronts a lady heckler during what is supposed to be a live show. Unfairly, I hold all contemporary comics up against Bill Hicks whom I adored and find them mostly wanting.  My friend booked Louis C.K. when he came to Beijing, and the comic ended up making a mess of it, crossing a line he shouldn’t have and nearly getting my friend in trouble.  As I recall, it was the comic’s manger - the same fella who bullied the ladies Mssr. C.K. jerked-off in front of, to keep their mouth's shut - who insisted it was somehow, all my chum’s fault.  Enjoy.

Many of the people who have been confronted a have admitted that the accusations are true, have tried to explain themselves have suggested they have a problem to work on.  Others have been fired before they could issue a statement.  The sad lesson thus far seems to be that loud, abject denial is an effective strategy.  How could it be that so many other people have fallen from grace and yet Donald Trump, the despite a litany of public accusers and admission of predatory behavior on film can continue along in his role?   Well, you see, he denies it. 

Now Roy Moore informs us that he doesn’t “generally” date teenage girls.  How can these people be taken seriously?  One, two and then four or five women have come out to accuse Moore of inappropriate behavior with him when they were teens.  Trump of course, has been the only major Republican or Democrat outside the state of Alabama whose come out in support of Moore.  And it is draining, so perpetually draining to watch him escape the comeuppance that every other person in his position has faced, simply by denying any of it ever happened.  The lesson flashing like neon over and over to children, to the world, to women, to me.  One has to believe that the reckoning will come, eventually.  This, in order to stay sane. 

In the meantime there is a remarkable frankness about abuse and intolerance for the patriarchy’s heretofore business as usual . . . for all beside the Commander in Chief and the people he endorses.

Sunday, 11/12/17

My That is Missing

I was wrapped up in my reading on the flight.   As soon as we touch ground I need to jump on a three o’clock call.  I watched the city skyline parade by at a distance, in a way I hadn’t see in before with the now, nearly finished, colossal Zun tower, newly defining the progression.  Uncharacteristically I had a window seat and the distance between where we’re landing and the section of the city I just considered is off-putting.  It couldn’t be that close.  A giant could cover the distance in two or three strides. 

I’d had a brief conversation with the man beside me as only happens it seems when you’re in a business class seat.  Otherwise people are just too close and your every effort is to keep them at-bay with your personal space protected.  He is in construction and I’m not exactly sure that we’ll ever have a reason to chat again but I scan his wechat regardlss and wish him an amiable farewell.  It’s not until I get in the ugly cab queue and reach for my laptop to draw a charge for my phone that I realize I’ve left my laptop on the plane.  I see.  

Back up at the domestic arrivals the kid informs me of what I already know.  “You can’t go back in.”  “So where do I go?”  “Lost and found is around the corner.”  And, indeed it is.  I’ve seen it there for years and never known what it was.  I explain the situation and the pleasant young lady in the corner behind the counter confirms that I’ll need to wait for forty-five minutes while they bring it out.  “You know, I have a young girl who’s in a play tonight.  I can’t be late.”  She takes this in.  “If you’re lucky they’ll be here in thirty.”  I fill out a card, show my passport and ask the lady if I can charge my phone in the socket behind her, which she helps me to do. 

I decide to take a walk from one end of arrivals to the other.  “You like a taxi?”  I dismiss the touts and slowly, reluctantly, return to the counter and take a seat on a corner couch, behind a large cart full of left-luggage.  A woman has come in asking for a black bag.  The cleaning lady has a brown bag. “Did you find a black bag?”  "No.  Just the brown one." The lady is nervous and is calling people, over and over again.  Her identity card is in the bag.  I ask her if she wants a seat.  She does not.  

Two or three additional hard-luck stories stop in.  I lost this.  My that is missing.  Check if you found it?  I try my best to read my book but all I’m really doing is staring at the clock.  At the forty-five minute mark I look and then try to go back to my book but I can’t.  I go to stand outside.  Not long after, two young ladies who are dressed like boiler room engineers saunter up with a cart.  I spy my laptop.  "Thank you!”            

Inside I need to sign the form again.  The young lady asks me to enter the computer’s security code.  I can do this and she turns the laptop over to me.  Thank you, thank you, thank you and I’m out the door with my computer now zipped up in my bag and a hand in an empty pocket.  Turn back around.  They are still charging your phone behind the counter.  You’ll want that. 

Saturday, 11/11/17

With Sublime Confidence

Down below.  Down below are the arid plains of Bejing.  I’ve just finished up my time with Somerset Maugham on this flight.  A happy ending.  Philip finally surrenders to the here and now.  He’s no longer waiting for anything, his degree, his about-to-die uncle, his trip to Spain.  I’m been with Philip from his first years till his mid-life thirties for seven hundred pages or so.  It isn’t the sparse artistry of Waugh, where a snicker or a “right” can serve for a chapter’s worth of explanation.  Much of Philip’s interior is not left to the imagination.  At least Mildred didn’t return as anything other than an apiration at the end of “Of Human Bondage.” 

It’s one thing to read about someone’s old-man-of-thirty worries as a fifty-one year old.  I could do with a bit of thirty something.  I’m sure there are no shortage of septuagenarians who could do with a bit of fifty-something. 

Outside the mighty jet engine is shaking in the wind.  It’ a good thing we don’t concentrate on it all that to much.  Be a shame to see it fly off from it’s welding. The gent beside me is so proud and confident about China.  “I had thought about sending my kids over seas but now I think, I’ll keep them here.”  It reminds one of the naïve confidence of Americans, who are visiting early twentieth century Paris in “Of Human Bondage.”  They bounce around with sublime confidence, they boast of their country and they have money to burn. 

Lovely day.  At least up here at twenty-thousand feet.  Seems a bit hazy now as we descend closer to the ground.  I’ve had cabbies and business prospects and waitresses all comment on the important new environmental protection laws that the country has enacted.  Note the subtle power of the propaganda apparatus: the message even reaches me.  “This winter no one will burn coal.”  This seems noble but impossible to believe.  I can only assume the first really frigid morning will be one that waxes bituminous when you step outside to breath. The enforcement of impressive laws, is always China’s challenge.  But lets see.  Americans learned to not throw trash out the window of their cars in my generation, thanks to the not-so-subtle propaganda of the crying American Indian public service message we were all subjected to.

Outside, we’re not there yet.  But perhaps this winter will be a bit better.  Perhaps the propaganda message is contagious.  The first wretched day of poisonous air will no doubt disabuse me of this contagion.  Lower now, landing above a river which I do not recognize.  Let’s go to the country this weekend.  Perhaps I can talk them all into that. 

Friday 11/10/17

On Ignoring The Screecher

When you sign up to take the last flight down to Shanghai it always seems like a good idea.  You imagine the extra time with the family and the down-time asleep on the flight.  But you forget how grinding it is to arrive somewhere at midnight.  The cab queue at Hong Qiao Airport was perhaps the longest I’ve ever seen.  This must be a function of fewer late night taxis as much as a surge of people.  But I will say this for the Shanghai airport functionaries, they know how to move a crowd.  The line moved more swiftly than it would have in Beijing, let alone anywhere in the U.S. 

I was enjoying some loud rock anthem when I heard some screeching above the tube amp crunch of distorted bar chord.  I removed my ear buds to find a young Chinese gentleman arguing with a young Chinese woman behind him in the line beside mine.  He suggested she mind her business in reasonable English.  She told him she’d mind whatever they hell she wanted in less reasonable English.  Then he took to ignoring her and she began to enumerate to the person next to her and indeed to all of the two hundred people in line why this guy was an asshole in loud, southern accented, Chinese. 

The line snakes around in an S shaped pen with at least five coils of turns so that once, and twice and three times more I get to slowly watch this odd pair approach, the taller guy is now frustrated, set on ignoring the screecher.  The lady continuing to complain aloud, over and over about the man.  I am very, very, tempted to say something biting to her as she passes close, but it is, of course, pointless.  This sort of street level haranguing that goes on ad nauseam and never results in blows or in fact anything really, is certainly another great refinement of the Shanghainese. 

Check in late.  Up to bed.  They are trying to be nice here at the Royal Meridien in Shanghai but I’d really rather they didn’t put this enormous complementary brownie they leave here in my room.  I should pick it up and immediately flush it down the toilet.  I wouldn’t normally eat a brownie before bed, but once I take a nibble, I’m sure to finish the whole thing.   

The next morning I lead a training with young Chinese professionals.  I talk to them about the differences between Chinese and U.S. culture and I provide a bit of theory to buttress what I’m saying.  They are confident, and humble, smart and open minded, a lovely group of young people.  I suggest to them that they are ambassadors of Chinese civilization and to not be afraid about their assignments in America.  I end by reminding them of how fortunate they are to have these chances that would have been all but impossible for nearly any Chinese generation before them.  And this finds its mark. 

Thursday, 11/09/17

Which China?

“China is different.”  “Really?  Precisely how so?  Which China?  Different from before the time you were born?”  I find myself having a harder and harder time keeping still when someone in their twenties utters the first statement with great solemnity in a tech business context.

This particular company was located down in a glistening tower in Huamao zhongxin.  I can remember staring out that way at a row of five story, eighties vintage dull apartment blocks that ran along the “outskirts” of the city along Jianguomen, beyond the third ring road in the late nineties.  I was sitting in a “China is Different” new building at that time that Motorola had just moved its office into and claimed for its own with its eight big letters up atop the building.  The identical building beside it housed Hewlett Packard. 

These young people today are part of a company that has taken a disruptive model for delivering real estate services and adapted it, with seemingly great success to a Chinese context.  They use free, open source versions of software and they are considering whether or not to license an enterprise version.  “We’d like to see a case study.”  We’ll, this is a reasonable question but, “I shared one of the precise U.S. company you modelled your business on, which describes in great detail how they use it.  And I showed you that earlier in our meeting this afternoon.  I don’t know that I have anything more contextual than that.” 

And then, in Chinese to my colleagues, as if I couldn’t possibly understand, we get:  “you see, China is different.”   Something about the hunrizi, passive manner in which this is uttered, suggesting that he is not content to have meaningful information brought to him but rather needs it gently spoon fed, something about the absolute confidence is China’s impenetrability, when he’s lived on earth less time than I’ve been in this city works to draw bile.   China is at its best when it is hungry and curious.  I’m tired of meetings with sated, dullards. 

Wednesday 11/08/17