<Truth and winning hardly ever go with upset and nervous, and sensitivity is not required.
Like I noted before, all is as it should be, going in the correct direction, correcting past accidents, towards new order, or is that the new new order.>
Quite right Jay.
Perhaps Brianh is nervous and upset. I'm not sure.
I checked myself to see how I fit in and found no upset and nerves. I find excitement and anticipation as when I sense victory in the offing.
It probably seems silly to the point of absurdity to you, but riding my bicycle down to Tienanmen Square for the dawn flag raising and to inspect, absorb, and view the cat inside China's Schrodinger box, to check it out for signs of life, direction and expectation, wearing the red scarf, and gloves loaned to me by a French Canadian guy we met at the hostel, I felt a thrill of success - the delicious expectation of it anyway. <I note that the journey towards TeoTwawKi and Collapse of whatever year is as delicious as delicious can be >
As you say, the journey is delicious. The arrival is somehow anticlimactic, prosaic and normal. Mountain climbers say that. Once the summit is achieved, the journey is over and while the success of the summit is what is desired, the moment passes quickly and then there's only the tidying up and return to base to be carried out.
Standing in front of QUALCOMM several years ago, phoning home with my newly acquired CDMA phone, was like standing on the summit. The journey was the best part, the moment of celebration but an acknowledgement of the success. Now, CDMA is just a phone, albeit with new byways and challenges and successes as new summits are scaled, new EV-DO achieved, new victories announced.
Anyway, that cold, bright, morning in Beijing, as the crowds milled, ran, and the song was sung and the flag raised and the glory of megalomania announced its success on a new day, I was unimpressed as I saw but a passing pretence.
As I played with the crowd and gently baited the plain-clothed taciturn guards and smiled at the sentries who couldn't help but smile back at the joy of freedom which they would so love, I could see that I was going to win and they were going to lose, because they weren't even really there.
They have already moved on in their minds to freedom and are just waiting for the day to make that phone call to announce their success and share their experience. There is nobody to defend the charade which all saluted. Just a few taciturn guards who secretly know their number is up unless they can keep the mob suppressed. Do the crowds in Freedom Rock salute the flag at dawn each day and sing its praises?
There was nothing they could do about a single, red-flag-flying nobody happily bicycling, having fun and inviting them to join. Some scowled, but nearly everyone smiled. Just below the surface were cheerful people waiting for their time.
It was not at all like, and quite the opposite of, an experience from 30 years ago [mid 1974] when we [wife and I] went walking in a market in some town in Yugoslavia. Never before or since [*] have I seen such a serious, sober-sided, going-about-their-business, sullen, taciturn crowd in circumstances where people are usually in their bustling happier social mode. Being young and relatively ignorant, it was only later events which completed the picture for me = a genocidal war in the area, which I suppose they knew, deep in their hearts, or perhaps not all that deep, was coming, one of these days, and it would not be good.
Beijing on the other hand, has a happy expectant sense of impending change. And it's not that the glory of Yiwu the Mad will murder heaps of Taiwanese and force them and the other billion or so under the megalomaniac yoke.
But, there are other potential truths lurking in the byways and alleys and hutongs - a nasty streak of young aggressive males training their psyches in the MAD maelstrom of cyberspace wars in the smokey cybercafes, with the older folks watching them with some dismay. Maybe they'll mature and be tamed by women, and daughters, as men are.
We'll see.
This is a LOT of fun. Victory is just over the next ridge, or the one after that. I doubt that Hu Jintao will upset the apple cart with a MAD attack on Taiwan, which would in all likelihood bounce straight back in the parallel mirror-world onto him.
Mqurice
PS: *On reflection, the melanin-rich of Capetown a few months before were as sullen, glowering out of surly eyes, but I knew then what was the issue there. I don't know if they still wear that scowl. I suppose so as things are still bad and badder. |
