China.

China.

China.

I can’t stop reading about it. I can’t stop thinking about it. I find myself making gloomy observations to the effect that China is a dangerous giant poised to depose the United States as the global super-power, eschewing any regard for human rights or governmental transparency as it does so. The fact that I make such observations almost exclusively to myself, muttering them under my breath on the subway, has severely compromised my claims to sanity, and has reduced my social circle to a few sympathetic lunatics who meet bi-weekly in an alley in Chinatown to discuss, among other things, the troubling ascendancy of China and the best place to find discarded Q-tips with which to receive messages from God.

I am not well.

Are we looking at a 21^st century wherein America will struggle to retain super-power status while at the same trying to court “friendly relations” with this ascendant but decidedly suspect nation? If you accept the damp-pile-of-excrement assertion that part of the reason we invaded Iraq was to “free” the Iraqi people and depose a notorious human-rights violator (and God help you if you do), how do we then justify our tacit acceptance of China’s even more vile and outrageous oppressions and executions? Saddam Hussein was a criminal and a dictator by any standards, but in China they execute people for breaking wind, and they do it on-stage. How can we take a stand on anything while maintaining a close economic relationship with a country that is self-righteously criminal? And if you’re answer is that we as a nation are self-righteously criminal as well, ok, but our government doesn’t shoot people in public, and we shouldn’t diplomatically prostrate ourselves before a nation that does so.

I understand that refusing to participate in the Olympics would be perceived as a sanction and would be a diplomatic mistake we can not afford (literally) to make. But how are we going to move ahead in to a Chinese-dominated 21^st Century if we don’t call them on their criminality here and now? If we are perhaps already in their pocket in a financial sense, do we really want to be guilty by ideological association as well?

Add to all this the fact that they’ve got a whole hell of a lot of people and they’ve got The Bomb, and you have a recipe that has reduced this anonymuncule to a cowering, timorous shell of a man increasingly convinced that the U.S. is on its way to Hell in a handbasket. The label on the handbasket, incidentally, reads “Made in China”. See what I did there?

Oh well, at least things in Russia are stable. That’s a relief.  

I’ll be in bed if you need me.

Help,

Dermott McCallscreener

P.S. Today is the luckiest of all days in Chinese popular lore. I stubbed my toe first thing this morning. Go figure.