XIAO BU SHI (Little Bush)

Here's something you don't see in the American media. Notice the lens caps on the binoculars. The Chinese media is full of pictures like this of our leader looking dumb. But this one is old. A French businessman working in the Shanghai pesticide business told me about it last week in the PuDong lounge one of my buddies sings at.

He said the engineers at his company tried to blame him for building the plant that they work to develope pesticides in. How absurd! He told me this right before he got apocalyptic and said "no one is clean. Not the Chinese, the Japanese, the Americans, Europeans, anyone." He was talking about the neo-imperialistic powers, but I told him that anyone involved in anything bad from any level was to blame...And then to give him The Fear, I told him THE PEOPLE WILL RISE. And then he bought me a glass of wine while I spoke to his Chinese fiance about the 1930's-era house they're renovating.

At least the pesticides this man was developing are the same as used in Western countries, even if Chinese peasants don't know how to use them. (That's where my friend Jim and his NGO, the Pesticide Action Center, come in). They're not anything worse.