Star Wars on DVD
I Saw it Here First

A week ago, it began. First it was Yoda and Darth Vader on my bottle of tea, and then there was the Sir Alec Guinness voice of Obi-Wan Kenobe playing on a loop at the movie theater down the road loud enough for pedestrians to hear. The only reason I stop there is to buy long-distance IP phone cards from a good natured chain smoking gentleman who always tips his hat to me on my way to and from the subway station.

I broke down and saw the thing. Alone. It was one of those cultural things I had to do. I was going to see it in that small theater down the road, where I did not expect the price to be much lower, but maybe the profits to stay local.

At US $3, the tickets were cheaper than other places, but the movie was dubbed, so I said, "not ok," and went home. The next day I told a classmate that it was strange to find such cheap prices for a movie with stringent demands to milk the public with unnegotiable ticket prices.

"You forget we're in China," my classmate said. "Of course they can negotiate. They just copy."

Tonight the hawkers' suitcases were smattered with Star Wars DVDs. I overheard more than one confused foreigner trying to figure it all out. They said things like, "But this just came out four days ago. Is this the same movie that's in theaters?"

Though the sellers couldn't answer anything more than "eight yuan" (a single greenback), of course it was the same movie, except presumably there fashionable hairdos a-plenty caught on video from the camera in the back of the theater.

Denial is a Powerful Force

"The thought," wrote Arthur Miller, "that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."

As quoted in the article "Let's Face It -- the State Has Lost its Mind," by John Pilger

Gender Ed in Shanghai:
Theory Meets Practice

My unit tonight was on gender. I wanted to fuck with my students' conceptions as much as possible. Their level is pretty high, so I took liberties with grammar instruction and tried to just break down conceptions of men's and women's roles.

In groups, all but two decided that toy guns, sports, and model cars were for boys; tea sets and dollies were for girls. Any variation on that might "turn the boys into sissies" and "alter personalities and development" because "boys are aggressive" and "girls are shy." Girls are more suited for housework. Boys make better lawyers and doctors.

By the time we'd finished this small group work, I'd filled the board with constructions like this and realized I was without an exit strategy. I hadn't set this up as a debate and didn't want to take the time to set up all that language.

Of course I had an agenda--fuck with gender--but I had to appear as if I were just the mild-mannered English teacher they'd had the class before.

I asked them which they thought came first, the pressure to play with certain toys or the careers roles they were expected to fill in society.

Silence. But I knew they understood me. More or less. They were thinking.

When I had them do role plays with the men playing typical Shanghainese husbands talking to a traditional Chinese neighbor about their children playing with certain toys, all the men who thought boys should have guns and keep their distance from dolls did brilliantly. They would have made Holly Hues proud.

Shanghainese men are prized as being "our China's best" because they not only work, but cook, clean and look after little emperors. They're regular Mr. Moms.

Of course, I wasn't completely satisfied with what had transpired. I was not the spirited feminist my gender-theory pushing college profs would have expected, but I did complicate the question a bit.

On the subway home with a colleague, I asked him what he would have done differently.

"Oh, that's easy. I would have just said, 'Hmm...nobody in the west believes that any more,' or 'Wow, you really believe that?' Sell it as travel advice. You can't make it look like you've got an agenda. It's gotta be spontaneous. We're not just teaching them English. We're teaching them how to not be fools, what music to listen to. We're teaching them how to be cool."

The Mighty Hand of George Lucas
Left its Mark on My Bottle of Green Tea

What a load of crap. "Last Star Wars" blah. Sure, I'll see it, maybe in the theater, but it's just because it's cultural currency that I used to care about. It feels about as formulaic as a rant about Star Wars.

I'm just glad I'm not in the States. China's consumer market is still undeveloped enough that the only thing bearing Darth Vader's shadow and the "kick-ass" version of Yoda is a certain brand of tea I like.

Fighting Desperately the Need for Excitement
And Other T-Shirt Slogans

Set grid coordinates for the obscure t-shirt producing planet known as earth.

I buy most of my clothes on the street. Tonight, on the way home from work, a tight sleeveless shirt with lizards caught my attention. I stooped over the plastic tarp and bartered the price down to five bucks for two shirts, the lizard one and the title of this post, a masterpiece of nonsense in graphical form. "Fighting" is splashed Superman-style across the chest, with "the need for excitement" as the subtitle. It's good because it almost makes sense and almost fits my toned down sense of adventure-seeking. Anyone who spends as much time in a lotus position looking at the back of his eyelids as I do would probably come to the same realization: that excitement isn't a need.

Regular Oblique: Basic Concepts

This cost eighty cents on the streets of Chittagong, Bangladesh. It's baby blue with flashy surfer designs in orange and black. I wear it to the gym because I want people to know I ain't no special kind of oblique.

No Sex, Just Masturbration

This I stole from a Thai lover's closet. I figured I needed it more than he did. I haven't "masturbrated" once since then.

Another Skinhead for Peace

That's me since I shaved my head again. It's got Gandhi on the front. Chinese ask who it is and then tell me there's a resemblance.

May t-shirts continue to lead humanity into the future they so boldly herald!

When New School is Still Old School:
A Neo-Confucianist Take on Principle

Because of all the ritual, reverence and general rectitude of the man, I never thought much of Confucius until I read some of the later thinkers. In Philip Ivanhoe's book "Confucian Moral Self Cultivation," these insights by a Qing Dynasty philosopher and philologist, Dai Zhen, jumped out at me. I think they're relevant now as ever.

Someone asked, "What did the ancients mean by heavenly principle?"

(Dai) responded, "Principle is feelings that do not err. One can never be without the proper feelings and still have principle. Whenever one does something to another, one should turn within onself and calmly consider, If another had done this to me would I be willing to accept it? Whenever one requests something of another, one should turn within onself and calmly consider, If another requested this of me would I be willing to do it? If one measures (ones treatment of) others with oneself, then principle will be clear."

***

When the ancients talked about principle, they sought for it in human feelings and desires; they took following principle to be a matter of causing feelings and desires to be without flaw. When people today talk about principle, they seek for it apart from human feelings and desires; they take following principle to be a matter of causing oneself to endure yet be indifferent to feelings and desires. This distinction between principle and desire is just the thing that will turn the people of the world into deceivers and hypocrites.

--from sections 2 & 42 of the Mengzi Ziyi Shuzheng ("The Meaning of Terms in the Mencius Explained and Verified") by Dai Zhen (1723-1777)

Back on the Blog

One of my classmates fixed my laptop yesterday, so now I'm back online. This doesn't necessarily mean I'll update more often, but there's a good chance.

Impeachment Time: "Facts Were Fixed"
Special to BuzzFlash
Thursday, May 5, 2005
By Greg Palast

Hmmm...

Here it is. The smoking gun. The memo that has "IMPEACH HIM" written all over it.

The top-level government memo marked "SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL," dated eight months before Bush sent us into Iraq, following a closed meeting with the President, reads, "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Read that again: "The intelligence and facts were being fixed...."

For years, after each damning report on BBC TV, viewers inevitably ask me, "Isn't this grounds for impeachment?" -- vote rigging, a blind eye to terror and the bin Ladens before 9-11, and so on. Evil, stupidity and self-dealing are shameful but not impeachable. What's needed is a "high crime or misdemeanor."

And if this ain't it, nothing is.

The memo, uncovered this week by the Times, goes on to describe an elaborate plan by George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to hoodwink the planet into supporting an attack on Iraq knowing full well the evidence for war was a phony.

A conspiracy to commit serial fraud is, under federal law, racketeering. However, the Mob's schemes never cost so many lives.

Here's more. "Bush had made up his mind to take military action. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."

Really? But Mr. Bush told us, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

A month ago, the Silberman-Robb Commission issued its report on WMD intelligence before the war, dismissing claims that Bush fixed the facts with this snooty, condescending conclusion written directly to the President, "After a thorough review, the Commission found no indication that the Intelligence Community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq's weapons."

We now know the report was a bogus 618 pages of thick whitewash aimed to let Bush off the hook for his murderous mendacity.

Read on: The invasion build-up was then set, says the memo, "beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections." Mission accomplished.

You should parse the entire memo -- posted on my website -- and see if you can make it through its three pages without losing your lunch.

Now sharp readers may note they didn't see this memo, in fact, printed in the New York Times. It wasn't. Rather, it was splashed across the front pages of the Times of LONDON on Monday.

It has effectively finished the last, sorry remnants of Tony Blair's political career. (While his Labor Party will most assuredly win the elections Thursday, Prime Minister Blair is expected, possibly within months, to be shoved overboard in favor of his Chancellor of the Exchequer, a political execution which requires only a vote of the Labour party's members in Parliament.)

But in the US, barely a word. The New York Times covers this hard evidence of Bush's fabrication of a casus belli as some "British" elections story. Apparently, our President's fraud isn't "news fit to print."

My colleagues in the UK press have skewered Blair, digging out more incriminating memos, challenging the official government factoids and fibs. But in the US press
nada, bubkes, zilch. Bush fixed the facts and somehow that's a story for "over there."

The Republicans impeached Bill Clinton over his cigar and Monica's affections. And the US media could print nothing else.

Now, we have the stone, cold evidence of bending intelligence to sell us on death by the thousands, and neither a Republican Congress nor what is laughably called US journalism thought it worth a second look.

My friend Daniel Ellsberg once said that what's good about the American people is that you have to lie to them. What's bad about Americans is that it's so easy to do.

And what's going to happen now? Iran's all teed up. So says Little Bush from the golf course. "We must fight these terrorist killers...Now watch this drive."

Shuikou, Zhejiang Province
Four Nights at a Buddhist Temple in the Chinese Countryside


At the temple.


Some of the scenery of Shuikou (water mouth) in northeast Zhejiang Province, four hours from Shanghai proper.


Your narrator, up early (every day we woke at 4am) collecting bamboo shoots in the bamboo forest surrounding the temple.


The incomprehensible local we called "old uncle" digging up bamboo shoots. He must have been seventy and smoked like nobody's business.


Another visitor to the temple. We were in tea country.


At a park with your narrator, Shuikou's Deputy Mo, and two new friends.


Playing the qin in the bamboo forest.

Now it's back to Shanghai. I've already begun teaching again. Tomorrow I return to Chinese classes from this mid-semester break. Hope you enjoyed!