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 his
is going to be a booger piece...
That doesn't
look right. Hang on, let me just pull up the Jonah column that started
this train of thought. Oh, yes, here it is... Jonah:
[W]hile I've
moved toward long essay-type doohickeys, it seems like the whole
world is going in the other direction. Andrew Sullivan, Glenn
Reynolds, Virginia Postrel, Jim Romenesko, the Pope (no, no not
the Pope), Mickey Kaus, and even our own Jay Nordlinger are just
a few of the folks adopting what industry experts call the "blogger"
format.
— NRO, 11/19/01
I beg your
pardon. I should have written "blogger," not "booger,"
to mean the kind of column where you just stack up a few short cogitations
on disjoint topics, as opposed to what Jonah calls "long essay-type
doohickeys." Sorry about that.
I am still
not really fluent with U.S. juvenile slang — though, living
in a street full of kids, and with two of my own in elementary school,
I am catching up fast. "Booger" is a fairly recent addition
to my vocabulary. My kids, as it happens, have just acquired the
British equivalent. We saw that Harry Potter movie the other day,
and they were baffled by the references to "bogies." Our
12-year-old neighbor Bridget, who knows everything, chirped
up with the explanation: "'Bogie' is British English for 'booger',"
she instructed them. Indeed it is. So the little ones learn... though
the things they learn are not always things we want them
to learn.
Always on the
lookout for column topics with which to edify and uplift my readers,
I came home from the Harry Potter show wondering if there was an
NRO column to be written about boogers. Plenty of literary references
came to mind, from Swift's Strephon snooping round his sweetheart's
dressing room:
No object
Strephon's eye escapes,
Here pettycoats in frowzy heaps;
Nor be the handkerchiefs forgot
All varnish'd o'er with snuff and snot...
...to Joyce's
Ulysses and Samuel Beckett's
Molloy. The Irish seem to be big players here —
Swift was a sort of honorary Irishman, after all. Possibly that
cool, moist climate has some especially enriching effect on the
material under consideration. Although, now I come to think of it,
non-Irish authors have fingered the subject, too: There is a long
rumination by the narrator in one of Nicholson Baker's novels, that
I prefer not to recall too explicitly.
Seeking further
inspiration I pulled down from the shelf my usual recourse in such
matters, William Miller's authoritative book The
Anatomy of Disgust , and looked up "snot" in the
index. "See Nose" was the only entry. Nose
got me to a page and a half on that majestic organ, the close scrutiny
of whose contents is apparently too much even for the otherwise
intrepid Mr. Miller, who says: "I don't wish to go into excessive
detail because of the reader's likely difficulty in allowing the
topic any chance of seriousness..." He does, though, note that:
"Certain advocates of celibacy in the early church thought
it a sovereign remedy for intrusive sexual desires to meditate on
the presence of snot inside beautiful female exteriors..,"
and fortifies this observation with a long quote from the fourth-century
divine John Chrysostom. Something to keep close at hand for the
next time Gwyneth Paltrow intrudes on your spiritual tranquility.
I dumped the
idea of a booger column, though, after realizing that you can't
improve on perfection, and perfection in this area was attained
25 years ago by Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore in one of their "
Derek and Clive" sketches. This particular sketch is premised
on the conceit that the Titanic (or, as Peter Cooke calls
it, "the Ti-[expletive]-tanic") was not
really a ship at all, but a colossal booger extruded by a certain
very famous Englishman. My poor words are utterly inadequate to
transmit the comic genius of those two; I only report that when
I heard the sketch, they damn near had me convinced. So, anyway,
this will not after all be a booger piece, only a "blogger"
piece.
 My
column last Friday about the rising tide of pessimism among China
watchers drew a good mailbag with lots of solid argument pro and
con. One of the best and most informative emails came from a person
who has been doing investment research in the Asian stock markets
for ten years. He pointed me to a
presentation given this past September by Mark Matthews, chief
Asia-Pacific strategist at Standard & Poor's, about the prospects
for China in the near future from a portfolio manager's point of
view. Mark is more upbeat about China than I was in my Friday piece,
but he is no gull and knows China very well. His conclusion: China's
probably going to make it, but your investments may not. Warning:
this is a long presentation, targeted at professional investment
managers, and presupposes a certain amount of knowledge about the
economic and political development of East Asia over the past 20
years. It's a good counter-piece to
the one by Gordon Chang that I gave a link to last Friday, though.
If, after reading Gordon's testimony, you were thinking of canceling
your trip to China next year, read Mark Matthews before you call
the travel agent.
Three
or four readers of that same piece e-mailed in to ask about "gull."
What did I mean by "China gulls"? they asked. What's the
matter, you folk don't have dictionaries? Merriam-Webster's Third:
"gull, n. — a person who is easily deceived or
cheated: dupe, sucker: "had been brought down to be the gull
of this intriguer'- R.L. Stevenson." Evelyn Waugh, who was
as good a writer as it is possible to be, wrote with a dictionary
on his desk, and "consulted it frequently," his son told
us. I do, too, sort of: I have the excellent Third loaded
on my hard drive and permanently visible on my task bar. Even then
I occasionally get caught out — most recently over "flounder"
versus "founder." With words, you never stop learning.
Do
Chinese people have a sense of humor? someone asked me the other
day. They certainly do: a sly, wry, dry type of humor that I personally
find very appealing. I included a couple of specimens in my
dispatches to NRO from China this summer. Here is another one
from Bertrand Russell's autobiography. Russell lived in China for
a while in the early 1920s. While there, he wrote articles about
the country for English publications. One of the articles had the
title: "Causes of the Present Chaos." It happened that
he had a Chinese research assistant named Chao, a well-educated
man fluent in English. Seeing the article on Russell's desk, this
assistant remarked with a perfectly straight face: "Why, the
causes of the present Chaos were all the previous Chaos."
Many years
ago, in a university library in England, I read a very good book
about the Chinese sense of humor. Yes, here it is — I have
just looked it up on the excellent Abebooks
website for second-hand books: George Kao's Chinese Wit and
Humor (1946). I have, in fact, ordered a copy, and shall report
back further on this topic when I've re-read Kao.
China
again: My piece last Friday prompted one reader to ask an interesting
question. What (he wondered) does it mean to be "optimistic"
or "pessimistic" about China? Suppose I say — as
I have said — that the Communist dictatorship is sufficiently
entrenched, and has co-opted sufficiently many of the urban middle
classes, that they can go on holding power indefinitely. Is that
point of view "optimistic"? Well, as a lot of Chinese
people would see it, it is. Bearing in mind what Chinese people
endured through the 20th century — revolution, war, occupation,
famine, every kind of upheaval — this past couple of decades
have been an oasis of peace and tranquility, even allowing for the
1989 disturbances. If that were to continue for another 20 years
under the Communists — hey, fine. You might say: "Yes,
but the longer the present dictatorship continues, the worse will
get all the problems that go with them — corruption, environmental
degradation, militarism, the widening city-country gap, the widening
rich-poor gap, oppression of minorities, etc. etc." To which
he will reply: "Have you ever lived through a revolution?"
Of course China
needs democracy, and can't become a really modern country —
even economically — without it. And of course the present problems
will just get worse and worse, and the danger of some military folly
greater and greater, if the dictatorship continues. But what if
the transition to democracy requires another upheaval, with economic
dislocation and widespread disorder? To a lot of Chinese people,
the answer to the conundrum is simple: "Better the devil you
know!" For them, an optimistic view is one that offers no change,
and a pessimistic view is one that foresees major change of any
kind.
All right:
From now on, I am going to use "optimism" in only the
following precise sense when speaking of China. To be "optimistic"
about China is to foresee a peaceful transition to constitutional
government sometime soon. Everything else is, to some degree, pessimistic.
OK?
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