Are you with me Doctor Wu
Are you really just a shadow
Of the man that I once knew
Are you crazy are you high
Or just an ordinary guy
Have you done all you can do
Are you with me Doctor
Steely Dan - Katy Lied
I'll sing a little ditty, whichAnonymous
I trust you'll not think flat.
Of a fine fat saucy Chinaman
Who lives on Ballarat,
Whose pigtail is wound round his nut
In a tremendous plait,
And who wears on most occasions
A mushroom-looking hat.
Like a fine fat saucy Chinaman,
One of the present time.
Lefties love Red China. SEIU Mandarins Andy Stern and Anna Burger made many trips to Red China before supporting Barack Obama for President. President Obama bowed to the Red Chinese Leaders - read not too much into that, Obama bowed to every tin-horn despot he encountered - Saudi Princes & etc.
America would be nothing without our home grown America Haters - Henry Wallace, Roger Baldwin, W.E.B. Dubois, Margaret Sanger, Jane Fonda, Noam Chomsky, Billy Ayers, and too many talented writers like Tom Friedman. Tom of the New York Times a frequent nodder on MSNBC - nod with conviction, mind you - is worried about American lard asses and our ability to remain a 1st rate Nation.
Hell, I worry about my own lard loaves reaching critical mass and thus necessitating a skateboard affixed to the afore mentioned appendages, in or to convey said properties over the concrete without tearing up the fabric. America will be fine.
Empirically speaking, I watched a bunch of kids in my neighborhood sprinting to St. Cajetan, St. John Fisher and St. Barnabas grammar school football practice. Likewise, this old geezer promenaded the Chicago Loop - Metra to La Salle; a brisk amble to St. Pete's for a lap around the rosary, off the knees and on the dogs to Lake Street and down Michigan to Adams and Adams west to The Berghoff. I had Knockwurst appetizer of two small Knocks, German Spuds and Creamed spinach and Berghoff root beer(s). Then back to the Metra and the mile and change to Casa Hickey on 108th Street. Heart Healthy! Moving like a Natural Man! Lord Ha' Mercy!
Now, I am by no means svelt; nor is Tom Friedman - looks like his skeletal frame ain't exactly sheet rocked with muscle and sinew - his own self.
Thus -
To visit China today as an American is to compare and to be compared. And from the very opening session of this year’s World Economic Forum here in Tianjin, our Chinese hosts did not hesitate to do some comparing. China’s CCTV aired a skit showing four children — one wearing the Chinese flag, another the American, another the Indian, and another the Brazilian — getting ready to run a race. Before they take off, the American child, “Anthony,” boasts that he will win “because I always win,” and he jumps out to a big lead. But soon Anthony doubles over with cramps. “Now is our chance to overtake him for the first time!” shouts the Chinese child. “What’s wrong with Anthony?” asks another. “He is overweight and flabby,” says another child. “He ate too many hamburgers.”
That is how they see us.
For the U.S. visitor, the comparisons start from the moment one departs Beijing’s South Station, a giant space-age building, and boards the bullet train to Tianjin. It takes just 25 minutes to make the 75-mile trip. In Tianjin, one arrives at another ultramodern train station — where, unlike New York City’s Pennsylvania Station, all the escalators actually work. From there, you drive to the Tianjin Meijiang Convention Center, a building so gigantic and well appointed that if it were in Washington, D.C., it would be a tourist site. Your hosts inform you: “It was built in nine months.”
I know, I know. With enough cheap currency, labor and capital — and authoritarianism — you can build anything in nine months. Still, it gets your attention. Some of my Chinese friends chide me for overidealizing China. I tell them: “Guilty as charged.” But have no illusions. I am not praising China because I want to emulate their system. I am praising it because I am worried about my system. In deliberately spotlighting China’s impressive growth engine, I am hoping to light a spark under America.
Studying China’s ability to invest for the future doesn’t make me feel we have the wrong system. It makes me feel that we are abusing our right system. There is absolutely no reason our democracy should not be able to generate the kind of focus, legitimacy, unity and stick-to-it-iveness to do big things — democratically — that China does autocratically. We’ve done it before. But we’re not doing it now because too many of our poll-driven, toxically partisan, cable-TV-addicted, money-corrupted political class are more interested in what keeps them in power than what would again make America powerful, more interested in defeating each other than saving the country.
