I got a fuller report of the Confucius Prize presser this morning from Yajun…she’s under the impression that the organizers and the judges had no earthly idea what they were in for when they decided to cobble this thing together and invite 200 or so representatives of the foreign media — all desperate for column inches/bytes to fill — to attend.
Seriously…the committee might have been better off bathing in duck blood and telling a pack of sex-crazed wolverines to “bring it, bitches.”
Even the use of a small child as an improvised human shield was apparently insufficient to keep the imperialist savagery at bay.*
Tan Changliu, the mastermind of this PR fiasco, closed the ceremony by scolding the visibly amused throng of journos that, “In 500 years we will see who is right.”
It probably won’t take that long. Historians are often poor predictors of what is yet to be, knowledge of the past does not guarantee a clear view of the future, but one thing studying history does do is give you a sense of how the present is likely to be remembered. It doesn’t take the wisdom of Thucydides to guess that in a decade or