A “Mad Men” guide to 90 years of the Chinese Communist Party
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I want to come clean: I am a Red Sox fenqing. Mao may have had his Red Guards but I’m a card-carrying armband-wearing brainless slogan-chanting member of the 红袜兵.* Hey, we’ve got our catchy songs and marching anthem too. You have a problem with that? Didn’t think so, because there’s a bleacher full of guys behind me who will find your ass, pull you out of your seat and get all Dropkick Murphys on you… You can hold me down, prop open my eyelids with rusty nails and make me watch video of David Ortiz plunging needles into his body like he’s filming the last 15 seconds of Kurt Cobain: The Movie and I still won’t believe that Papi was juiced on steroids even though he went from hitting 20 home runs a year with Twins to bashing 50 home runs only after joining the Red Sox and making the acquaintance of one Manuel Ramirez. The cover of Sports Illustrated with Nomar Garciaparra that caused every red blooded New England male to question their sexuality for .000001 seconds? Yeah, nothing going on there. Oh sure…right AFTER steroids became a big deal Nomar started breaking down like a decade-old Xiali, but In Tuesday’s Pearl Harbor post, I appended a little shout out to my home state’s role in ending the Russo-Japanese War. Well, just when you thought China had a monopoly on specious historical claims, here comes Maine and their splittist propaganda: Really enjoyed your recent post on Pearl Harbor and historical absolutism. It’s somewhat difficult for me to hear anyone even suggest that the number of historical absolutists in America is fewer than elsewhere, because as an American living in the UK essentially all I hear about is how skewed our view of this or that historical event is. It breeds apologists of my fellow American expats, which I don’t love (when do Brits ever apologize for the situation they had such a hand in creating in Africa, to pick an atrocity out of a hat?). I’m writing to note, however, that in fact you New Hampshire people–well, you can try to claim the Treaty of Portsmouth all you want, but the site of its signing in fact is in my home state across the border from Portsmouth. It’s somewhat confusing, but the Treaty of Portsmouth was signed at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, located in Kittery, Maine. I know, I know, So it’s October 2nd and Beijing is waking up with a bit of hangover. I went to a parade-viewing party yesterday morning and when I arrived, at 9:00 a.m., the assembled gathering of translators, bloggers, and professional snarkers was already searching for their second collective bottle of vodka. It went downhill steadily from there. But more than just a day off and excuse to start drinking at breakfast, the day was also a moment to celebrate the triumph of the CCP’s will in taking an impoverished nation and building a 21st century powerhouse. The message yesterday: “Hu’s the man?” And it was delivered with the sledgehammer subtlety of Kanye West attending an awards show following three hours of blowing bong hits in the back of Jay-Z’s Maybach. Now that the biggest event in the PRC this year is out of the way, I thought I’d try to work my way back through the celebration with this summer’s funniest movie, The Hangover, the kind of movie that is monumentally stupid-funny in a “DVD you would put on if you had spent three hours blowing bong hits in the back of your buddy’s hatchback” kind of way. And since that really kind |
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