Fauxlympics
Wish I could take credit for the title, but it’s Rick Reilly’s from ESPN.
As a matter of fact, I can’t improve on anything he did, so let me just cut and paste a sample for you:
Even if I couldn’t make it fit, I still had to share it with you. It’s that good.
And it’s symbolic of the whole Chinese enterprise, from wonton soup to lychee nuts.
Not that China isn’t an economic powerhouse the likes of which the world has never seen. But it has accomplished its cosmic expansion at the cost of everything—everything—I said everything—we have come to hold dear. Individual liberty? Don’t make me laugh. Care for the environment? They don’t even pretend. Honesty and fair play? So Western, so bourgeois.
What do you care if the buildings are fake or real? If the fireworks are computer generated? If the 16-year-olds are actually 14? We gave you a good show. You like our General Gau’s chicken, and that’s got enough sodium and fat to stop the heart of a rhinoceros. So now you want to know the truth?
It is probably the vestigial liberal core still resent in my DNA or in my reptilian brain, but I expect justice in this world. Go ahead, laugh. It must be the mellowness from my vacation talking.
What was I just saying?
Two elderly Chinese women who applied to hold a protest during the Olympics were ordered to spend a year in a labor camp, a relative said Wednesday. Police later squelched a pro-Tibet demonstration.
The women were still at home three days after being officially notified they would have to serve a yearlong term of reeducation through labor, but were under surveillance by a government-backed neighborhood group, said Li Xuehui, the son of one of the women.
Li said no cause was given for the order to imprison his 79-year-old mother, Wu Dianyuan, and her neighbor Wang Xiuying, 77.
“Wang Xiuying is almost blind and disabled. What sort of re-education through labor can she serve?” Li said in a telephone interview. “But they can also be taken away at any time.”