Years of Poems and Spirits

Continuing the sentiment …

Taking notes from Yakima, WA. Beautiful full moon rising over the vast East Washington plain tonight.  Reminded me of Ansel Adam’s famous photograph.

Notes:

Leading Democrats advocated financial market deregulation as late as 2007

From a yellowing page I saved from two years ago, on Feb 5, 2007 issue, James Surowiecki commented on a report released by Bloomberg and Schumer. The thesis? Too much regulation hurts America capital market. “The U.S. is losing its leading competitive position” because rules like Sax-O.

Also in the article: numbers to undermine the study and previous dooms day predictions to stall major reforms.

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The Dec. 8, 2008 issue has a profile on Naomi Klein

Summary: accused Milton Friedman of using turmoil and disasters to promote fundamental capitalism. Book “Shock Therapy”. Seems like a popular activist with little academic grounding.

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Stunning photograph: Chen Jiagang, The Great Third Front

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July 28, 2008 Profile on the Chinese PhD student who compiled a popular video after the Tibetan riot. First video of such. Neither artistic nor articulate, yet pretty full of anger (my impression)

Date: 4/25/2008, Name, CTGZ/Tang Jie. Fudan Western Philosophy PhD student, can read English and German. Used books to support his bed.

A typical Fen Qing netizen, except he’s imbused with exposure to Western thoughts. Also, his professor “rejoiced” over the video he produced.

A disconnection between experience and learning, possibly.

What makes a good April Fool’s day joke?

I think a good one is one that gets people to ask themselves, “This can’t be true, can it? OMG!” Then you hit the jackpot. In other words, besides being outrageous, a good Fool’s day prank has to seduce its audience to believe in their worst instinct about this world.

While driving home, I was listening to the story of Norma Khouri, who wrote a book of a fictional case of honor killing in Jordan, pretending to be a personal friend of the victim.  She grew up in Chicago, went to Catholic school, married and have two kids but presented herself throughout as a 35-year old virgin from Jordan whose life was in danger because of the book.

How did her perfect American accent not give her away? How could she show up in one TV shows after another, signed hundreds of books at trade shows, but no one in the hundreds of thousands of the audience ever suspected her authenticity?

Because she wrote the book in 2003, not long after 9.11 but before the Iraq debacle fell apart. Is Khouri a master of deception or many among us are perennial fools?

Heard the news that Caroline Kennedy is going after Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat.

The Kennedy clan’s history is at the same time a tragedy and a mockery of American democracy. When Ted ran for his brother’s Senate seat at age 30, his opponent bitterly complained, “Sir, if your last name is anything but Kennedy, you would have been finished … Your credentials is a laughing stock.” (History Channel’s documentary on the Kennedys) As if to prove his opponent right, Ted won the election, committed several scandals–including one where someone got killed and another one got raped, grew a large brain tumor, but remained to this day the beloved chosen representative of the people of Massachusett.

And he is among the lucky Kennedys who survived the Natural Selection. In other words, several other Kennedys felt so certain that no man-made law could touch them that they challenged God but lost.

Yet year after year, a Kennedy is going to Washington.

Reminded me of what Shakespeare said about Julius Caesar (through the mouth of Cassius while trying to talk Brutus into killing the tyrant of the Republic):

Now, in the names of all the gods at once,
Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed,
That he is grown so great? Age, thou art shamed!
Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods!
When went there by an age, since the great flood,
But it was famed with more than with one man?
When could they say till now, that talk’d of Rome,
That her wide walls encompass’d but one man?
Now is it Rome indeed and room enough,
When there is in it but one only man.