Let's try this . . .

So, crazy people confuse, say, metaphor with reality. Dangerous people have no sense of irony, and wouldn't know a metaphor from Jesus.

I watch and wait with a mixture of excitement and dread at Tian-an men redux either picking up some steam or getting repeatedly squashed in Tibet. The state there clearly going far beyond the pale in happying (Haigism) their people. No longer hearing God, they raise their knife on the pure knowledge of what's good for the people. As apparently, they were able to turn the tide following the previous debacle by promises (and delivery) of Western style Disney life. Now the people in China proper are the government, and I'm sure they're plenty irritated by those complainers in Tibet. Fascism by any other name!

But not being Christian, I don't think the Chinese can be accused of either lack of irony or misconstruction of metaphor, a figure of speech they don't promote quite so much. Instead, as I recall, there is a kind of spiraling equation of this with that, neither of which quite gets at what one is trying to say, but both of which together scintillate the brain and feel like, say, truth. The loss then today in modern China being just that there's no that anymore. Only this. So, they have to turn off the cars to fool the western guests at the olympics, and sweep out the unseemly in promotion of the phenomenal success of their economy.

And here we are, irony-less, self righteous in our complaint that they can't seem to swallow the filth we export them in pursuit of our superior, well, Disney-life. So, I complained about Dershowitz, not getting the Christian import of the Abraham-Isaac story. Is this because the Jewish point of view has him justified, and for Christians, he's simply screwed because that's God's prerogative??

Well, I'd hate to give the Bushies any credit if their grand world strategy bears fruit in the collapse of Chinese unitarity. NOOOOoooooo!!!!!!!

See, the thing is we just need a good bus driver, so the rest of us can get back to what we do well, instead of backseat driving. Is it television that fools us into thinking that we can, Bush-Putin style, look into peoples' eyes to find trust? When they act, whether driving, banking, pricing, marketing, drugging, as anything but our neighbors. Anything but neighborly. And so no-one trusts anyone, not can or should they, and the Jesus style trustworthy trusters are annoying and the equivalent of pesky smelly. Patsies. (And why is it that rich and comfortable types are, to a person, cynical, as in "it will never get any better". Are they that unhappy? That happy? Where's the irony?

I think Barak Obama is a good busdriver. Anyhow, I'm on his bus, and not much nuancing the details of what he "stands" for, knowing full well that this "standing" for, in our degenerate usages, is code for manipulating literal truths, and labelling the scintillations of metaphor as, well, crazy.

Crazily, toward June 4 plus 20 (19???).