Libertarian Justin Raimondo explains the recent fall of Chinese communist “princeling” Bo Xilai.
Bo went after the corrupt head of the local Communist party’s judicial branch, Wen Qiang, former deputy chief of the local police. Wen was found guilty of protecting the gangsters, taking bribes, and rape: he was duly executed. At the time, the Peoples’ Daily, the official voice of the Communist Party, praised these actions, but the central party leadership was not happy. Here was a charismatic and – worst of all – populist figure, who was gaining public support on the strength of political campaigns that, they say, resembled the dark days of the Cultural Revolution, when the country was enveloped in chaos.
Bo’s various campaigns, however, also resembled the efforts of a political party, such as one might see if China allowed multiparty democracy. Here was Bo offering up his own “Chongqing model†– in implicit opposition to the “Guangdong model†favored by the party’s Eastern elites, which emphasized exports over targeting the huge domestic market. Bo’s initiatives were bold, in stark contrast to the timid “reforms†preferred by “pragmatic†party leaders. In the days before his ouster, Bo declared China was ready to move toward a multiparty system: “We need to take the road to democratic rule.†A week later, he was ousted, his whereabouts unknown. …
Having been stripped of his post, it appears he will lose his seat on the Politburo, and the lesson here is clear for any other aspiring populist leader who dares challenge the Beijing bureaucrats: don’t do it. What Western observers should take away from all this is that the Chinese gerontocracy is as brittle as an over-baked fortune cookie, and living in fear of the populist giant that shows worrying signs of restlessness, especially in the still-impoverished countryside.
Connor Husain finishes the last jump of the Intermediate course of the Morven Park Spring Horse Trials on Piece of Hope, a bay Swedish Warmblood 17 hands high. (photograph: Karen L. Myers) Click on photo for larger image.
I was standing next to this obstacle all day working as a jump judge for the trials.
A nice little essay, in Stale of all places, by Nathan Heller on Hemingway, discussing why greater respect is generally accorded Hemingway’s earlier work, his short stories in particular being preferred to certain later works featuring a recognizable note of self parody.
Those who knew Hemingway well, especially in these early years, reported that his braggadocio was something of a cover: Far from being the swaggering, insouciant rake of lore, he was emotionally fragile, stirred into panics by women’s rejections, prone to insomnia, workaholic and perfectionist (in Paris, he’d spend all day writing and sometimes come home with a single sentence), and given to weird and compulsive record-keeping projects, like tallying exact word counts or tracking his wife’s menstrual rhythms. He was what we would now call a neurotic, and the struggle to make sense of a life suddenly coming apart gave his work the urgency and contours earlier efforts had lacked. Hemingway was at that point in the habit of composing “sketches†that doubled as diary entries, and in the course of writing up an odd and flirtatious trip to Pamplona with friends and enemies, he realized he had more than a few pages of material to work with. The result was The Sun Also Rises (1926), Hemingway’s first real novel and, he later said, the most successful book of his career.
It’s also a strikingly linear novel. Few time cuts or flashbacks appear, and its narration has the effect of plodding forward, never looking more than a few feet ahead. Yet the book seems viscerally vivid and alive, as in its description of bull-running:
There were so many people running ahead of the bulls that the mass thickened and slowed up going through the gate into the ring, and as the bulls passed, galloping together, heavy, muddy-sided, horns swinging, one shot ahead, caught a man in the running crowd in the back and lifted him in the air. … You could tell by the degree of intensity in the shout how bad a thing it was that was happening.
Every sentence here is shaped by a sequence of perception: We see the people running, then become aware of a slowing, then see the bulls pass, then see one strike a man, then see him go in the air. And on. It’s only in the final, beautifully colloquial sentence that a causal interpretation and a moral judgment—in short, a narrative frame—finally appears.
What Hemingway captured, in other words, was the familiar, personal, very un-Jamesian experience of processing the world directly in time. His work of this period connects with our animal habits of consciousness. And the struggle it brings to the foreground is the struggle to make sense of—to find a line of narrative through—this disordered experience. Hemingway’s insight was to understand that this struggle was not just a literary one. It’s a fundamental part of how people themselves perceive and try to make sense of the world.
Bird Dog, at Maggie’s Farm, explains how he and his talented collaborators became fabulously wealthy simply by publishing a conservative portmanteau blog.
(Scrupulously following our secret contract, Bird Dog never divulged the six-figure per link fee that NYM pays him.)
Secret video of Bird Dog celebrating his financial success achieved by blogging.
