China, wow...it gives away so much to say I remember Mao, and that the memory of his enormous image imposed on all we saw, is a lasting memory. And now it's quaint, with a popular Propaganda poster shop/museum.
It's played well, like a harmless miracle and it's even written well, with a small hint that the Cultural Revolution was a passing phase. It sells well, and people buy the things, the posters and the postcards that are increasingly worth money even here in the US, and make great presents...It's chic to own a Mao poster. And how long will it be to make it quaint to name your child Adolf, and have all memory erased...for Nazi posters to be a valuable nostalgia souvenir.
In my last diary, I spoke of Afghanistan and Iraq losing coverage while each move and gunshot and death and near death were reported in Gaza.
Selective attention, and selective memory. And the study of history is the study of our own propaganda without--just yet-- the inflated rates for posters of pro-Vietnam sentiments.
Distraction, and our fears of confronting the mirrors...and the appeal of Gaza and the lack in Afghanistan, and the lack....
So what does all this have to do with the price of tea in China? An old idiom not known by the daughter we visited there. But it's still a good idiom: what does this or anything have to do with anything of importance?
We can forget all about it all, about the names of the places that are collapsing. And again my opinion, seemingly not all that popular, that unless we engage our capacities to know and delve into the deepest parts of our ambivalence about everything and everyone we will forget all and learn nothing from that little we remember.
Actually the price of tea in China is pretty good now. Our American debts are to them who make cheap goods, and attract us with their prices and the sense they will take over the Asian part of world power.
What does all this have to do with anything, with tea, with China, with us? We would have to think and feel, and gaze in mirrors without our makeup and without or before our cosmetic surgeries, our surgery that we have accepted and now hold stubbornly to our memory and our consciousness.
Are we, are you too busy? Too busy to think about this? What would you say to a German who was a Nazi because he was too busy to read about Hitler? Would it have anything to do with the price of tea in China?
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