Steven Mark Pilling
10/27/2013 03:48:30 am
Five thousand years of cultural inertia! It occurs to me that a little mindless fun like Halloween or Marde Gras is exactly what the Chinese DO need. As you pointed out, this obsession with "face" has constantly dragged them back into the doldrums, ultimately negating every movement (foreign or domestic, for good or evil) that's inflicted itself on their bland cosmos. Genghis Khan, Teiping, the "foreign devils", Tojo, Mao... ho hum. Life goes on. "The yak is slow... but the earth is patient"!! One of the hallmarks of a healthy culture is, in my humble opinion, not only the ability to laugh, but to laugh aloud- and in public- at one's own foibles. Before it "diversified" into an adult bacchanalia, Halloween was valuable insomuch as it gave children that ability early on- along with being just pure fun. It also gave their parents and others in a neighborhood a chance to reconnect in what was essentially a community project for the children's sake. That has now sadly declined in our urban areas. Are we becoming "chinafied"? Possibly worse, because the Chinese are an homogenous (largely) people and culture. Our's has been busy in erasing all forms of commonality in the "sacred" name of Diversity. China, like the damned yak, will continue to languish behind a bright facade. In our present times, we are also building facades. Only they disguise a disintegrating slum tenament inside. Which is worse? I'm still hoping that the dynamism inherent in traditional Western culture will reassert itself before a collapse.
Reply
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Author
Greetings from The Land Of Chairman Mao's Miracle Archives
February 2014
|