Neglectful
What to say? Like many Americans I was profoundly moved by Obama’s election…so moved that I have very little to add to the many, many folks who’ve already posted about this new chapter in the American experiment. I’m only middle-aged, but am inexpressibly grateful that I, too, should have “lived to see the day.”
In a similar, but lesser, vein I feel as though I’ve already been silent on so much that has gone down this fall in Beijing, that “catching up” is impossible. Just this last week, for instance, saw R. explicity baiting W. at the faculty lunch (“So, I told this Chinese kid to ‘fuck off’…) and that lunatic, pretentious, grey-haired laowai playing an amplified sheet of glass at “noise night” at club D-22 where I went with T. M. and D. There are things to talk about hereabouts, if I felt the need to talk about them. But the imperatives of the American election have, quite correctly, made my own idiosyncratic narrative seem of little consequence, even to myself.
Instead, I’ll content myself with linking some of my favorite reactions to the New Day Rising: Judith Warner, James Laxer and, especially, The Onion.
