[I’ve been sitting on this all day, hoping for a perfectly logical explanation. Alas, no dice.]
The PRC had one of their pet pianists play an anti-American, Korean War-inspired ditty (did you know that we’re jackals? Did you also know that Marxists are incompetent buffoons who can’t feed themselves, or the countries that they manage to control?) at the White House without the administration twigging to that fact. And it wasn’t really an accident, either. Supposedly, everybody in the PRC with a television set (under different circumstances I could have written that out as ‘everybody in Taiwan,’ but then Taiwan is a First World nation, while the PRC is a Third World one with nukes) was tipped the wink to watch ahead of time. Got to love the professionals running the US Government these days, huh?
You know, I had a rather elaborate and convoluted post planned out on how an imaginary American pianist played a thoroughly anti-Chinese (and still popular!) song right under the noses of PRC bigwigs, but this failed because American culture has been rather ruthless about stomping on that kind of thing recently. The best example I could come up with on short notice was “Chin Chin Chinaman,” which is from the 1890s and isn’t even American. Besides, to make it particularly true to life it would have ended with the PRC seizing the pianist, shooting him, then charging the American embassy for the bullet. That would have spoiled the ‘joke’ by making it unbelievable: even this President couldn’t have ignored that.
I think.
Ach, well: as the Russians would say, the current Chinese dynasty has always been a bit nyeh kulturny.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
I’m not all that upset over this. Like I pointed out at PJM’s Tatler, this is like playing “The Star Spangled Banner” when there are Brits around — it’s a song about a battle between the two countries that has come to mean more about love of one of the countries than about the enmities between the two.
Rob: I would actually have had a (small) problem with us doing that to our British cousins until September of 2001.
Just serve cheeseburgers, asparagus with cream sauce, cheese covered broccoli and ice cream at the next state dinner with them. Top it all off with big cold glasses of wholesome California milk (your choice of whole, skimmed or two percent).
The ignorant jug-eared buffoon and his media acolytes will try to pretend nothing happen. See no, hear no, speak no evil.
The White House circus continues to turn into an arcade of oddities.