Tibet Your Life

In preparation for the 2008 Summer Olympics, China has made great strides in... trying to _look_ like a normal place. But every other day we read about public restrooms from hell, dust storms, oppression of minorities, bad food, pollution, toxic toys, people refusing to stand in orderly lines at McDonald's, people spitting on the street and on each other, stray and rabid dogs, and so on. Seems the Great Leap Forward into Olympic prime time is not going quite as smoothly as one might have hoped. Plus, in the background looms the saga of the Three Gorges Dam, which has displaced enough people to populate a mid-sized planet, and buried countless temples, architectural sites, historical sites, and... hey, where are all those "preservation" people when we need them? Don't tell me China gets a pass on all that stuff.

So, yeah, China is stumbling into the 21st Century like some kind of neurologically-impaired Frankenstein. But this is the place that is, at the very same time, buying up vast sectors of the U.S. economy! You figure this out; I can't. At any rate, right in the middle of all the commotion, who should appear like the proverbial bad penny but Tibet, which barely survived cultural and literal genocide at the hands of China, only to be turned into a kind of Indian reservation in the Himalayas. And here's this Dalai Lama -- a rabble-rouser if ever there was one -- encouraging Tibetans to defend their own culture, traditions, and heritage against the encroachments of the Han Chinese, who have taken genetic modification to such a state that they are now born with a cel phone already permanently attached to one ear. What's the matter with these Tibetans? Don't they appreciate progress? Just because they were, for centuries, one of the most religiously and philosophically sophisticated countries on earth doesn't mean they can just look down their nose at people who were smart enough to allow Chairman Mao to smash China to atoms for a few decades. What's this "Tantric Buddhism" noise when you can have your own back-yard steel furnace? What are a few thousand dusty old scrolls when you can have the Little Red Book? Honestly, these people! And now they pick the worst possible time to start busting the chops of the powers that be in Beijing. (BTW, why is it now "Beijing" rather than "Peking"? And why don't we call the dish "Beijing duck" now? Just wondering... ) What are they trying to do, make us look bad?

I imagine, as the Olympics draw near, we will see many more of these awkward incidents. I imagine we'll see a _lot_ of them during the Olympics. And people might just start to realize that, in many respects, they're looking at the world's largest Potemkin Village.