The International Writers Magazine: Comment

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Bloomberg in China & Gun Madness • Dean Borok I absolutely believe that multi-billionaire and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg is getting ready to exploit the fissures evident in the Republican Party and present himself as the only viable challenge to Hillary Clinton. If he recruits Arnold Schwartznegger as his running mate I may even vote for him myself.  Not because I have anything against Hillary, but because I admire Arnold so much!

Bloomberg is getting ready to make a campaign visit to China, which is a very intelligent move, as long as he does not use it to lecture the Chinese on American Values, which is a subject that stultifies them.  He would do better to emulate French president Sarkozy and German chancellor Merkel, who concentrated on filling their order books during their recent visits there.
 
On every single point of reference, the American government has presented itself as an obstacle to China’s reemergence as a coherent country and a world power.  During the nineteenth century we assisted the European powers in their policy of leeching China white, forcing the Chinese people to become opium addicts (ever heard of The Opium Wars?), pillaging their cultural artifacts and using them for slave labor.  We indulged in race hatred against Chinese on an unimaginable level that makes the current xenophobia against the Mexicans look like a Boy Scout jamboree by comparison.  We employed Chinese coolie labor to construct the transcontinental railroads, sending them with dynamite to blow up rock formations. Health and Saftely, don't make me laugh.
 
Eurocentric as I am, I never particularly cared about China, and I still don’t care about it now.  But you have to admire a people who removed the heel of the European colonial powers from their face, resisted the barbaric invasion of Imperial Japan, threw out the corrupt American-supported Kuomintang and in the last twenty yearsestablished an industrial dynamo.
 
Chairman Mao is a figure of ridicule and derision in this country, like a roller skating football mascot.  But in 1948 he was the architect of the Chinese revolution.  He wasn’t a general like Washington – the generals were subordinate to him.  Chairman Mao was the supreme political tactician and ideological visionary who mobilized the resources and engaged in alliances with China’s disparate ethnic tribes that permitted the Red Army to survive as fish in the sea, dragging a freezing, starving mass of fighters across 7,000 miles of hostile territory, all the while fending off vicious Kuomintang attacks every inch of the way.  In addition to having to bear their supplies and weapons, Red Army soldiers were obliged to carry their own spinning wheels to make their own uniforms.  They transported sewing machines on donkey to sew the uniforms.  Some climates that they marched through were so inhospitable; the soldiers killed animals, skinned them and then just wore the raw skins inside out without tanning them.  Yuck!
 
At the Tatu River, the floor of the bridge was destroyed, so the Red Army fighters were obliged to swing across the bridge hand-over-hand like monkeys in freezing weather to get to the other side.  Kuomintang machine gunners picked them off while they were hanging from the chains, sending the Red Army soldiers falling into the freezing river below.  Still they kept coming, horrifying the Kuomintang gunners so badly that they abandoned their positions and ran to the hills.
 
So whatever Bloomberg does, he shouldn’t admonish them about Valley Forge, y’know?
 
If Bloomberg is smart, he’ll stick to economic issues like the undervalued Chinese currency and promote American trade.  Any lecturing of the Chinese on moral issues would be toxic.  He can do the United States the most good by admiring the new Beijing Olympic installation, which are breathtaking, eating some duck and going to the opera.

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OK, the kid in Omaha blows away eight people in a shopping mall (shopping maul?) using an assault rifle.  He wanted to go out in style, he said.
 
If you want to go out in style, you lodge a stick of dynamite up your backside, run onto the basketball court during a Knicks game at halftime and light the fuse.  That's style, not blowing away innocent working stiffs in an Omaha department store.
 
The way The New York Sun, reported it, they just said the kid used "a rifle."  It would be sacrilegious for The Sun to admit that the kid used an assault rifle, because Clinton got a law passed banning those.  When Bush got in he allowed the law to lapse, and now they're legal again.  Naturally, The Sun doesn't even want to use the word "assault rifle." Americans are not bad people but they're too easily deceived by wicked interests.  Six months ago a kid executed 20 people in his school with a handgun.  Now you got this kid with an assault rifle.  In six months time it'll happen again, guaranteed.
 
Tennessee Titans player Pacman Jones goes into a Las Vegas strip bar with $80,000 and starts throwing it into the air while the strippers are dancing.  The strippers dive for the money, naturally.  Jones gets offended.  "That's my money," he objects.  "I'm just throwing it around for the beauty of it, to see naked women being showered with money.  I never intended to actually give it to them!"  The guy is obviously operating under a mental malfunction.
 
Pandemonium breaks loose in the bar.  One of Pacman's "entourage", if I may be allowed to flatter a gang of thugs with an elegant French term, pulls out a high-caliber handgun and starts shooting wildly.  One bar employee ends up paralyzed for life.  Pacman walks away with a slap on the wrist and a one-year suspension.  Hey, he didn't actually pull the trigger himself, right?  He just brought a gang of jerks into the bar and incited a shooting riot that left a guy paralyzed.
 
Never mind!  Nets star Jayson Williams takes his drunken party of friends out back of his mansion in the middle of the night to shoot off guns in the pitch darkness.  They kill the chauffeur, who went out into the field to take a leak.  Williams gets acquitted because, Hey it could happen to anybody!
 
Meantime, all those plastic Barbie Doll TV announcers (and I mean the men, too) are wringing their handkerchiefs, "What is happening to us as a nation?" they cry.  They're stupider than apes - even apes can connect the dots.  Moron+Firearm =John Dillinger.  A jerk is just a jerk until you add a firearm into the equation.  Figure this out: nine out of ten gunshot victims knew their assailant.  This idiocy will continue to occur until society gets leadership tough enough to cut the legs out from under Wayne LaPierre and the NRA.  Firearms have got to cease being an integral part of our culture.
 
Now the Supreme Court is getting into the picture.  They are going to decide a lawsuit that was brought to throw out strict gun control enforcement in the District of Columbia.  Given the quality of erudition that currently inhabits that august chamber, I'd say the odds are better than even that in a year's time even infants in baby carriages are going to be packing heavy artillery.
 
If that happens, if The Supreme Court interprets the Second Amendment to mean that everybody is entitled to pack heat, then all hell is going to break loose.  A lot of people are going to decide to impeach the whole court for incompetence.  Remember, The Supreme Court sits at the pleasure of Congress, which can change its configuration by a simple act of law.  This court was able to dodge the bullet on such imbecilic decisions as allowing the Paula Jones lawsuit to proceed while Clinton was still a sitting president, setting the stage for the bogus impeachment; and for their decision to throw the 2000 election to Bush even though Gore had clearly won Florida, which got us where we are today.  Whether these deluded dimwits can survive a decision turning the country into a reality version of "Grand Theft Auto" remains to be seen.
© Dean Borok December 9th 2007
deanyorkave@yahoo.com .

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