This is the peasant whose son ran off,

Who had the SARS that killed with a cough,

Who knew the official with snout in the trough,

All he knows is greed and sloth,

Who once was a student who only could scoff

At the landlord who’s ears he’d cut off,

On the orders of the Party Boss,

Who always seemed cross,

And went on to starve the poor,

And start some wars,

And kick laowai out,

Then blamed the drought,

Murdered the monks,

Smelled like a skunk…

This is the State that Mao built.

Hey there peasant wench. How’s it going? I’m not sure whether or not you are aware of this fact, but you’re in what is laughingly referred to as the ‘First Class Carriage’ on this train. It’s for people who have paid a premium in order to avoid being reminded of the fact that they are in China, although obviously it’s quite impossible to escape that harsh reality at any price.

I’m also not sure whether or not you know this, but by the age of five, most little boys are quite capable of using a toilet unassisted. In any other country, that is, but apparently not here. Certainly your son doesn’t need you to hold his legs apart in mid-air so that he can piss all over the aisle. Jesus Christ, wench! Put the kid down! Just. Put. The. Kid. Down.

What the fuck are you doing now? It’s bad enough that you are training your son to piss all over the aisle, but now you’ve just hitched up your own tresses and squatted down in the aisle, too. In the fucking aisle? What’s wrong with you? And what’s that rotten fish smell? Oh God, you people make me sick.

It isn’t like you even had to wait for much longer – I mean, there’s an unoccupied toilet not ten feet away! What the hell is wrong with you, peasant wench?

Right, this really is too much. I’m going to give you a disgusted look… No, as I feared, you have no sense of shame at all. Plenty of face, I’m sure, but a complete absence of shame. Right then, hear this: “That is uncivilised behaviour, and not harmonious”. No, don’t ignore me. I mean it.

Nothing huh? Well, you asked for it: “You are a disgusting animal”. It’s no good turning your head away and pretending you are somewhere else, because you’re not. You are right in front of me, squatting in the aisle of the First Class Carriage, pissing in a puddle. I hate you, I really do.

Oh, you’ve finished now? Good. Maybe the poor conductor will mop up your puddle of piss from the aisle. Wait a second… What’s this? It’s no good, you know. Holding a hand in front of your face while you hold a conversation about me isn’t much use when your whispers measure 67 decibels. What’s that you say? All foreigners are rude? I beg your par – I beg your fucking pardon?!

Wait one. Let me get my phone. Shhh… I’m trying to arrange for this train to be diverted to the nearest disinfecting siding. There’s vermin on this here train, and only the cleansing power of Lysol® [note edit, who says I’m not harmonious?] will do.

No, I’m afraid that no one will miss you if I kick you out the door at speed. Your entire extended family, who are apparently sat here with you, won’t miss you. Particularly since I mean to chuck them out, too. Your friends won’t miss you either, not in a society in which your best friend is the one most likely to inform on you to the Party. And sure as eggs, you won’t be missed by me.

It isn’t like you’ll even be a loss to the species in the event you don’t survive the fall. I seriously doubt that anyone in the entire history of your province has ever made a worthwhile contribution to the human race. You’re all just a waste of oxygen that could be put to better use by higher lifeforms, like pigs. That’s not just my opinion either – the Law of Averages is quite clear on the subject.

I wish, I really do honestly wish, that every pink-spectacled do-gooder in the West could be here now. I wouldn’t give your culture ten minutes if the people whose fingers are on big red buttons knew what you were really like. Personally, I’d turn the place over to people who are more civilised, more cultured, and who understand the meaning of ‘personal hygiene’. The Japanese, for instance.

That’s it, enough is enough. I can’t stand the sight, smell, or sound of you any longer. I’m getting Mister iPod out and going to sleep. Please try not to rob me (again).

And the next time I hear some hollow-chested nationalist fucktard bleating on about how the West never looks at the good things about China… I’m giving the blighter a warning shot between the eyes.

Now, Xiu, you’re getting to be a really big boy, and I know you’ve been asking a lot of questions about Mommy and why she’s been so sad lately. Well, your mom and I have been talking and we think you’re finally old enough to learn where babies – where babies go.

No, the stork doesn’t take them away, Xiu. Please, son, just listen to Daddy, okay?

Do you remember when Mommy had a big tummy? Yes, you put your ear next to it, that’s right. Now, do you also remember around that time, when that letter came in the mail? The one Daddy ripped up and threw all over the ground? And Xiu, a few months after that, do you remember that man – that tall man in the shiny coat? He came to our door and there was all that screaming?

No, he’s not where the babies go, either. Not exactly. Please Xiu, just wait a second… It’s a little more complicated than that.

You see, when a mommy and daddy love each other very much, but they’re being pressured by the People’s Republic of China and they have nowhere else to turn, sometimes they will walk miles away to a place where nobody knows who they are, and they’ll – wait, no. Hold on. Let’s start over. Can Daddy just think for a moment here?

Play with your toys for a bit. Why don’t you take out Mr. Bear and Mrs. Giraffe and play with them for a little while? It’s all right, Daddy’s okay. He just needs to go splash some cold water on his face.

Okay, this might make more sense. You know how sometimes I complain about there being too many toys in your room, and how I say that they’re making a mess, and in order to not make such a mess, you might need to throw some of your toys out? Well, China is kind of like that, too. What’s that? You’re right, I’ve never told you to throw any of your toys away. Because that would be very mean – yes – you’re right. Xiu, my son, please don’t cry. None of your toys will have to be thrown out.

Nobody should have to get rid of anything they love.

Maybe Daddy can borrow some of your markers and paper. That might make things easier to explain. First, let’s draw your mother. And inside your mother’s tummy is a tiny little baby. Look how cute she is! Let’s call her Eu-meh, okay? That was your great-great-grandmother’s name. Well, inside Mommy there is also something else. There’s also this black thing here. That’s called “fear.” And every time Mommy gets a phone call from the census bureau, or a threatening telegram from the National Population and Family Planning Commission, that black thing keeps growing inside of Mommy. Growing and growing until it’s bigger than even little Eu-meh.

No, no, Xiu, Mommy’s not going to give birth to the black thing. It was just an example. No, the black thing can’t be your little sister. Look, it doesn’t work that way. Just forget that I mentioned the black thing at all.

Here, this I think you’ll understand. Remember Uncle Jm Leor? He was really smart, and used to teach school at the university, and helped to organize big parades against the government? Remember how after one of his parades we told you that Uncle Jm Leor had to move far, far away? Well, that’s where babies go. They have to move far, far way.

I guess in a kind of hotel, yes. It’s not the kind of hotel you can visit, Xiu. Because it’s already full. It’s all full of babies. Listen, I don’t know who takes care of them. That’s not the point of what I’m trying to…

How can I – you’re so young and so… You know what? It’s the stork. The babies go with the stork, Xiu. Giant storks come and take the babies away and that’s where they go. Make sense? Good.

– The Onion

“Stoopid is as stoopid does”
– Forrest Gump

Some things in this world are stupid. But there’s another whole realm of mindlessness on the far side of stupidity, and it’s called Retardland. Some people live there their whole lives. Examples are legion:

– Deciding the winner of an argument on the basis of who shakes their index finger the hardest and shouts the loudest is bloody stupid. Making that the basis of your entire legal system is nothing short of retarded.

– Stealing a successful and productive business from someone by illegal and immoral means for no other reason than that they are of a different ethnicity to you is stupid in the extreme. Blaming that person when you manage to single-handedly bankrupt the entire operation within months is retarded. Mister Mugabe, this includes you. Mao Zedong, you too.

– Walking erratically and aimlessly across a busy road in the absence of lights or a pedestrian crossing is incredibly stupid. When the traffic is coming from the left and you are looking steadfastly to the right, that makes you a retard.

The character of Mister Bean is a stupid character. But if he were not a fictional character and were, say, an actual person, then he’d be a retard. The Three Stooges played characters who were stupid, too. If those characters stepped out of the silver screen and became real people, they’d be retards. And there is one place in the world where that has apparently happened. I think you know where I am talking about.

Sometimes being a retard has unexpected consequences, as illustrated below:

– When the woman who does the cleaning has been told every day for a month not to touch [someone’s] desk or anything on it, and she persists in moving [someone’s] things around anyway, she is clearly a retard. And now she is a retard who is looking for another job, and who is, furthermore, nursing a clipped ear.

– When the bus pulls into the terminus, and you are one of the eleven other people who is fighting tooth and claw for the empty thirty seats, that’s retarded. If you happened to be one of those persons and you felt a sharp blow to the right kidney around two thirty this afternoon, then you’ll no doubt be grateful of having a place to sit

– If you’ve tried to sell [someone] a stolen laptop, then you’re an optimistic idiot. If you tried it again an hour later, you’re awfully stupid. If you tried it forty seven minutes after that, then you’re a retard. And if [someone’s] knee happened to nudge you firmly in the wedding vegetables, then you are a retard who will never have to worry about accidentally impregnating a female. Which is probably a good thing for the species as a whole.

– Picture a narrow lane with a high concrete wall either side. There’s just about enough room to get a car down it, but no chance at all of opening your door once you do. Fortunately this lane is clearly marked as being ‘One Way‘. Driving down it the wrong way would be stupid, but insisting on driving down it against the wishes of your passenger when you can see another vehicle coming down towards you is retarded. And if you are that taxi driver, now you have a broken window where your passenger smashed it to climb out. A pity you couldn’t open your door to give chase, but that’s called ‘consequences’.

So by all means, be retarded. But do also be aware that things might not always turn out for the best. Still, as no doubt you know:

Confucius say: “Two thousand, three hundred years of a culling program designed to kill off anyone with brains or balls, combined with a strong belief that incest is a game for the whole family and a culture that rewards failure with promotion and success with punishment, cannot help but produce lucky descendants.“

TalkTalkChina is back. Thank the Lords of Kobol.

Monday, May. 21, 1951

The Nazis, though they herded millions into death camps, made an effort to cover up their iniquities. The Russians broadcast and filmed their relentless show trials of the ’30’s, but they chose to execute the accused in the privacy of an NKVD cellar. But the Chinese Communists have put on a public spectacle of death which the 20th Century has not witnessed since the Russian Revolution in 1917. Since the Red Terror began in China two months ago, the scene had become so familiar from a dozen broadcasts and newspaper stories that its enormity had almost been lost. Last week, when the terror hit Shanghai, after having engulfed Canton (TIME, May 7) and other cities, the scene was re-enacted, and blatantly broadcast by Communist radio and news services.

“Shall We . . .?” In the courtyard of the National Textile Mills, Chen Siao Mao, a worker, and his wife & son were “on trial” as counterrevolutionaries. The public prosecutor went through the customary question & answer game.

Prosecutor: Shall we shoot them?

Crowd: Shoot them!

Prosecutor: Do the people want to shoot them immediately?

Crowd: Shoot them immediately!

The three accused, pale-faced and trembling, knelt. “Kill them!” shouted the crowd. A second later, the shots rang out.

“All of Them.” The scene was repeated over & over again in the great (pop. 4,000,000) city. Shanghai “owed an enormous debt of blood to the people,” said its Communist Mayor, because it had been “the headquarters of the imperialists, feudalists and bureaucratic capitalists.”

City cops, helped by Communist political police, in a single night arrested an estimated 24,000 Chinese, dragged them off to concentration camps in Shanghai’s outskirts. Among the arrested: former Kuomintang officials, schoolteachers, Christian churchmen, non-Communist union leaders, property owners, newspaper workers, factory managers, students. A committee of 24 Communist-appointed “civic leaders,” called the Committee for the Investigation of Counter-Revolutionaries, selected candidates for trial & execution. The New China (Communist) News Agency proudly reported that Shanghai high-school students marched beside the prisoners on their way to execution beating gongs and drums, and chanting: “Kill nice! Kill them well! Kill all of them!”

“Unanimous Roar.” Public trials were staged in parks, public squares, at the Canidrome, a once fashionable dog-racing track, where 10,000 people gathered and (as the Shanghai News reported it) demanded the death of the accused in “a unanimous roar.” The Communists set aside the four Shanghai airports for public executions. In one day they shot 293 people. This did not break the record set by Nanking the day before with 376 executions, but there was reason to believe that Shanghai with its larger population would win the contest in the long run. Hangchow (pop. 500.000) only executed 50, but it reported proudly that more than 110,000 people had “waded through rain-soaked streets” to witness the occasion. In two days, 719 Chinese had been executed, an average of one every four minutes.

The killing of men was accompanied by the perversion of souls. A 20-year-old student, Chow Ying-fu by name, whose father had been executed last month as a counterrevolutionary, last week in the journal of the South China United University at Canton expressed his feelings about the event. He sounded like a character from George Orwell’s 1984.

“My father should have been killed long ago,” he wrote. “For the security of the people, for the permanent destruction of the old system, for truth, for peace, I must firmly approve his execution . . .”

The only hopeful news out of the bloody melee was a sign that at least some Chinese were standing up to the terror. One newspaper reported that four Communist officers and political workers were “wounded when resistance was offered.”

“In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

Thus spoke Benjamin Franklin. A wise man, but a man whose vision failed to have the foresight to predict Walt Disney: a man whose cryogenically frozen husk continues to this day to cheat both the Grim Reaper and the Taxman.

To that list of inevitable certainties, Mr. Franklin should also have added being judged by others. And for a man who liked to spend most of his free time wearing tights and getting struck by lightning, this is something he should have known firsthand. No matter what we do in life, no matter how we choose to conduct ourselves, someone, somewhere, will always have something disapproving to say. Take last week for example: I was innocently forcing a glass coke bottle up my seven year old boyfriend’s arse in a public park, when some narrow minded idiot felt the need to come along and tut his disapproval. It wasn’t my fault that he preferred Pepsi to Coke, but how was I to know? Live and let live, that’s what I say.
That said, primarily because I’m deliberately slacking off from work today after my boss decided to cancel my pre-booked holiday, I’m about to pass judgement myself. For today I will ask that age-old question which man has been asking since the gnu:-

Which is better? Chinese Food or Actual Human Shit?

There are two ways of deciding. Evaluate the taste of the aforementioned items, and evaluate their nutritional value.

Taste: Actual Human Shit has been renowned for generations for its diversity and flavour-range. The watery mid-morning green splashes of a middle aged alcoholic Scotsman can be compared to the delightful and piquant aperitifs of Southern France; whilst the sturdier, solid, black poos of a Guinness based diet are ideal warm, comforting, family fillers in countries with colder climates. Little indigestible treats can also be found in most deposits, like sweetcorn nuggets and peanuts, which only add to the smorgasbord of flavours that can be found in most lavatories.
On the surface, Chinese food also appears to have an astonishing range of taste sensations, ranging from sweet, to sour, to sweet and sour. However, though menus in restaurants with names like Joy Luck Dragon House promise much, the constant onslaught of chicken, pork, noodles, dumplings, monkey brains and civet cats all surprisingly contain the same taste of greasiness and rottenness that can only normally be found in expired Brylcreem.

Safety: As Bruce Willis pointed out in Fast Food Nation: “We all have to eat some shit now and again.” You know where you stand with Actual Human Shit, as long as you don’t play with it and then touch your eyes you’ll probably be alright, and even if you do go blind, you probably don’t want to be looking at your excre-meal anyway. We eat the falling produce of chickens’ arses, so why not our own? Let’s face it; if you’ve ever eaten any form of vegetable or processed meat in your life, you’re probably a regular eater of Actual Human Shit already. However, the product may contain nuts, so those with peanut allergies should exercise caution.
It wouldn’t be just caution you’d have to exercise if you decided to eat Chinese food, but your right to be sectioned under the 1981 Mental Health Act too. As of the last check, eating Chinese food or food made in China can lead to SARS, Bird Flu, Sudan Red, melamine overdose, MSG induced cancer, mouth ulcers, baby death, malnutrition, diarrhoea, lead poisoning, salmonella, and the full alphabet of Hepatitii. Not only that, but eating Chinese food alongside actual Chinese people can even lead to manic depression, existential crises and brain melting. Quite frankly, you’d be better off eating arsenic.

So, it looks like a clear victory for Actual Human Shit over Chinese food. Alas, it is, however, a Pyrrhic Victory. You see, Actual Human Shit and Chinese food are intrinsically linked in a Lion King-esque circle of life. In order to produce the Actual Human Shit we want to eat, we must unfortunately consume Chinese food, which in turn contains Actual Human Shit. Thus, the cycle perpetuates for eternity. Interestingly, the same model can be used for Chinese political thought: we would all much rather read MyLaowai’s enlightened treatises on 21st century China, which in turn generates absolute bollocks from angry Chinese youths, who ironically provide the inspiration for more online bonmots.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this discussion on shit versus shovel. I’m off to cook myself a Brown Trout, have a great week.

– Meursault

This little piggy went to market,
This little piggy stayed home,
This little piggy had roast beef,
This little piggy had none,
And this little piggy looked at the next two little piggies and… um…
…and said: “Laurence-Moon-Bardet-Biedl syndrome is very lucky”