Christopher Rushlau

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The European imperative is to commit suicide. We go out and attack someone, or some place, in the hope of gaining a heroic death. The 20th century did not really go our way on that score. The USSR did most of the defeating of Nazi Germany ("I joined the US Army to fight fascists and found that the Army was full of fascists", quoted in Thunderbolt, Lewis Sorley's biography of Creighton Abrams) and I think the US campaign against Japan was almost totally a waste of men and materiel. What, by 1945 we were building aircraft at five times the rate we were losing them while Japan could not replace what we were destroying. We could have hemmed them in from 1942 by naval air power. And anyway, in both cases, we didn't finish the job, but rather kept the aggressive systems in place so we could use them against Russia, but I think the real target was always China. So Obama reopened the grand European drama of the last thousand years with his Trans Pacific Partnership (excluding China) and pivot to the Pacific of US naval power. That was the time this movie was made. I guess it was clear even then that China was too big and strong for the US to hurt it. Trump is just running another game show to undermine the US corporate paradigm, the white elite racist establishment which otherwise loves freedom, which is indeed committing suicide by attacking him for giving them what they want: rumors of war on Iran, blockade on China, friendship with the Arab dictators, racism on the half shell, and all it's doing is making the US appear the laughing stock it is when it ignores its stated principles, mainly equality. Exceptionalism is the idea that we don't have to say what we mean, nor do what we say. So Trump cancelled TPP, has the Arab dictators clawing at each other, has NATO and the EU jumping through their own rhetorical loops, while China goes from strength to strength, including its moon rover missions. Pearl Buck wrote that the Chinese coped with invasions (Mongol in 1200, Manchurian in 1600) by "entombing them in luxury". More or less in the case now, China is game-showing us not to death but to the weakness of laughter. I'm just up to the point in the movie where the American, distraught, has met the Shanghai street performer who break-dances, imitates Bruce Lee (a paradigmatic American) and does what might be a James Brown impression. He says to the American, if you jump off that bridge, you're going to spoil that handsome face, and he makes a face at him to demonstrate. Tariffs, wars of words, it's all good business. Walmart won this war, as Sun Tzu might say, long before it even got to the field of battle. This movie is about an American in China. I've only watched 33:20 so far. Watch it and see if you don't get the same idea I did. Think of Barack Obama telling the Financial Times, concerning the TPP, which the FT said was designed to "weaken and isolate" China: "Why should China make the rules? We should make the rules." You say, "Barack who?" OK, I watched to the end, and will add just one thing, something I often tell myself these days when wondering why politics is such a lonely business in the US at the moment. "These people kill people for fun." You can't say, "Oh, they don't know what they're doing." They know they're substituting some effigy, some mental mannequin, for a real-time representation of their environment, but when they start shooting at that effigy, they're really shooting a gun into their environment--and they know that, too. Their rationale: "Oh, I'm in so much pain, I need to express myself," blah, blah, blah. Or as Resurrected Savior John McCain says, "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb-bomb Iran".