Watching a Clock That Never Ticks
What could possibly be worse than spending ten hours doing work that could easily have been done in half the time? Hint: think of watching the second half of a football game where the score was 45-3 after the first quarter.
“I soon discovered that boredom was as exhausting as back-breaking labor.”
The Cultural Revolution
The Cultural Revolution in China came with all the force of an actual overthrow of the ruling power structure. The entire foundation of Chinese society which had been intact for centuries changed over the course of a ten year period of upheaval that made the 1960’s countercultural revolution in America look like the mere exchange of a necktie for a Nehru jacket:
“my siblings and I were totally unprepared for the Cultural Revolution, although we had a vague feeling of impending catastrophe. In this atmosphere, August came. All of a sudden, like a storm sweeping across China, millions of Red Guards emerged.”
Carrying Pictures of Chairman Mao
John Lennon warned through song that doing that thing mentioned up there was destined to ensure you didn’t make it through to anyone you actually wanted to listen to you, anyhow, so don’t bother. This lyric probably didn’t make the Beatles any more popular in China than they were already were and, besides, citizens already had a hit song referencing their dear leader as a metaphor:
“A popular song went: `Father is close, Mother is close, but neither is as close as Chairman Mao.’”
The Great Wall of China
During the period which the author describes, the greatest wall in China was no made of stone and didn’t stretch along an easily defined topographical borderline. The truly great wall was almost invisible and consisted of ever-moving army ready to construct an instant border between truth and the rest of the world:
“On our way down, we passed a two-story villa, hidden in a thicket of Chinese parasol trees, magnolia, and pines...and I snapped my last shot. Suddenly a man materialized out of nowhere and asked me in a low but commanding voice to hand over my camera...I noticed he had a pistol. He opened the camera and exposed my entire roll of film. Then he disappeared, as if into the earth. Some tourists standing next to me whispered that this was one of Mao's summer villas.”
Soul-Sucking Meetings
Turns out that meetings at which nothing gets done and time is wasted and people leave feeling a bit less human than when they arrived is not inherently a capitalistic ploy to tame the fire raging inside new bureaucrats. Meetings designed strictly for the purpose of reducing human desire to improve the system to a crazy hope one once had were actually an integral part of the very fabric of Maoist authoritarianism:
“Meetings were an important means of Communist control. They left people no free time, and eliminated the private sphere. The pettiness which dominated them was justified on the grounds that prying into personal details was a way of ensuring thorough soul-cleansing."
