Trump is infuriating. Not only is he dishonest, crude, criminal, stupid and inarticulate – he’s unforgivably ignorant.
For example, he does not know that there is no “Chinese” language:
“They will own this country. China will own this country. North Korea will own this country,” Trump declared.
Trump doubled down on his assessment on Tuesday, telling conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that if he doesn’t win, “You’re gonna have to learn to speak Chinese.”
In China, about 80% of the population speak Mandarin, which is a language with a deep and complex history (that I am far from qualified to touch on) – China was assembled out of large warring states by Qin Shi Huang (the guy who was buried with all the clay soldiers, and who was the emperor in the movie Hero) “Qin” is pronounced “Chin” and is the root of the name “China”. But that was long ago (200BC) and since then, Mandarin acquired words and elements from many other sources. Basically, Mandarin has always been “what they talk in the capital”; i.e.: the language of the Mandarins – the highest civil servants, AKA “the deep state.” Anyhow, I should not try to lecture on Chinese history, having only had one semester and that was back in 1983.
Trump is also, absurdly, implying that North Korea is going to “own” the US. I have trouble even finding words to express my contempt for the stupidity of that claim: North Korea is a long way away, vastly smaller, and its military budget is tiny compared to ours. Short of inventing the Q-bomb, North Korea is not taking over anyone, ever. If they got militarily adventurous, it would be round two of “US attempts genocide in North Korea”.
The dipshits who listen to and vote for Trump have absorbed and accepted propaganda like Red Dawn and this:
That is some brilliantly effective propaganda, but it’s basically wrong in more ways than we can count on the fingers of the entire population of Columbus, Ohio.
The most obvious question nobody is asking is, “who the fuck would want to rule the United States?” Its oligarchs are having trouble controlling it, never mind trying to conceive of the kind of crazy Patrick-Swayze-led insurgency that would result if anyone tried to take over this shithole and run it. The level of military committment necessary to take over the US is almost, literally, unimaginable because nobody has come close to trying such a thing, except for the Mongols, who failed and fell apart fairly quickly. It’s a stupid idea; none of it makes any sense, and here we have dipshit in chief talking about it as though it’s something serious. I am shocked and angry that the people of the US did not react to that with a great, howling, belly laugh.
The Duchy of Grand Fenwick is not going to save us, either. US strategy for decades has been to achieve nuclear first-strike capability against anyone. If anyone is going to go around taking over other places, it’s the US – and they have conclusively demonstrated that taking over other places, basically, fails. ‘The West’ has been conclusively demonstrating that since the Crusades; it’s why we get tragicomic historical incidents like England (tiny) conquering and dominating India (huge) until the Indians figured out that they were being scammed.
All of this makes me remember a book that came out in the 70s, which was strange and nihilistic: M.J. Engh’s Arslan. [wc] The premise of Arslan is that something unexplained has happened, that caused the entire world to politically submit to the generalissimo-in-chief of a small country in north Asia, who (for reasons we never understand) makes his battle-camp in a midwestern small town and begins treating the locals the way Americans historically have treated everyone else that they conquer. It’s a weird, and very dark book, with some really upsetting elements including horrible sexual assault, but when I read it I was captivated because I realized that the author was trying to work out some of what it probably felt like to be conquered by the Mongol empire, or the British empire: suddenly a small force of redcoats show up and everything changes, much for the worse. I saw it as a counter-point to The Mouse that Roared [wc] which is a cute satirical look at when a tiny medieval European country accidentally successfully invades and conquers the US.
I suppose I am thinking these things because I am so disgusted by the current state of the poorly-run US experiment in oligarchy, that I’m starting to hanker for “regime change” – any regime, just – please – change. That’s a dangerous attitude, I know, because change is usually not for the better when you’re talking revolution and conquest.
Can I hear a big “FUCK YOU!” for the media, and around half of the US population that take this imbecile seriously?
I am not recommending you read Arslan. It’s very disturbing and it has a lot of really horrifying content. Reading it felt like watching a slow-moving train-wreck. In other words, if felt like being a US citizen in 2020 feels every day. There’s no sense deliberately subjecting yourself to that. I am, in fact, shocked and disappointed that the times we live in remind me of that book.
A short story about Chinese history: my dad is/was a history professor and the chair of the department at Johns Hopkins for forever. One of his colleagues (Robert Forster) who taught US history once had a student from China who was specializing in US history. Forster asked him casually, why he was studying US history, and the fellow blushed and eventually said, “I’m lazy. There’s so little of it.”
One of the class texts for the semester of Chinese history that I did study was Ray Huang’s 1587, a Year of No Significance. [wc] That was a fascinating book, and a great introduction to how one can approach history as art. Huang starts off disengenously claiming that he is examining some events in 1587, which was a year (he claims) nothing important or big happened in China. Which is absurd on the face of it: there are always interesting and big important things happening in China. Huang writes about a failing emperor, a failing government, a failing general – a bunch of little things that he argues added up to the collapse of the imperial dynasty. It’s brilliant history. I’m not expecting you to run out and read it, but if you’re interested, sink your teeth into this review [medium].
Donald Trump: “Belgium is a beautiful city”
And he told Narendra Modi that India shared no border with China.
Compared to the Orange Menace, W now looks like a genius,
Maybe, or maybe he’s (almost certainly correctly) assuming that the people he’s talking to don’t know that. What percentage of the US electorate do you think knows that Mandarin is the most widely-spoken language in China, and what percentage just think it’s a kind of orange? Hell, what percentage of the US electorate thinks that the national language of Mexico is Mexican?
When looking at US politics, it’s very difficult to tell whether people are genuinely stupid and uninformed, or are merely pandering to the genuinely stupid and uniformed. I would usually assume a bit of both.
Meanwhile, Americans have to try and interpret presidential comments uttered in Tangerine.
lumipuna, that’s a good one. ;-)
Reading this made me think of the Taiping Rebellion again. Tens of millions of people were killed, but it’s pretty much unknown to most Westerners.
Arslan is on my very short list of books that I will never read based on what I’ve read about them. As someone wrote
Another on my list is Hogg by Samuel R Delany, even though he is one of my favourite authors.
> I’m starting to hanker for “regime change”…
Were you not listening? “… same as the old boss…”
When Americans force billions of people on this planet to learn English, then that’s OK. Yet the mere thought that somebody might force an American citizen to learn another language is somehow horrible.
Regarding Arslan, I too perceived it as a book that is plain disgusting. Not because of the nasty events that kept happening again and again in the story, but because most protagonists were disgusting people.
I perceived this book as a deconstruction of irrational American fears. Some random dude from the middle of nowhere invades the USA and makes Americans’ lives miserable. Everybody gets sterilized by a single injection that gets distributed as a vaccine, and people notice that the whole planet has become infertile by the time it’s already too late. Yeah right.
Occasionally, the plot of some book is so silly and impossible in real life that I lose any remnants of the willing suspension of disbelief. Arslan was such a book. USA getting so easily conquered, all women getting sterilized with a vaccine, etc. plot points made no sense and were utterly implausible.
Yet some Americans appear to believe that something like this might actually happen. People stockpile food, hoard weapons, and learn weird “survival skills” for some kind of disaster they anticipate in the future. Conspiracy theorists believe that somebody is developing some food or vaccine or whatever that will make everybody infertile. Yet these fears are just irrational.
By the way, if somebody ever invented an injection or some food that makes people infertile after a single dose with the effect lasting for a lifetime, they’d market it and earn a fortune. I had to get a surgery and spend a lot of money on sterilizing myself. If I could have gotten a single injection that lasts a lifetime and has no side effects, I would have loved to buy it. Sterilizing people who want to remain childfree is a big and profitable business.
Rob Grigjanis@#6:
Arslan is on my very short list of books that I will never read based on what I’ve read about them. As someone wrote
I can engage with a writer who makes me want to hit something, or one who makes me want to curl up and die, but not one who makes me want to puke.
Yeah, that’s a good description of it. It’s as though someone decided to write a fictional account of the Holocaust. Ummm…. Why?
I’ll note that I read Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird at a much too early age. Any age is too early for that book, actually. I still wonder how and why it got written. But I read it because I kept expecting it to get better. Instead, it was just like life under the Third Reich: it didn’t. That’s another book that made me want to puke.
I once read Eugene Kogon’s The Theory and Practice of Hell which is a true account of the death camps. For some reason, if it’s history, it’s not as – shit, I don’t even know. Why would anyone want to write The Painted Bird or Arslan?
All that aside, Trump’s comments made me think of that book. Basically, he’s appealing to the things in it that made it shocking. What an asshole.
Andreas Avester@#8:
I perceived this book as a deconstruction of irrational American fears. Some random dude from the middle of nowhere invades the USA and makes Americans’ lives miserable. Everybody gets sterilized by a single injection that gets distributed as a vaccine, and people notice that the whole planet has become infertile by the time it’s already too late. Yeah right.
Yeah, right: it’s a book about things being done to Americans all of which Americans have done repeatedly to other people. Horrible. Too horrible to contemplate.
Edit: sorry; that came off a bit snippy. I blame typing on iPhone. I generally agree with you, though I believe the author’s object was what I describe above. It’s a pretty clear agenda, really. Of course it’s shocking – it’s history, which is often horrible. I imagine that if was often thus in ancient days: for the residents of Jerusalem the arrival of the crusaders was a similar shock, especially the ensuing carnage.
Dunc@#2:
When looking at US politics, it’s very difficult to tell whether people are genuinely stupid and uninformed, or are merely pandering to the genuinely stupid and uniformed. I would usually assume a bit of both.
As Dogbert says, “that may not be an ‘or’ question.”
I read Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird when I was in my 30s. I agree it was much too early.
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Jesus wept. There’s a movie.
“Can I hear a big “FUCK YOU!” for the media, and around half of the US population that take this imbecile seriously?”
At least by now they’ve collected plenty of footage of the man being a bald-faced lying idiot. Since all those 24 hour news networks are always looking for filler, maybe a few of them could just switch over to airing a compilation of lies / idiocies / unpresidential moments* over and over again. It’s difficult to estimate but the loop could last anywhere from weeks to months, providing a valuable information to the electorate. These channels should probbly be shown in polling stations at full volume. It’s the only practical response to Trump’s tactic of avoiding scandals by drowning them in more scandals. If life gives you lemons galore, open a bottling plant.
*See, that’s three channels sorted already.
It depends upon what you call a “language” versus a “dialect.” There’s a saying that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”
Generally speaking, I’ve mostly heard the kinds of Chinese spoken in different parts of China called “dialects,” even though Cantonese is at least as different from Mandarin as Dutch is from High German. The phonology is different, and the vocabulary is somewhat different. However, since Chinese writing isn’t phonetic anyway, and the words peculiar to Cantonese are seldom written, it’s not as much a barrier as it might seem.
Allison: Yeah. Not too worried when the Mango Menace uses the term “Chinese language.” It’s not THAT bad of a shorthand for the complexities of the language situations in a huge 1.5 billion empire!
Andreas: I think you are being a bit over the top here. Americans are not really “forcing anyone to learn English”. The use of English as a lingua franca can be tied just as much to the BRITISH EMPIRE as the American semi-Empire. Given British imperial history, it was…convenient…for English to become a unifying language of commerce and administration, especially in new nation post-colonial nation states where there are multiple native languages, some mutually unintelligible. That is why French is still widely used in West Africa. As the modern American Empire totters towards its demise, one can ask if there are other languages that would replace it. I wonder if “Chinese” (Mandarin?) could play that role, given the challenges of tonal languages to those not raised in them and the lack of a phonetic alphabet????
And I think Trump is actually right in a sense…China will be THE dominant power over the next century or so. They will have no reason, though, to “conquer” us. Why would they want or need to? They will just buy up the resource producing industries that are actually of use (the Chinese own the largest American pork producer) and our corrupt, doddering, useless spreadsheet diddling ownership class will happily sell the industries and land to them. Heck, it may be better for the remaining American workforce to be owned by a Chinese company rather than a Bain Capital type American Vampire Squid?
Marcus @#10
If people living in some small Asian country fear American invasion, that’s possibly a rational fear. If Americans, who live in the country with the world’s largest military, fear getting invaded by some small Asian country, then that’s an irrational fear.
If in a science fiction novel there exists a drug that can render people infertile after a single injection, I’ll accept that. If in a novel that is otherwise set in the real world such a drug appears out of nowhere with no explanation how it was developed and kept in secret from the entire world, I’ll consider this an implausible plot point.
Beginner novelists often create bizarre plots with implausible events that happen only because the author wanted said event to happen even though it makes no sense in universe. Good novelists occasionally create bizarre plots for some artistic reason. Given that Arslan was well written, I guess it is the latter scenario that’s happening here.
Imagine a novel set in some small Asian country which gets invaded by the USA. Invaders rape local kids, kidnap local girls for their brothels, and force local women to undergo tubal litigation surgeries against their will. I would accept such a novel plot as realistic. Instead in Arslan the country with the world’s greatest military gets invaded by some people out of middle of nowhere and people get sterilized with some miracle drug that appeared out of nowhere with no characters knowing in advance that such a drug has been invented in the first place.