You're not punk and I'm telling everyone

Appollogies for any and all extreme delays, my computer is still "huai de" as they say, I will take it to be looked at later this week.

A decent amount has happened since the last post, including a relatively sucessful first week and a half of English Table, which I started essentially through force of will and with no help from the English department; a trip to Kaifeng, one of the ancient capitals of China (I have now visited five of them, Beijing, Luoyang, Xi'an [then called Chang'an], Kaifeng and Zhengzhou [also previously known as something else], leaving only Nanjing to complete the tour); and a Halloween party for some of my students. I have also come to several interesting revelations that, although I had hints of before, had not fully formed as coherent ideas yet.

Rich, my sometime roomate and the primary reason I started listing to punk, has commented on several occasions that he would never want to live in a pre-hegemonic country. Post-imperial countries on the downward slope of their power supposedly have a better sense of irony, which makes them much more willing to laugh at themselves. Every aspect of their aesthetic is markedly changed, from their architecture and visual art to their music, performance art, humor and litterature. More importantly, these types of countries are much better able to support sub-cultures and counter-cultures.

Rich has also remarked that there is very little that he appreceates fully for itself, without any irony. This is a sentiment which I feel goes a bit far, but nevertheless describes much of the way I think and understand art and culture. This I think is also related to the state of American power. In my experiannce, older people, especially those who came of age before the mid-to-late seventies tend to have a much less developed sense of irony than younger people. And people who are optomistic about American power likewise have a more straightforward sense of humour. But I think that it is my generation that generally has the most developed sense of irony in America. We have gone from laughing at people falling down or at fart jokes to not laughing at them to laughing again, but in a self-consious way. These two things, the state of imperial or hegemonic power and a sense of irony I believe to be correlated very strongly with a punk movement, or something very like one.

In response to a large variety of cultural factors, but I believe largely to the Vietnam war, America had a series of cultural movements in the sixties and seventies running counter to the mainstream. Notable among these were the hippies and the punks. The hippies were the optomistic counter-culture, they represented a utopic view that they could reshape soceity or create a new one. Their music was syncretic and happy in a slightly meloncholy way. The punks came out of their falure; they are the pessimistic counter-culture, self-consious of their own failure. The music is defined short and energetic and simple songs and anger and represented a rejection of the concept of "good" music.

Ironically enough, the punk movement became huge. Anti-hero singers with obnoxious voices like Joey Ramone and Jonny Rotten became superstars. And now songs of rebellion are used to sell cars. The movement went underground and continually resurfaces to self-conciously sell out its ideals for commercial sucess. This is the atmosphere in which my generation grew up: with a counter-culture so counter-culture it is counter- its own independant status. This is the situation, to greater and lesser extents, I believe, in every country that has had a punk-type movement: a pessimistic counter-culture, but one that was powerful enough to become mainstream.

China has not had a punk movement. They have no sense of irony. This would appear to be because it is still a culture of mainstream optimism, it has not even progressed far enough to create a true optomistic counterculture, although it may be close. In America, among the most ardent pro-choicers you can find people who laugh and call themselves "baby-killers". Among the most sober passifists, you can find those who joke about "nuking the towel-heads". In China, it is impossible to find people who will laugh about Taiwan.

At the hazard of making overserious people angry, I will go further. Taiwan is China's abortion. It is China's gay marriage, school prayer . It is an important issue, just as all of these are important issues, but it is not nearly as important as the issues that it overshadows. It is also an issue with a fairly well-established status quo which is unlikely to be substantially changed in the near future.

Say what you will about the danger of Bush's Supreme Court Appointments to Roe v. Wade, I find it fairly unlikely that abortion will be completely criminalized. Which is not to say that we should stop paying attention to it or advocating the position that we support. I find it unlikely that gay marriage will be universally legalized in the near future, but I likewise think it unlikely that "defense of marriage" acts will stick in the long run. These are issues that politicians on both sides of the fence (and why are there only two sides to the issues, that's stupid) use to rally the troops and turn attention away from all the things they're not getting done with respect to education, health-care, social security and of course the war.

In China, with one party in power, they have found an even better issue, one that everyone agrees on rather than one that everyone disagrees on, that they can use to keep the party faithful faithful. But the diplomatic position with Taiwan is fairly stable. Despite some changes in the past few years, Taiwan is unlikely to join the mainland or to have their secession recognized at least until the current generation of politicians, on both sides of the straight, dies. It is also unlikely to be the cause of any sort of serious military confrontation. But it keeps people from talking as much about rural poverty and unemployment, a mounting health-care disaster that makes the US look solvent and increasing environmental destruction.

But China still needs a punk movement so it can laugh at these problems. And listen to some decent music while they're at it.