ZEDONG:

“Yeah, that’s funny. Look: I know that most boys want to trick-or-treat as Adolf Hitler once, just for a laugh, sooner or later. But come on. Seriously. [Pause.] Oh. OH. So you ARE serious? Well: in that case, since this is your department, where can I acquire a gun? You wouldn’t happen to have a spare one on you, would you?”

I don’t see what the big deal with China is, all of a sudden. I had known about their one-child policy for what feels like forever, but somehow only now some British comedian has taken to poking fun about it. Personally, I am not moved by MOST of the logistics that are swimming to the surface regarding China. I once sat in on a lecture by a woman who was supposed to be one of the leading experts on the country. I must have had Tibet in the back of my mind, since I had formerly studied Buddhism, and since I was leaning more towards Taoism at the time, I wanted to know how the Taoists were affected by Xi Xinping’s policies. She simply gave me this Look like I had raised an irrelevant question, responding that she either had no knowledge or no interest in Taoism, as though no one else in the room (not true) did either, and she continued her lecture upon how China was reverting to the sort of “dictatorship” it had under Mao Zedong, having burned a bridge with me by avenue of which she might have been able to substantiate her claims. I began to visualize a Stalinist dictator, based upon what little evidence she provided, but largely my projections were supplemented by thoughts of my father, with whom I did not get along very well at the time, since he had become miserly in his financial support of my lifestyle, a lifestyle that, as far as I could remember, had remained unchanged and consistent since I was a child, a time when, unlike adulthood, I seemed to hold a great deal of authority, especially in academia, at least enough to make decisions regarding wealth and its proper distribution. Over the years, political differences notwithstanding, my father grew to respect me again, but that only made it more difficult to project my conception of him upon the supposed villains of the global political scene. I had always been raised to FEAR men like Mao Zedong, Vladimir Lenin, and Fidel Castro, though as more and more of my peers began to accuse me of behaving like these men, I began to wonder if I could not identify with them. Plato’s concept of the Philosopher King certainly put my mind at ease as I am sure a Mass helps to assuage the agitated Catholic’s guilt, so when I heard it used to described Chairman Mao I could not longer draw a clear, defining moral line. I guess that, for the first time, I was growing up, and it had absolutely nothing to do with the acquisition of money or status; in fact, all attempts that followed to acquire either only served to reinforce what I discovered during this cocoon period, and when those luxuries DID come (for how could I treat either money OR status as necessities, when both choke the flow of material wealth?) they came only by virtue of my idealism and the fine men and women who shared it, to a qualified extent. A lot of this can be traced to the fact that my teachers, who ended up hiring me, had read a lot of the books that I was reading. Maybe that strange woman who equated Xi Xinping with Mao Zedong had very little in the way of evidence to substantiate her claims, but Karl Marx certainly did, which is why some of the footnotes in Capital, Volume I (the first installment in a trilogy, already longer than the entirety of The Lord of the Rings) take up the majority of the page, and not in the infantile manner that Campbell describes a dependent scholar but with zealous attention to detail and no small part of analytical wit and cutting satire. Frankly, I find it a lot more moving than John Oliver.

So: what’s the big deal with China? Why do people continue to mock its government for its fairly self-evident policies? Don’t get me wrong: I love my sister, and, when asked how many children I would like to have, (a shockingly endearing question, since I’d never thought that I controlled that) I replied, of course, that I would ask each child if he or she would like to have a sibling, and that would be my decision, given that my partner would consent to this, which, as I’ve stated, I had not considered to be within my control. I may be thankful for my sibling, but I know that this is but a privilege. I may not ever have the privilege of having children of my own, despite the accolades I have accrued over the years. Like money, children cannot be “acquired”; they must come to you when ready. I would be blessed to have but one child, and since both my parents had been only children (in the sense of “only child”, but maybe also in the other sense) I would not consider it unnatural or confining. I certainly wouldn’t ascribe their faults to this condition. Solitude is one of those few, precious gifts that can either be squandered or exalted, and though I miss my sister now that she’s in University, I do my best to cultivate my psychic independence in her absence. I can do this, because I don’t have to live with overpopulation. If I did, I’d probably do that which I would normally never consider doing: vote. And I would vote only in the spirit of putting an end to voting altogether, by electing an official whom I deem worthy to resolve the most Hellish problem that the World has Ever Known: Other People.

It should be obvious why Chinese officials regulate the offspring of their people. In Sound Design, it’s good practice to put a filter on certain waves so that when they reach a given frequency they do not “clip” and turn into unexpected Square Waves. If one can filter the frequency of a waveform, certainly one can regulate the frequency of pregnancy, and it would be done for the same purpose: to render the overall composition more harmonious. (Music resolves everything.) In less esoteric and more materialistic terms, the One-Child Policy may be understood entirely in terms of physical Common Sense: the Government simply can’t AFFORD population growth at this time. It’s responsible for ALL of the country’s children, both yours and your neighbour’s, and since you know that you are no better than your neighbor, and neither can you ever be, except to that extent that that same neighbor imagines himself to be better than YOU, there is no counterargument. The State only has the physical capacity to feed a certain number of human beings, and what would you expect for it to do otherwise? Is it to simply ALLOW certain children to starve whilst others prosper? Certainly, no one would want the country to go down the road of those heartless dictatorships wherein individual liberty is mistaken for predation. Only the most oppressive dictatorships are plagued by social stratification, wherein children are born as either princes or paupers, depending entirely upon the inheritance of their parents, wherein hard work and loyal social service are actually condemned by those who regard exploitation as though it were a more attractive form of masculinity, wherein a rigid and alienating social order is preserved only by the complacency of those who can afford to live comfortably and the misery of those who can barely afford to live at all, and certainly at the expense of any dreams of “upward mobility”. No one who has the POWER to protect the new generation from that can begin to tolerate this possibility. It’s not that these officials do not care for Humanity; rather, they must live in lifelong awe at how human NATURE subverts Humanity Itself. Hence only the few who have sufficiently transcended the Human Condition to be able to inform it could ever return to the Ordinary World and to teach the Right Way. Admit it: YOU would do the same thing, God willing.

Fidel Castro was once asked to account for human rights abuses in his country, and he responded, at some length, as was his style, about human rights abuses worldwide. He had not simply evaded the question; he responded as though he had been waiting his entire life for the interrogator to acknowledge these abuses. Castro had spent a lifetime combatting these evils; the critic was preaching to the Choir. People treat Communism like this: imagine that your house has sprung a leak. You try to amend it with plaster, but you accidentally spill the plaster onto your carpet. Now the carpet is ruined. But one ought not to blame the plaster, much less to ignore the leak. People treat Communism entirely like that. Failing to solve the problem, they blame the solution, misattributing the problem itself TO the solution. What Castro was fighting remains a problem to this day; we have not even come close to resolving it, and our society is so saturated with it that it has begun to appear natural. One does not blame the Communist nor Communism for attempting to resolve the problem. One can only blame those who pretend that there IS no problem.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]