The Chinaman is the Issue

We're just trying to get to the bottom of human sacrifice. It's a bit like putting a resistant world on the couch and trying to psychoanalyze a behavior that is repressed, sublimated, misremembered, and covered over by layers of yada yada. It's like everyone is a little embarrassed by it and wants to move on.

For example, I'm reading a history of China, and one of the early dynasties is described as "warlike and highly superstitious, worshipping a number of gods and conducting human sacrifices to them." Ho hum. No details, and no further mention of the subject in the rest of the book. 

Although from another angle, I suppose one could say the book is one long and tedious chronicle of human sacrifice. I don't think I'll be finishing it. Frankly, I'm not even that curious about the Chinese, there's just nothing else to read around here. And therefore nothing much to write about. 

Next up: Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought, by Louis Sass. It doesn't get here until Saturday, so meanwhile I'm stuck with madness and premodern insanity in China.

Let me flip through it and see if there's anything else you folks need to know. After all, nearly one in five people on Earth is Chinese.

When the communists took over in 1949, more than 75% were illiterate. It doesn't say how many are literate today, but probably everyone, and imagine the crap they have to read! I'd go nuts. It's like when progressives defend Cuba by saying it's 110% literate or something. Yeah, well, I'd rather be illiterate than have to read Das Capital or the Aphorisms of Castro.

Not all creation myths are created equal. One of their popular ones claims that once upon a time "primal chaos congealed into an egg, in which the complementary cosmic energies of Yin and Yang thickened around a hairy, horned giant called Pangu." Yada yada, Pangu hacked them in two, and here we are: Yin became the sky, Yang the earth, Pangu's sweat the rain, and his breath the wind. 

As for the production of silk, "How did anyone think of boiling moth cocoons in the first place?" It doesn't say, but I'll bet it was a bored eunuch with nothing to read. 

Says here that no book in history has had a greater influence on more people over a longer period of time than Confucius's aphorisms (The Analects). Meh. That's a dubious claim in a country where it's illegal for most people to own a Bible.

As far as I know, Lao Tse is my favorite Chinaman. He discovered such important principles as non-doing, which is like Chinese Slack. Of course, the Slack that can be named is not the true Slack, but he was attacked for preaching Slack anyway. 

The Tao Te Ching dates back to the 8th century BC. "Because the text was inscribed on strips of bamboo, no one can say for sure in what order it's meant to be read." I don't think the order matters, since it goes to the vertical order that is outside time and therefore chronology. 

One of Lao Tse's followers was a guy named Zhuangzi who dreamt he was a butterfly but then couldn't figure out if maybe he was a butterfly dreaming of being a man who dreamt of being a butterfly.  

Really? 

Zhuangzi notwithstanding, it seems that Confucians were rigid statists and Taoists conservative liberals, in that the former "yearned to serve a ruler" while the latter were "disinterested in serving government." Thus, Taoist Subgeniuses "have irritated straight-laced Confucians for millennia."

Confucius very un-Dude.

Then there's the I Ching, which makes astrology look like quantum physics.

Speaking of which, I saw Oppenheimer a couple nights ago and found it to be unbelievably tedious. Didn't grab me at all, so I left after two hours. The only thing I learned is that eggheaded autistic physicists do have sex after all.

Upon the bomb's explosion, Oppenheimer famously quoted the Bhagavad Gita, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. Coincidentally, that was his favorite pick-up line.

If it were me, I would have quoted Wanda Jackson:

I've been to Nagasaki, Hiroshima too

The things I did to them, baby , I can do to you

'Cause I'm a Fujiyama Mama, and I'm just about to blow my top

And when I start eruptin', ain't nobody gonna make me stop

I'm sure the Chinese would approve. They hated the Japanese.

One of their dynasties had a wise old saying: burn the books and bury the scholars. A guy named Qin Shihuang thought the tenured were a bit much, so he had more than 460 scholars buried alive. 

In 1958 Mao reportedly said, and I quote, "What's the big deal about Qin Shihuang? He buried only 460 scholars alive; well, we've buried 46,000." 

Yeah, that was Mao's favorite pick-up line.

Until the 10th century it was legal to cut off a slave's johnson. "Some impoverished families" even "had their sons castrated in the hope that they could gain access to power and wealth," so at least they had a better excuse than our own transsexual nihilists.

Back in the day, one of their bored eunuchs invented paper, but all things considered, I'd still rather have my johnson. In any event, no more writing on bamboo leaves. 

Buddhism arrived via India in the 6th century BC. "Eunuchs proved enthusiastic converts, comforted by the promise of reincarnation," this time with johnson attached. In the meantime, "they carried their severed parts in a special container so they could be reunited with them in the next life," and why not?

Then there's Zen, which was a slimmed down combination of Taoism and Buddhism. I myself dabbled in Zen back in the 1990s, but the radical detachment it preaches seems more suitable in culture that absolutely sucks. 

A culture where they practiced, for example, foot-binding, a widespread sexual perversion (you don't want to know) involving the ideal of a three-inch foot. There's a photograph in the book, and it looks like somebody's foot got caught in a trash compactor.

Oh well, 3,500 years of beautiful culture from Pangu to Xi Jinping...