Tag Archives: Spicy Spice

by harrisrh | February 28, 2017 · 12:14 pm

Quote of the Day

“It was a time when telling fantasies to oneself as well as others, and believing them, was practiced to an incredible degree…A large part of the population was swept into this confused, crazy world. ‘Self-deception while deceiving others’ (zi-qi-qi-ren) gripped the nation.”

Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

I know what you’re thinking: How on Buddha’s still-somewhat-green Earth could Jung Chang have presaged all the way back in 1991 through her book Wild Swans what would happen to the U-nited States of America in 2017? The answer, of course, is that she didn’t; she was writing about growing up in China before, during and after one of the most sinister leaders of the 20th century, Mao Zedong.

Kind of ironic (READ: scare the quills off a porcupine’s balls) that you can read the above passage and say to yourself, Wow! That so captures life today under Donnie T., Spicy Spice and the Grim Reaper.

Lest we forget, though, Jung Chang did a mind-blowing job of capturing 20th-century Chinese history from the perspective of three generations of females in a narrative that is at once memoir, social critique and eyewitness account to one of the most tumultuous eras in modern history.

Mao’s Reign of Terror, which was masked by such euphemistic banners as Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward, was in fact on the same sub-human level as the French Revolution’s real la Terreur, Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution, Pol Pot’s Killing Fields, and Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, to name but a few of the blemishes on civilization’s track record over the last couple of hundred years.

Along with Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, Wild Swans should be mandatory reading for anyone trying to get a handle on where China has come from and where it’s heading in the future.

Quote of the Day

“[H]uman consciousness has been reduced to a panicked blur, a zoetrope of galloping despair.”

I love this line! I didn’t even know what on god’s green earth a “zoetrope” was before reading it this morning and I STILL loved it. Awesomeness as its most awesome.

This quote comes from an op-ed by Lindy West in The Guardian yesterday called “The first 25 days of Trump have been a zoetrope of galloping despair.” The preamble is as follows:

Today, during my morning routine of opening my laptop, clicking on literally anything, and just screaming and screaming, I made the astonishing discovery that Donald Trump has only been president of the United States for about three weeks. Which is weird, because I could have sworn we had fallen through a tesseract into the airless crush of a two-dimensional void at least seven eternities ago, or what would have constituted seven eternities if such a place had a linear concept of time. Turns out, though, it has only been 25 days, we are still on earth, and every cell in my body has not been excruciatingly flattened into pure math. It just feels like it.

It’s an understandable mistake, I think. Trump has really been eat-pray-loving his way through his first month as the most dangerous man on earth, seeding so many potential atrocities – including, perhaps, the breakdown of the republic itself – that human consciousness has been reduced to a panicked blur, a zoetrope of galloping despair. There are simply too many emergencies to hold all of them in your mind at once. Cecily Strong captured the feeling on this week’s Saturday Night Live: “Let me just say, you’re doing too much. I want one day without a CNN alert that scares the hell out of me.”

Spicy Spice might like using dolls to explain things to the media on a certain TV show, but with Donnie T. I think his pictures speak more words than any painter at anytime in history could ever evoke if not for the T.’s sage choice in art.

I’m not really sure what that means exactly, but here goes my poor attempt to capture the essence of it.

This is your brain.

This is your brain in the Donnie T. era

Spicy Spice: The 6th Spice Girl

(Siobhan Spicer shares a light moment with himself after mistakenly referring to the “Cold War” as the “Frigid Battle.”)

Semantics matter. So do names. After referring to the Canadian prime minister, a man we Kanadians (oh, spelling matters, too!) call Justin Trudeau – or simply “The poster boy for the Hair Club for Men” – as Joe Trudeau, Siobhan Spicer has officially earned himself a place in the world’s most famous girly girl band.

Now known as Spicy Spice, or the 6th Spice Girl, S.S. (not to be confused with the Schutzstaffel…you can look that one up, Spicy Spice ) has not only become a household name in many countries around the world (e.g. Kanada, Mehiko, Ymn, Searia, etc.), but has also landed himself a place on SNL. Well, vicariously, at least.

See, the issue here is that the current White House keeps falling back on idioms like “The devil is in the details.” The problem is that there really is no catch or mysteriousness to the details that the Donnie T. administration keep screwing up. This is not a case of slippery semantics, wily words, complicated conundrums or any other alliterative term you can think of to defend these egregious errors. (Ooh ooh ooh! I just earned a Spicy Point for that one!)

Seriously, though, do we as a planet have to put up with this Banana Republic (No, not the clothing chain, Spicy Spice) for another three years, four months and eleven days? Don’t believe my math? There’s actually a UK site counting it down to the second.

Here’s another idiom: “The blind leading the blind.” That’s a good one because it dates back to the Upanishads, which…oh, forget it. Perhaps a good ol’ Dutch oven from that hilarious Hollander, Erasmus, will do the trick: “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

At this point, I think many of us who could not vote in the U.S. election but must endure its consequences would happily accept a thoughtful, well-spoken cyclops in the Oval Office than what we have now.

But if you want to brush up on your langwage skillz before yer next press briefing, Spicy Spice, I highly reco you reed this beaut of a short story, “Everybody’s Dictionary.”

Tag Archives: Spicy Spice

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

Spicy Spice: The 6th Spice Girl

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