Saturday, May 01, 2004
(2:50 PM) | Anonymous:
Eighty-Pound Lenin & Mao
When someone makes a tongue or typing slip-up and I draw attention to it, I do it out of no malignity but sheer delight in language and all the zany possibilities it reveals.Thank you sincerely, Robb, for your suggestion of printing on an 80-pound Lenin—which reminds me that I saw Mao in the inner sanctum enclosed in glass, in Beijing, as guards swooshed me swiftly past. I have no reason to believe that was not the late Chairman Mao.
The strangest thing about the viewing was not the fantastic length of the queue outside the mausoleum (Think, oh, I don’t know, what’s popular in the U.S.? Disney Land/World? Assuming they have really long lines at Disney World, think that but in Chinese proportions. Think Disney World times a billion. A thousand.). Nor was it the colossal alabaster statue in one of the long outer rooms, sitting in front of a landscape-painted wall like the ones in my neighborhood’s Mexican restaurants. What was really queer about dead Mao was the unearthly glow-in-the-light-green color of his face.
I figure it would have cost them about thirty cents’ worth of makeup to fix that. In American money, that’s less than a nickel.
