We’re All Going to China!

Vers l’orient compliqué, je volai avec des idées simples. — Charles de Gaulle

Our gang was out of control. Spit-wads and paper planes ruled. Then, like a busted clock or Kant of Königsberg overcome by Hume, time stopped: Dr K strode into the conference room to a large laminated world map and tapped it with his pointer.

Gentlemen.

Heavy German accent via Frankfurt on the Hudson.

The spit-wads and paper planes ceased at once.

As you’re all well aware, we’re all going to China.

On a slow boat, Dr K, like the King of Swing?

We’re all going on Air Force One, a slow boat to China would take too long. Gentlemen, I’d like one of you to show me where China is on this map.

One hand went up, the smartest guy in the room, the trickiest for sure.

Mr President, if you please.

Taking the pointer, the President flirted with Formosa before tapping her rival across the Straits.

There. There it is, Mr K —

Dr K.

— Sorry, Dr K — the People’s Republic of China, Red China, which, lest we forget – and we must never forget — owes its existence to the Franklins at State.

Very good, Mr President, you may sit down.

Our gang traded fives. Marco Polo! China Smith!

It is of the utmost importance to know a few facts before we set out on this momentous trip. Can anyone tell me how many Chinese there are?

A billion?

Close. It’s eight hundred million and rising.

How many Chinamen does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Mr Butz, I don’t think this humour is appropriate for the —

Thousands, because Confucius say many hands make light work!

Our gang cracked up.

Charlie Chan!

No. 1 Son!

Thank you for that moment of levity, now can we please return to the –

How many Chinese Red Guards does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Mr Butz —

10,000 — to give the bulb a Cultural Revolution!

Our gang collapsed into helpless laughter.

That’s Earl, brother!

Mr Butz, don’t you have an office to go to, perhaps a quarterly report on manure production to file?

I didn’t hear about —

Shit in, shit out, Earl, roared the President, that’s your job!

Our gang fell about in stitches, punching each other’s arms.

Hell, I guess I do have some reports to write before we go. Dr K. Gang!

Simian hooting.

Please, gentlemen, otherwise we’re going to be here all day.

Not with the Redskins playing we’re not, said the President, it’s Sunday, Dr K, have a heart. It’s the great American pastime.

When I came to this great country of yours in 1938, the immigration official who dealt with us informed me that the great American pastime was baseball, and that if I wanted to be a real American, I should pick up a bat and ball.

(Did he tell you what to do with them?)

Who knows, he said, I could be the next Fred Merkle.

A cough.

Anyhow, can anyone guess what China’s greatest export is?

The Little Red Book, shouted a hyena-like man in a brown Hart Schaffner Marx suit, a prop for every dirty longhair campus commie in the world hoping to get off with some equally dirty longhair campus commie hippie chick.

I couldn’t have put it better myself, Spiro.

Just calling a spade a spade, Mr President.

Hear-hear!

Actually, it’s tea.

‘I wouldn’t trade you for all the tea in China!’

Our gang warbled and crooned, off key and decidedly blue, which wasn’t how Dr K envisaged government service when he left Harvard for the White House, briefing a half-plastered chamber of commerce junket.

Snubbed provincials, striving overachievers, whose advancement had been checked at every turn by the ‘Franklins’…

All shoulder pads and ambition, in too much of a hurry to be tactful or scrupulous…

The car dealers as opposed to the New Dealers…

‘Harvard hates America, Professor; you know it, I know it. You’re there on sufferance. If they really believed in merit, you’d be head of your department instead of some stuffed shirt with the right last name who hasn’t got a tenth of your brains.’

He knew he was right. His last name sounded ‘funny’. Was unmistakably foreign.  

It wasn’t a ‘real American’ name like Jack Armstrong or Pete Boone.

‘Why after all these years does Professor Pushy still sound like Bismarck?’ he heard a not very collegial colleague say within earshot.

‘Bismarck? Surely you mean Dr Strangelove?’

Sniggers.

Not one of us.

‘We know Hubert approached you but he’s not going to win, not after Chicago. And Rocky’s on our side now; he says good things about you. So does Mrs Luce, whose opinion we prize very highly indeed. We want everybody inside the tent, pissing out instead of outside pissing in, as our outgoing president so colourfully put it. We want you. Join the winning team, Professor. Forget teaching history — make history.’

And here he was, standing tall, sitting pretty, National Security Advisor, with the ear of the most powerful man in the world; and the witlings prithee? Still seeking tenure if not truth in the groves of academe, ‘pointy-headed nabobs of negativism’ with their teapot tempests and remaindered tomes. 

Power — the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Tor!

Since it is a disservice to reduce the 5000-year history of a great civilisation to a thumbnail sketch, I shall instead focus on a book of wisdom that has had as profound an influence on the East as the bible has had on the West — The Analects of Confucius.

Otherwise known as Golden Guide to Fortune Cookies!

Guffaws.

I’ve acquired copies for us to peruse at leisure. It is that kind of book, sayings, aphorisms, anecdotes, some true, some apocryphal.

Our gang’s mascot, the ever-obliging Bebe (‘the guy who mixes the martinis’), passed them around.

(Where pitchers? I see no pitchers.)

Confucius speaks —

Isn’t that ‘Confucius Say’?

The principal concepts of Confucius are ‘The Way’ —

  ‘Show me the way to go home’.

— And ‘Virtue’, which is not unlike the Western concept of ‘Ethics’ as defined by Aristotle. 

We’re not at Harvard, Dr K. Relax.

(When are we going to RFK?)

Sorry, Mr President. I shall stick to the key points. As with the bible, there are multiple interpretations of The Analects, notably as a manual for state authority, stressing obedience to parents and elders, hierarchy, deference to a mandarin class.

Like you, Dr K.

Modesty forbids, Mr President. And though officially banned in the People’s Republic, it nevertheless underlies Mao’s thinking in his role as ‘philosopher-king’.

Yeah. ‘Power comes from the barrel of a gun’.

Which Confucius said in so many words, Mr President, that amongst other things rulers need arms, a principle the Chairman has enthusiastically embraced.

‘Government is synonymous with righteousness. If the king is righteous, how could anyone dare to be crooked?’ Well, I can tell you right now, Dr K, that’s a crock.

I agree, Mr President.

(Jesus H Christ, enough already!)

Take Ike. I speak with some authority. Everyone took Ike for a righteous man. But Ike was a far more complex and devious man than most people realised…but in the best sense of those words.

Dr K suppressed a smirk. We speak the same language, Mr President. Class dismissed, I mean, gentlemen, enjoy the game.

Our gang was out of there.

Dr K sighed. What did you think, your Highness, he asked a feline figure who had sat in the back unnoticed, as if auditing a course or doing an assessment.

Pas mal, Herr Doctor. I was thinking it was just as well you didn’t apply the ‘Law of Unintended Consequences’ to The Analects.  

‘Every book contains its counter-book’ your Highness.  

Prince Metternich rose carefully from his seat. Precisely. Which thought could be confusing, even dangerous, in a knave or a fool. Tokay? 

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Bebe by Julian George is available now from CB Editions. You can order a copy here.

Julian George’s work has appeared in Fictionable (forthcoming), Exacting Clam (forthcoming), the Naugatuck River Review, Perfect Sound Forever, New World Writing, Slag Glass City, Panoplyzine, Ambit, The Journal of Music, Film Comment, The London Magazine, Cineaste and Art Review.