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In This Issue

• Positively Sino-Soidal
• AIDS, SARS, Avian Flu... Bean Curd?
• A Paradoxical Paroxysm of Pancakes
• Letters to the Editor
• International Yuks
• Après Moi, Le Corbusier
• Get a Free Bobblehead, for a Limited Time Only!
• The Sweet, Sensual Twang of Success
• Shut Up, Shut Up.
• To Sachs With Love
• Santa's Grottos Steal X-Mas
• Broad Goes Abroad to Paris
• A Lesson on Father Christmas
• Hugo Chavez in 2008: He’ll Crush Us Like Grapes!
• Martha’s Civil Unrest Tips
• Politics: Opiate of the Asses
• A Plan to Unite Humanity Without Using Glue
• Mad Cow: All the Cool Kids Are Contracting It
• Things Around the World on Which to Pee
• Trapped in the Closet (Deleted Scene)
• Mario Around the World!
• THEY WATCH
• The Staff of 21.4

Michael Bredin

Everyday low prices and egregious human rights violations! I’ve got a mandate from heaven... to shop at SINO*MART! Revolutionary deals! Yellow Emperor-tag sales!

No matter our respective political stripes, we can all agree that America was pretty sweet while it lasted.  China is the new darling on the superpower scene, and she's got the biggest global power-titties ever.  Let's find out about our new more attractive friend who will soon replace us at the lunch table and steal our steady!

First of all, we live in such a self-aware world that one empire can actually see the other coming from decades away.  The Aztecs, on the other hand, went through something like "Hmm, what's that speck on the horizon?  Whoa, it's a bunch of shiny god-people riding a whale made of trees!  Oh wait, just some pale bros with beards, cough cough, uh oh, I'm dying, I'm dead.  I died so I can't go to the library which got burnt to the ground anyway.  Blef."  We Americans, on the other hand, have had ample time to lament our decline, act like planetary dominance isn't even that big a deal anyway, and get excited when we beat China's gymnasts.  The Chinese have also had ample time to laugh at our pettiness and build up resentment toward us for our laundromat owner jokes and that whole transcontinental railroad issue.  

Another peculiarity of the Ameri-Sino power transfer is the friendliness between the countries' highest power-elites.  There has been a great deal of cross-pollination of influence between the political and corporate leaders of each empire; for every lap dance administered with feigned excitement to a small, scream-giggling eighty-year old Chinese electronics manufacturer in Las Vegas, a back-hairy weapons manufacturer from Ohio has received a "massage" from a "nineteen" year-old weeping orphan in Beijing.  So the transition will ultimately result in all of us being ruled by the same rich people, just with different stationary.

Now, I know what may be vexing you.  When it comes to personal freedom, China is sort of like a grizzly bear taking a dump down the face of Mount Rushmore: total indifference, and big teeth.  The Chinese leadership style is secretive and prohibitive of all dissent, and that sounds like something that would startle our Founding Father Thomas Jefferson out of fucking the people he owned.  But I ask you, what's so un-American about Chinese tyranny?  China's governing style is a lot like that of a big American corporation, just with more artillery.  Recast the contrast between America and China to one between Wal-Mart and, let's say, Omni-Chine Incorporated, and your apprehension should fade as you begin to correctly perceive your current and future leaders not as political exemplars, but as corporate bosses.  You've seen it all before, so no problem, bro!  

Regrettably, the Chinese probably won't get to experience the full, fattened tranquility of extended, peerless dominance of the globe, since they'll have to contend with Nature, formerly America's bitch but newly enraged.  America and Britain caught Nature off guard for a couple centuries and enjoyed earth-spanking luxuries like factories, plastics, and coal-powered toothbrushes while getting off scot-free.  But now Nature seems to be putting us in check.  Our seasons are all out of whack, deadly viruses are bungling our one-night-stands and our three-piece wing-n-breast bucket population, and God Himself recently cried out a hurricane and killed jazz.  India, meanwhile, seems to suffer a massive earthquake every time it threatens to break the billion people mark.  Who are they, the Buffalo Bills of global power?!  Haha, I am vastly sorry.  

China, however, tops them all with its Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River.  Chinese people dammed up their river so hard that they've slightly altered the rotation of the earth by putting so much weight in one place.  Now, that's some straight up superpower gangsta shit, but you know Nature is going to come down on them.  Hard.  I predict a giant meteorite made of volcano-hurricanes (a.k.a. Hurri-canoes^TM) will smash into central China and awaken Fin Fang Foom, the giant dragon which sleeps beneath the Great Wall.  Hopefully the Chinese will know the herb to put it back to sleep for another three hundred years: cinnamon, but in Chinese!

The Chinese probably won't build up enough hubris to merit Katrina-scale disasters for at least a little while.  What are some of the interesting decadences and opulences they can enjoy in the meantime?  And yeah, I know "opulences" isn't a real word, but I use it because I'm an American so fuck you.  Speaking of which, the Chinese will likely get lazy about their language and reduce their working vocabulary to a couple hundred words and emoticons, like we did with English.  After all, why pay attention to language when your country is on top?  Your countrymen are just like you and thus already know what you're going to say, and people from other countries already know that every sentence you speak is just a variation of "Carry my fucking bags, ugly."  So yeah, the Chinese will dumb down their language (thank God for that; I'm too lazy to learn to write with those little drawings of dojos) and then, of course, they need to get even fatter than us.  Say goodbye to bicycles, China's stupid current convenient means of transportation and exercise for hundreds of millions.  Hello, rocket-robot-bicyclotron 5000!  I envision newly wealthy middle-class Chinese ascending out of their driveways into smog-belching storms of flying titanium vehicles, since a flying rocket-robot-bike makes its driver feel like a more substantial person.  And talk about privacy and a sense of adventure!

I also predict that the coming Chinese superpower will revel in its crown jewel, its sceptre of global dominance: DVD technology.  We will all get DVD systems installed in our butt-cracks, and we'll play our monthly "Epistle from the Great Happy-Face Ruler" on screens engrafted on the insides our eyelids: "Everything is going Super-Happy^TM!  The Middle Kingdom, your favorite Iron-Clad Tower of Smiles, will protect you forever from the ever-present Evil Mean Threats which we have Destroyed Anyway in a Fun Rock n Roll!  Ice Cream for our Troops and Basketball!  We invite you to celebrate at the mandatory Joy-Level!  Please buy and insert more DVDs in your Lower Smile^TM!"  Hey, America would've done it if it had survived long enough.

I suppose it's always sad when one's country gets supplanted.  It's easy to feel bitter about the decline, or to feel somehow responsible for the collapse of America's civic spirit.  Don't let any of that nonsense get in the way of what really matters: the fact that someone has to hold power over everyone.  Honestly, would you want to see someone like you in charge of people like you?  I didn't think so.  So whether you're in the hands of a cabal of rich white men from America or a cabal of rich Asian men who've dined with those rich white men, rest assured that you're being protected.  By rich people who care enough about you to dine together, and who are men.

Now I don't vote - but if I did, I'd vote for China in the new millennium!  Go ahead, fellas, do Taiwan like we did Hawaii!