Mandatory Fun

Mysteriously, The Plank, and all of The New Republic, seems to be completely mute on an issue which I would’ve expected to hear a lot about from them — the Russo-Georgian War. But they do have a rumination from Sacha Zimmerman that’s worth a good, long ponder, in re the Chinese Olympics, specifically, the Greatest Opening Ceremonies in Human History.

It was easy to sit agape thinking, How did they do that? Still, I couldn’t help but wonder about the logistics of a $300 million production that had thousands of performers training for more than eight months (let alone the cyber-savants working tirelessly behind the scenes). After watching a moving opening routine that featured 2,008 drummers performing in a kind of mind-boggling unison I’d only ever seen accomplished in kooky North Korean videos of parades in honor of Kim Jong Il, it was easy to wonder: Could this kind of mass-synchronized undertaking only be accomplished in a totalitarian state?

Indeed. I like to joke that in the libertopia of the future, the Fun Police will conduct random violations of the 4th Amendment to ensure no one is being dangerously antisocial, disapproving, and restrained. But even that kind of farce would lack the creeped-out concentrated power of a command fun economy powered by the mandatory discipline of the state.

….Right? I have no need to refer to China as a totalitarian state — ‘pink police state’ is much more instructive, referring as it does to a regime that permits, licenses, and even underwrites broad-based social indulgences in pleasure and cultural indulgences in modern lifestyles while denying in exchange any kind of political liberty and personal privacy of any meaningful description. But I wonder whether a big move isn’t afoot, especially among younger heads, to look at China as the cool pink police state and Russia as the uncool one, frozen and diseased where China is hot and happening.

This would be a big mistake, in my estimation, even if it’s partially true. Leaving Russia out in the cold while fawning all over China with money and attention will make too much of an enemy out of the first and too much of a friend out of the second. We lose in both directions.