So few of us know what surreal really means. This is surreal.

It’s off to war we go….

Slate’s Saddamometer says the chance of war is now 100 percent. So I guess any discussion between me and Hong Kong’s best-known Gweilo would be irrelevant. There’s something odd about this whole thing — I sense (as best as I can sense anything about the the US from here) a real unsureness, an attitude among the slim majority that we should do it but we kind of wonder about it. There were no such doubts when we ousted the Taliban, the mission was clear. Everyone was in line behind it (aside from Village Voice readers). This time, the reputation of the country is at stake in a way I’ve never seen before in my lifetime. The risks are incredible. If I believed in god, I would be praying.

Okay, I won’t go on about Iraq; there’s plenty of viewpoints on the subject out there. In just a matter of hours — maybe even before I push the Post key — most of that debate will be irrelevant. Let the cards fall where they may.

Is it just me, or is this the most confusing debate ever?

Read Andrew Sullivan and you’d believe anyone opposed to war with Iraq is either an idiot or a Frenchman. Read Nicholas Kristof and you’d believe the whole thing is a canard, the product of alarmist hysteria.

While I hate seeing idiotic peace marchers claiming that Bush is the “barbarian” and not Saddam, I have to question the logic and the necessity of invasion. Kristof’s words today are thought-provoking indeed:

In the 1950s and 1960s, the hawks magnified the threat from Vietnam and Cuba. In the 1980s they obsessed about Nicaragua (only a one-week bus ride from Texas!). None of these threats were imagined, but they were exaggerated.

Now the focus is on Saddam, and it’s true that he has been brutal and threatening for 25 years — particularly in the 1980s when Don Rumsfeld was cozying up to him in Baghdad and the U.S. was shipping him seven strains of anthrax. The last 10 years have been the best behaved of Saddam’s career (not saying much), and he is now 65, controlling an army only one-third its peak strength, and in the twilight of his menace.

Alas, what to think, what to believe! Bouncing from one blog to another, I get even more confused. What is The Truth? How can such smart people come to such vastly different conclusions? It’s so confusing, I’m ready to SCREAM.

Pure Evil

I know, this story is so old it is carbon-dated, but I just came across it while surfing Dan Gillmor’s great weblog and I can’t just let it go. Can a company truly be as evil as this? Can it actually send its own employees to their deaths? No, it can’t be true…. But it is.

I was wrong, it’s not China’s Interent that’s been so slow lately, just my apartment building’s Internet. I’m in the office now and there’s no problem. (Well, there’s one problem: I’m not supposed to be doing this in the office.)

Where’s the Outrage? Our Office of Homeland Security is Pure Farce

Maureen Dowd, who has become such a bratty, gossipy bitch that I often skip her columns, made some really sharp observations yesterday about the idiocies of our Office of Homeland Security. Being part of the marketing/pr industry, I found her insights especially biting. E.g.:

Last week, the head of Homeland Insecurity unveiled the big strategy he’s been working on for nearly a year: a $1.2 million “ready campaign,” a p.r. concoction complete with a “D’oh!” Web site. There are TV ads starring cute New York City firemen telling people to store water and get flashlights, and close-ups of Mr. Ridge spouting simple-minded axioms like “Have a good communications plan for your family.”

George Bush has always mocked Washington’s dependence on focus groups. Only last week, he derided mass European protests against the war, saying listening to the marchers would be like relying on focus groups to set foreign policy. (Millions of people marching in the streets of world capitals is not a sampling of opinion; it is opinion.)

If you want to be a pundit, China is not the place to be. No, I’m not talking about the government. It’s just that the Internet is often so frikking slow here, you can grow old waiting to link from one site to another. It always seems worse on Sunday, when my “broadband” seems to take its own day of rest, leaving me SOL. Bloggers need access to lots of news and opinion to comment on. With nearly every major e-newspaper blocked and broadband that’s slower than the 9k dial-up modem I used back in the early 90s, there’s little I can do today but stew. I’ll be back once the pipes have been re-opened.

Eschaton, one of my heroes, was kind enough to mention this blog yesterday, and I am absolutely shocked at the uptick in traffic to my teensy little site. All I can say is Thanks.

I posted this earlier but must have somehow deleted it. Not untypical.

This poster — courtesy of Orcinus, who I hope doesn’t mind my stealing it — had me laughing out loud.

More, each funnier than than the last, can be found here.

Of Guards and Greeters

Every afternoon I look down from my office high up in the huge SOHO complex to witness another of those phenomena so unique to China. This one is the Changing of the Guard. Just about every building and every business has its own guard, if not an entire fleet. They invariably wear military-like uniforms and at first I thought they were actually soldiers of the People’s Army. Currently they all wear long coats and big fur hats, but I presume that will end once the weather improves.

Having security guards is nothing strange. What’s strange is the ritual they go through each and every day. Across from my office is a huge complex of high-rise apartment houses, and each tower has its own set of guards. Before going to work at their afternoon shift, the guards all congregate and stand in rows, in full uniform and at full attention, as the King of the Guards gives them what appears to be a pep talk. After a few minutes, they all march off in neat columns, goose-stepping to their respective stations. I have since found out that this goes on just about everywhere in Beijing (if not all of China).

Taking one’s job seriously and inspiring your team — these are obviously noble endeavors. Still, I can’t help but wonder what the King of the Guards says to his minions each day; is it always the same? Do they enjoy it? Do they receive some benefit, spiritual or otherwise, from it? After all, once they march off they essentially sit around all day and do nothing (which is not to say they are not important; but ideally a security guard will never have to do anything, except deter trouble simply by being there).

The guards are everywhere. Outside of every restaurant there are the guards. On the street outside of every business and every building, and in the lobbies as well. As to the ones who stand outside, I have virtually no idea what they do, yet there they are, permanent fixtures in uniforms that are often dazzling, if not a little scary, to behold.

A little higher up in rank than the guards, yet equally inexplicable (to me, anyway) are The Greeters. This is something that originally startled me, and now I just take it for granted. It is very nice to be greeted warmly when you enter a restaurant, but why, I wondered, do they need four women in bright red uniforms to stand by the door to say hello and goodbye to every customer? Wouldn’t one be sufficient?

There is a famous Peking Duck restaurant here (no relation to this site) whose name escapes me at the moment — Quanjude something — that has no fewer than eight (you heard me, eight) greeters standing around the front door. The first (and only) time I ate there, I was overwhelmed as the brilliantly clad greeters shouted “Huanying guangling!” (“Welcome inside,” I think) and grinned at me as though they had just seen god. And that’s what they do, all day, all night, day after day and year after year.

I frequent a Cantonese restaurant near my office, and I enjoy it even though they only have four greeters (which is four less than Quanjude). I would probably love it if they had only one or (I’d better not say this to loud) no greeters at all. Still, it’s obviously part of the culture and it’s certainly intriguing to experience. I only wonder, when I get back to the States and walk into a restaurant to find no greeters at all, will I feel dejected, despised and ignored? It’s funny, how these things grow on you and you come to expect them, to take them for granted. There are a lot things that absolutely shocked me when I first arrived, and now I don’t even flinch. (Is that a good sign or a bad one?)

While I don’t often cite articles from the Wall Street Journal (at least not in a positive context), today’s In Memoriam article by the father of slain journalist Daniel Pearl brought tears to my eyes. I did find it poor judgment on the part of the layout editor (for the online edition) to have a large and distracting advertisement alongside the article with the prominent caption Help Headhunters Find Out About You.