The Great Realisation That We are A Mob of Sooks.

So I was in England for the whole of the Olympics. At the risk of shocking people: it didn't really matter. I find the Olympics rather a huge bore. Actually, the last time I was in a country where the Olympics were being held I unknowingly scheduled a party for the famous Closing Night Shenanigans , and couldn't understand why all my friends, usually quite gregarious types, kept wandering over to ask when we could turn the telly on.

I truly am dedicated to fraternity, sorority, peace throughout the world, Understanding Between Nations...all of those noble Olympic goals. I just don't want to stay strapped down in front of a tele watching sweaty people with hairy armpits and steely determination, in order to prove it.

However the Olympics couldn't help but be in the forefront of my thoughts this year and so, a couple of times, I plonked down to watch various chat-shows, or General Interest-type programmes to get the British slant on it all.

I was astounded. There I was, in the land of loony dog-lovers, gentle old parties who actually nod at you when you pass(I mean c'mon: when was the last time you actually nodded at someone?), helpful women in museums and interesting travellers on trains. And it appeared that they were all united in their feelings towards China: like their ancestors of yore (a town in East Anglia)they metaphorically spat in the dirt, narrowed their eyes and were prepared to swallow any old cobblers about them queer-folks down-along. Albeit that down-along these days is slightly further away than the approximately ten miles that constituted exotic furr'en parts in the days of aforesaid Yore. (Which was the County Seat in those days).

Or so I assumed by the plethora of China Experts or Wo/man On The Spot shows which proliferated. Every one of which was, in the vernacular, dissin' China. Or, if you prefer, pissing all over China. It caused me to see yet another angle in all this Good China/Bad China speculation that appears to have - not too long after the day of The Yellow Peril - gripped the West.

Oh, there's nothing original about this conclusion; its been voiced, in various contexts and constructs, in umpteen places. But it sank in while I was in England and then was hammered home when I caught up on all the chat-shows, satire spots and comedy gigs etc. that the media had run during the same period back in Oz.

While I said this conclusion wasn't completely original, I would like to think that my take on it is a small thing but mine own. I have therefore named it "The Great Realisation That We Are A Great Mob of Sooks." Kind of rolls off the tongue.

(For those not up with Aussie vernacular: the word "sook" denotes a namby-pamby, timorous beastie; a vaguely unpleasant type who would probably rat on the neighbours as soon as look at you. Thought that last bit might not actually be part of the translation I certainly was firmly conscious of these connotations when I christened the concept. )

Because when all's said and done, we are like a mob of kids in many ways. (Or would that mean instead, that there is no such thing as rising above the level attained in childhood in some areas for our species? That's kind of when we peak?) For Instance: - we spend our entire childhood aware of deadly menace in our environs: whether it be the monster under the bed, the bears in the cracks in the pavement or, sadly quite common, over-affectionate Uncle Bob/Daddy/Auntie Tammy?

Once we grow up, therefore, and find logical explanations for our world and our fears, or else turn to fundamentalist religions - or else grow bigger than Uncle Bob/Daddy/Auntie Tammy - we have become so used to that feeling of menace around us that it seems quite normal. It is normal in our society to fear something. So fundamentalists use The Devil and the rest of the world chooses China.

I am harking back once again now, to the Lhasa Riots coverage around the world and what an enormous effect that incident had here in China. Many Chinese newspapers and popular web sites/blogs ran the apologies made by foreign media. The confessions and unravelling of wrong-doing were all over the place here. It seemed that the explanations were all accepted, the wrongs righted, the public overseas as aware of the public here of the culpability of some publications and we all lurched on to the next crisis.

But no. Once arrive in England and it seems like all the man (woman?) hours wasted on exposing the ...er..mistakes (silly me, I almost typed "frauds"1), the dissecting, the discussions, the protests, the blog wars here in China, were our own private bunfight. I doubt now whether, in the West, those apologies and retractions were ever featured in anything but a paragraph buried somewhere very boring where nobody goes, like in the classified advertisements for government employees. Because, if they were made aware of the story of the coverage of Lhasa, then the population at large is, well...a bit simple.

If they knew that, about 5 months earlier, a completely admitted hatchet job had been done on China by the world's media, surely it might occur to some viewers that maybe, just maybe, the coverage they were currently getting might be just a tad, well, predictable?

There they all were - stock characters: the disaffected homeowners, the angry citizens being rude to foreign journalists, the terrified "source" unfolding tales of desperate deeds and stolen body-parts. We were being brought this stuff by the same old crew we were familiar with - after all, they are the Person on the Spot in any news-foment around the world....jetting into cities, learning about them in the local bar with the local bore, and coming to us all concerned and more in sorrow than anger a couple of days later, revealing to us yet another "typical" Chinese with a horrific tale to tell.

Did it not occur to anybody that out of 1.6 billion people there might be just one who could give a giggly smile from behind her Mickey Mouse sunglasses and tell us that life in China is pretty cool thank you very much and no, I'm not a communist or the recipient of a forced abortion. And yes, I can get the BBC and porn on my internet , thanks?

Did nobody the length and breadth of the British Isles or the Wide Sunburned Land not think for a moment "Christ, they're a gloomy lot. And when are we going to see some tits and bum?" Anchor people kept sycophantically asking "And can we possibly have the views of the Man...(sheepish cough, leery grin) or should that be WOE-man in the street, please Cliff/Andrea/Randy?" or "And what do the real people of China think, Cliff/Andrea/Randy?" and "So what about the ordinary people of China, the real people?" as if that amorphous Beijing we're always hearing about, had, with fiendish oriental cunning, posted plastic facsimiles around the television studios to give recorded, CCP approved recordings. But this was the cue, of course, for Cliff or Andrea or who-bloody-ever would wheel out someone who lost 5 kids in Tiannemen Square, spent 20 years in a labour camp, and had had 8 fingers removed by a machine in an over-crowded sweatshop.

I'd been watching a steady diet of these things and doing various deconstructions, critical examinations, and deep philosophical streams of thought. I'd brushed through Hobbes and Locke and various latter-day scholars in order to get to the root of this continued need for everyone to show, see and feel the very worst of what China had to offer when, finally, all the bits clicked into place and the Great Realisation dawned upon me: We are a Mob of Sooks.

It felt so good to huddle safely in our beds after a goodnight kiss, a decade of the rosary, an MP3 (or even a transistor back in the day), or a locked door had reduced the monster to ineffectual powerlessness outside our charmed, familiar world. We had it under control. We were invincible. Until tomorrow night.

So, while we have accepted fear as a normal part of our human state, we have also learnt how good and cosy it feels when someone keeps the monsters at bay for us. Mmmmm. Lucky us, eh? We may perpetuate mindless fears throughout the natural course of our lives but hell's teeth we know how to feel good about it.

It's like we are all continually yearning for our blankies. We are a mob of sooks. Just as we cannot conceive of life without that particular piece of old blanket, so many of us cannot conceive of life without our good ole mate fear. Its primal we tell each other sagely. A means of self-protection that ensured the continuation of the race. Its why we spent decades instructions young people to Be Prepared. We need that fear in order to be human. Besides, if we got rid of it, we'd get rid of that nice, glowing feeling we get when we are isolated in our little charmed circle. When we're in control.

But the thing is, no matter how some sections of our shared society might rattle their sabres and rail against modern, wishy-washy, greens, lefties, feminists, New Age people, Gay Rights, or those who eat quiche, its undeniable that the world is changing. (In deference to the sabre-rattlers, I substituted the word evolving with the word changing. Even though I personally feel that, in this instance, the two are synonymous).

The Berlin Wall came down, the Africans are all too diseased or hungry to rise up against the White Man, Communism let go of Czechoslovakia, Russia smelted the Iron Curtain, a black person is going to be the leader of America...who is there left to fear? Well, there's always one third of the entire world. There's China.

To be fair, I do see that there might be a couple of holes in the argument for my latest thesis. Perhaps a psychologist or sociologist or a philosopher may have been able to argue it with a tad more finesse and polysyllables. But at the moment I am at a loss to to explain why the hydra-headed Public at Large sucks in a depressing and unvarying diet of palpably biased commentating on the subject of China without a murmur of - well, not protest, exactly, but at least the demand to know if anyone at all in China is just a normal person like you or me or the couple next door.

I was also, for a long time, a little stymied as to why "Experts" on China think they are being daringly original to uncover yet another riot or malfeasance, and whether it ever occurs to them that, inside a country that contains one third of the entire world's people, you'd be hard pressed NOT to find an individual or group or movement that was not fed up with the status quo. I mean, when we read the World News, all the stuff they are reporting from all over the world comes from only one other third because the last third represents the people who are comatose from hunger and neglect and illness. They only count in the News stakes when taken as a whole, not individually; because they're too busy dying slow deaths to do any plotting or rioting or in any way worthy of the Late Bulletin. Sheesh! Compared to all the lunatic fringes, revolutionaries, mercenaries, criminal organisations, corporations, serial killers and cult followers represented by the other third of the world, China is a haven of sweetness and light.

But I realised of course, that it actually is within the interests of the "expert" journalist brigade to keep parading the interchangeable stories about Abominations and Human Rights Violations in front of us. Firstly of course, a respected journalist would look like a bit of a pouf if they recorded a story about typists from some provincial city or the funny men in the lift, or their riotous night out at one of the clubs where they learned to say "What's yer name, where'y from an' what yer on?" in Mandarin. I mean, with everyone else digging up hidden criminals and underground movements, you'd feel a bit of a tool handing in a story about two jolly business-men from Wunan you met in a lift, wouldn't you? Especially if they had never been beaten, could access regular web-sties from their computers, and were Buddhists.

So, in order not to feel like a nob, and, more importantly, in order to make sure that Cliff, Andrea and Randy keep getting sent swanning off to furr'n parts on company expense accounts (and in some cases, because they actually know squat about China - last week they had to bone up on Afghanistan), the real people of China, in all their complexity, diversity, continue to be represented by anyone who can make a Westerner reach for their blankie and say a decade of the rosary.

We've got to hang on to the old familiar fear-feeling because to lose it would argue against our ancient origins. We'd lose our edge without it. So, with a shrinking field around us of people to be scared of, its rather convenient to hang on to China. There isn't likely, any time soon, to be a huge uprising in which Beijing, with tears in its collective eyes, flings wide the prison doors, decks itself in flowers and begs America to show it the way to democracy, christian values and apple pie.

Cliff & co. (who are currently praying for a juicy little uprising in The Bermudas) are probably all employed by Murdoch anyway, so they know from all the recent memos exactly how those wily Chinese need to be reported. Besides, no-one wants to look the dickhead, do they? "Real people" indeed!

Ah well, those of us in China can just join Cliff and Co. in trying to summon up that Bermudan coup. Maybe the new government there will make VooDoo the national religion, enforced by by an unlimited stay in G'tmo. Then everyone can stop using China as the blankie and get themselves really, gut-churningly frightened of the Bahamans instead. And then maybe people would listen to what the real Chinese people have to say.