Hongkongers Away

Howdy, I'm at Hong Kong airport awaiting my flight back to Shanghai. I just managed to spend 24 of my remaining 100 Gongbi on a bag of Skittles and two bars of Toblerone, the ever-ready staple of airport commerce.

What's neat is that there are all these little internet kiosks lying around so you get online just about anywhere you go, and they're never all taken up. Matter of fact, the machine next to me is free as I type this. Maybe I'll get on that one and multitask...

Anyway this morning David, my cousin, took me out for breakfast since he didn't have a meeting until 11 A.M. Unfortunately we had an awful time ordering (no Mandarin, only broken English was used) and I ended up with an oily fried egg and two hot dogs, while David had the same eggs with two slices of Spam. Yum! Goshdarnit, you improve your Chinese just a little, and then they go and switch the dialect on you.

Alright. Time to go wait for the plane and pop some Swiss white chocolate goodness.

P.S. -- I learned from the South China Morning Post, the premier English-language daily, that a "Hongkonger" is a resident of Hong Kong, and there is no space.

White House on the Couch

David Brooks does a nifty job of deconstructing the White House in today's column. I like his approach because it's realistic. He's critical but also portrays the administration as an emotional, evolving, complex thing. He covers politics like a fanboy -- he shows his empathy with a given side and simultaneously administers sensible criticism.

He frames it through the Scooter Libby trial, and then discusses the White House at the time of the trial's events.

When you think back to the White House of 2003, the period the trial explores, you will discover a White House consumed by a feverish sense of mission.

Senior officials were greeted each morning by intense intelligence briefings. On June 14, 2003, for example, Libby received a briefing with 27 items and 11 pages of terrorist threats. Someone once told me that going from the president’s daily briefing to the next event on Mr. Bush’s schedule, which might be a photo-op with a sports team, was like leaving “24” and stepping into “Sesame Street.” No wonder administration officials were corporate on the outside but frantic within.

The administration, he says, has gradually become a more competent one -- on paper -- as failure after failure has bred change.

In short, this administration’s capacities have waxed as its power has waned. And you can’t help but feel that today’s White House would have been much better at handling the first stages of the war on terror. But that’s the perpetual tragedy of life: the owl of Minerva flies at dusk. Wisdom comes from suffering and error, and when the passions die down and observation begins.

Down With the Grups

This David Brooks column from Sunday is freakin' funny. He's fed up with all the funky moms and dads running around and turning their offspring into Shrinky Dink hipsters.

I mean, don’t today’s much-discussed hipster parents notice that their claims to rebellious individuality are undercut by the fact that they are fascistically turning their children into miniature reproductions of their hipper-than-thou selves?

Later he administers the best line of the piece: "Let me be clear: I’m not against the indie/alternative lifestyle. There is nothing more reassuringly traditionalist than the counterculture . . . . What I object to is people who make their children ludicrous."

Of course none of this would be possible without last April's widely read New York mag story on the now-fabled Grups.