Chinese Psycho

TorgoX on 2005-06-06T10:05:42

Dear Log,

One of the things I most like about the Guardian is that they keep the readers on their toes by occasionally publishing an article by someone who is insane in the membrane, insane in the brain.

I don't mean totally Usenet-style lunacy with allcaps and alien probing -- I just mean the sort of thing in this Mao article. That article starts as a review of a sane book about Mao; but then the reviewer seizes the occasion to say that, yes, Mao was a ghoul, an actual high-res 3D real-life psycho; and yes, he was just short of an Richard-Ramirez-style serial killer; and yes, there was that time he starved thirty million people (oopsies!); and yes, if he did anything good in his entire life it was by accident; but, the reviewer whines, why doesn't anyone mention any of the good side-effects of Mao's grand deeds?

Hopefully the reviewer can go and provide us, in the future, with articles that ask provocative questions like:

• Yes yes, we all know that AIDS is stacking up tens of millions of corpses all over the world. But why doesn't anyone mention the good things like AIDS has done, like flooding Africa with a vast supply of used shoes (from, you know, the corpses), such that now fewer poor people are going unshod? I mean, every (lethal) cloud has a silver lining!
• And okay, that Hitler was a big meanie (killed millions of people, and turned generations of Europeans into stunted panicked basket-cases, etc etc) -- but why doesn't anyone mention how he singlehandedly revitalized the German lampshade industry?

So yeah, the occasional kookoo article slips thru.

But at least it's better than reading Andy Rooney.