Misdirection

Faithful readers, I owe you an apology one and all. Despite promises of vicarious discovery, examination and cheap thrills, precious little has been delivered. While I would be loathe to claim that slothfulness played no role whatsoever in my missing missives--my law of the farm work ethic aside--there have been powerful interlopers playing a not insignificant role in the barrenness of this blog.

You see, in the interest of protecting the general population from capitalist roader rhetoric, the cultural imperialism of the Eagle and Lion, as well as for the continued maintenance of the chaste and upright character held by the young men and women who are this nation's future, the Stone Boat, in its current incarnation, has deigned to turn a benign and benighted eye towards the likes of your humble Hinterhands.

Not myself, as a singular thread in the vast tapestry of discourse spread like a comfort blanket over the Linus-like epsilons churned out through nine years average education, but rather all of us, whole cloth, who turn idle hands to idle thoughts and threads, collated and cataloged in entries such as the one your eyes, from some remote region, track in awe.

It's impossible to say if the difficulty one has from time to time accessing blog sites from China is intentional or the result of poorly developed networks. A typhoon can make things sluggish even here in the northern capital. Wikipedia and the BBC are always and overtly off the table, however, as are organizations which step on too many toes.

Wordpress and Blogspot and Blogger and what have you are all touch and go in these parts.

"The connection has timed out."

"Mistakes were made."

"Nobody is absolved of responsibility by the passive voice."

Usually, when the Ministry of Culture steps in, moral issues are the party-line (more accurately "Party-line") when concerns are raised over heavy-handedness, such as when the Rolling Stones rolled through Shanghai.

China is a place where people aren't afraid to go out and make a buck. So there are plenty of tech-savvy people engaging in a practice I don't even know how to describe. It's similar to squatting on a valuable domain.

You've heard of New Yorker magazine, right? Well, you would then be inclined to think that http://www.thenewyorker.com/ would put you front and center for tepid fiction, inscrutable cartoons and whatever else the too-often published but also often brilliant magazine has in store for us.

You would be wrong. I wouldn't call what you find instead to be bullshit, per se, but it's close. Lottery results!

That's squatting in a nutshell.

The additional wrinkle to this blocked blog situation is that someone, somewhere, is taking advantage of Ministry of Culture redirects to shuffle potentially millions of users off to risqué, dirty little sites positively populated with pictures of women in bras linking to who-knows-what (not Hinterhands, my fellows and dames!).

Surely the fact that the government agency charged with fostering culture has unwittingly enacted policy which directs people looking to read something somebody else wrote to a quasi-porn site is cause for a bit of soul-searching somewhere.

I find it is all too easy for westerners to criticize China--an ancient nation with history and traditions a lifetime of study would barely illuminate, with literary texts so dense that a life's work could be made of translating and interpreting one of them.

Perhaps I here jump too readily to conclusions, but I fail to see the bearing such honorable aspects of China's heritage as "running grass" writing and Daoist thought have on this situation. I therefore avoid the typical Sinologist plea of complexity, and will say outright that this hall monitor, minder aspect of the culture is a real bummer.

My inability to regularly access a blog created in the spirit of reserving judgment and providing open-eyed, even-handed commentary has stirred feelings of resentment and cynicism that . . .

Aw, shucks. Sometimes my mind gets away from me. In any case, I can access my blog today; let's all hold hands and wish real hard that I can do the same tomorrow.