Wednesday, January 5, 2011

so much depends / upon / a red rain / coat

glazed with rain, etc.

My sincerest apologies to William Carlos Williams.

The big news out of China tonight -- and this is ALL over the motherfucking wires -- is that Chongqing's police are wearing colorful raincoats to "improve their often hard public image."

Like -- sarcasm alert -- in the photo here (below), an AP pic that ran on Yahoo, NPR, et al.



Uh, let's see, what's wrong here... a cop dressed in all black on a fancy, technologically advanced -- I daresay futuristic -- piece of equipment in a picture with a shallow depth of field with the blurred background image being -- well, what the fuck else? -- a portrait of Mao...

Oh.

Great job, Western editor. Bravo. You've conflated "China" with "Chongqing" and in the same fell swoop brought authoritarian imagery to a story about RED FUCKING RAINCOATS. What's that, you're chuckling? Okay, I get it. You were being IRONIC.

You. Are. Such. A. LOUSE.

You know what, on second thought... William Carlos Williams would have given you a goddam standing ovation. Like fitting form to meaning, you've fit an image to the China narrative. Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about.

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