Fat Tuesday

The Roman Catholic community is split in its observance of this Tuesday. Its religious adherents consider it a time to confess “one’s sins” in a penitential posture toward Ash Wednesday’s penance ushering the 40-day season of Lent culminating in Holy Week, the triumphal entry of Palm Sunday into the excruciating rites of passage of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Saturday Glory, and Empty tomb Sunday.

The more secular Roman sees 45 days of deprivation and thereby goes into a binge on Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras to the French, the day before facing up to the indelible truth that “from earth we came to earth we shall return; blessed is the reality of life.”

We zero in on two aspects of the day: the confessional one and the binge.

Brother Barack Obama played confessor-cum-accuser to China’s Vice President Xi Jing Ping in the latter’s recent visit to the United States. Obama lectured Xi on “human rights” in a discourse increasingly resembling the passage of two ships in the night in close proximity but missing substantial contact, let alone substantial encounter.

Human right gained widespread popularity with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, expanded in meaning from its UN formulation in 1948 of individual freedoms and social responsibility into various covenants and protocols that now embody various emphasis and direction.

The United States looks at human rights from the perspective of personal conscience, thus out of morality, while China looks at the same from communal responsibility, thus out of social ethics. Neither is exclusive of the other, but the U.S. views it from the focus of the human individual in a time sequence of bondage to liberation, servitude to emancipation, while China, rooted on the order and organization of space, locates the human core at societal stability and tranquility.

Thus it is inconceivable to the Western eyes to see authenticity in North Korean citizens’ shedding tears over the demise of their revered leader Kim Jung Il. Tears for JFK differ in that it is for the individual Jack; the one for Kim was for the reality of a figurehead, a symbolic yet existentially real to the life of a nation and the individuals within it.

Nor is it a wonder why Iran might insist on a nuclear power capability given the treatment given Gaddafi of Libya after he gave up on the country’s nuclear armament program as compared to the “respect” North Korea gets after the country’s 1993 decision to militarize rather than remain a weak ward of China post-USSR collapse.

So, Xi getting lectured on China’s “human rights” record from a country that waged a civil war to emancipate its African slaves, create an immigration office to keep Chinese and other Asians out of the passport line, and self-defensively falling into paroxysm of fear emotionalizing the 9/11 assault to launch an undefined war on terror, and we wonder why the Chinese keep English as its second tongue on its way to the globalization of its economics, politics, and cult ure!

The Americanization of Emily is a 1964 movie of a cowardly Navy commander in England taking advantage of the goodwill of an English lassie as he tried to avoid being exposed to the danger of frontline combat. The classic anti-war movie starring James Garner, the commander, and Emily, Julie Andrews, Americanized England as IBM and Apple is Americanizing China.

The commercialization of China is in full swing. The ads, the couture, and the culture are all being massaged along lines familiar to Madison Ave., NY. Budweiser is now the best selling beer being the NBA sponsor, the League highly promoted by Yao Ming, and now revved up by the emergence of Jeremy Lin of the Knicks.

Obama thanked Xi for the recent relaxation of restrictions of U.S. films to the China market. Movies at the local cinema charges the same price as what Kapolei in Oahu cost three weeks ago, yet my Chinese counterparts receive less than an eighth of the U.S. poverty level. Still, the numbers are there for an emerging middle class sufficiently Americanized to fork out the exorbitant price (relative to earning) if that was what it took to view the latest of Barbie and Ken, and the latest glitz from Hollywood!

It is on the binge that commercialized America and China do not differ. The U.S. as the largest developed economy and China as the largest developing economy are poster kids of the stuffing-your-face world. On the obesity column alone, China is fast catching up, with no little thanks to the triumvirate of McDonalds-Pizza Hut-KFC and the fast food service ethos. Sedentary addiction to electronic gadgetry and the allure of the bucket seat are not too far behind.

Republican Rick Santorum penitently Shroves his Tuesday (Mitt Romney revisits Salt Lake City 1982 Winter Olympics) and Barack Obama might Mardi Gras the night away Insha’allah, but does it really matter? Mardi Grass in Louisiana and Copacabana are hardly religious festivals. Lent has claimed its old English meaning of “spring.”

The commonality across any line is the liberal dosage of cholesterol but we’ll hope we get more spring today than the stuffing. Enjoy Fat Tuesday!

Jaime R. Vergara (jrvergarajr2031@aol.com) is a former PSS teacher and is currently writing from the campus of Shenyang Aerospace University in China.