China Taking Center Stage...

And Stinking Up The Joint

"I've never been to Beijing. I went to China in 1995, but I only visited the south, including the industrial city of Guangzhou and the then-newborn metropolis Shenzhen. I met a couple of American girls sitting at a sidewalk café. Two days in Guangzhou, with Athlete's Foot in my eyes, my throat feeling like it was being burned by a lit cigar sitting in my stomach and the taupe sky obliterating the sun - and this was in January - had convinced me that this was the worst place I'd ever been. And I'd been to some pretty horrible places, including a war zone in the Middle East, Paterson, NJ, and an Ivy League seminar on Deconstructionism.

The American girls were from Beijing, way up north. They'd been studying there for a year or two. I asked, "Is the air this bad in Beijing?" "Oh, no," they said. "It's much worse."

Tack on 13 more years of vomitous coal fumes, 13 years in which millions of Chinese became rich enough to afford automobiles, 13 years of let-the-sky-be-your-toilet industrial free-for-all, you get a formula for a place that is more unchartably rancid than the last Ashton Kutcher movie.

Two weeks in China - two hours in China - will be enough to raise questions in even an anchorman's head. Doesn't the stench of the air kinda make it hard not to think about the stench of China's ruthless skull-cracking policies? As Chinese scientists scurry around waving studies that claim the air isn't that bad, can anything China says be believed? Isn't China a full partner of the IOC (which has shrugged at China's censorship of the Amnesty International Web site and others, with even visiting reporters blocked from using them)? IOC president Jacques Rogge stated on July 17 that there would be no censorship of the Internet during the Games. (That meant, of course, no censorship of visiting VIPs, never mind the massive everday censorship of the Chinese)."

Peking is one of the world's most odious cesspools.

Makes it okay, though. Them chinamen bosses are anti-US so you won't hear a peep about global warming coming from our or Europe's anchordicks.