It’s now the year of the Rabbit and despite hanging out in Hong Kong for twenty years and turning Chinese, I haven’t a clue what that means. Nor do I care any more. There was a time when I thought these things might have some kind of validity, a sort of cosmic season that must effect how things come about, but I haven’t seen any valid evidence.
Even so, I have more sympathy for Chinese mumbo-jumbo than any other because the Chinese treat it all very much in the way I treat Santa Claus. I know he doesn’t exist, but just for Christmas I’d like to think that there is a jolly fat chap who goes around bringing all the rich kids iPads and doesn’t bother much with the third world and the poor. It brings the innocent light of childhood back to me for a moment. Then the credit card bills come in and the truth about the fat old con man is brought home to me.
Religion and superstition are all OK so long as you don’t believe in any of them. Psychopaths and Psychotics tend to hear the voice of God most loudly and he always demands that you kill people in the name of peace and goodwill. Everyone else doesn’t really believe, or only believes the Santa version but in moments of turmoil, they often fall in with the psychos who think sacrifices should be made. Hacking off the heads of foreigners seems to be the most popular thing known to God, which was all very well when God was an Englishman.
Unfortunately we’re going through a period of riot and revolution. The powerful have been caught fixing the books while promising more than they can deliver. A whole generation of mis-educated youths has woken up feeling conned, and their parents have woken up wondering who’s run off with their pensions. This gives nobody much of a stake in the status quo. Democracies tend to fix and fudge things with a few riots, stiff letters to the newspapers, and the release of the next smart phone, but the scabbier places of the world see no reason why they shouldn’t burn down the one shopping mall with a functioning escalator.
A good rule of thumb for avoiding trouble is to give a miss to places with squat toilets. There must be something about squatting that keeps people on edge and makes them religious. If everyone had a good sit down, and possibly a copy of Hello Magazine resting on the cistern, people would feel much less tense and angry. It’s what keeps Japan on an even keel despite being bankrupt and having no politicians anyone thinks know anything. If I were an autocratic dictator looking to save my neck, I would install heated toilet seats in every household. Far cheaper than an atomic power program, and much less likely to call down international sanctions upon you.
Luckily I live in a non-scabby place, though it’s weak democratic credentials make the coming collapse of the property bubble more trouble than a 3D TV can resolve. After all, according to the South China Morning Post’s headlines, “Even the rich, pay twice as much” for their apartments than they would anywhere else. The mere thought that rich people cannot get things cheaper than poor people is just the sort of thing to provoke riots here in Hong Kong. And I have seen a few squat toilets creeping into the shopping malls, which can only encourage the troublemakers.
Maybe here is my evidence that there really is something to
this Year of The Bunny thing. I predict that anything to do with Carrots will
be good for us and since nobody in Hong Kong can actually spell, those twenty
four karat gold “God Of Wealth Ingots” are going to be very popular.