A nation like me

[just mercedes]

Without reading the XiXi, mention of Russia directed my thoughts to Lenin's tomb and cadaver.  In Orwell's formulation, he who controls the present (the makeup artist) controls the past, and therefore the future.  Every nation constantly edits its founding and procedural myths - what was Roman mythology like (or Etruscan, for that matter) before being adjusted to the Homeric standard? (Etruscan Mnerva couldn't have been much like Athena, that far from Athens!)

Today we in the US are being hectored to see (for example) Jefferson's formerly wistful, polymath smile repainted as a leer of slaveholder's lust, Robert E. Lee's strength of character in tragic circumstances as nothing more than racism... as if that word even had meaning during his lifetime, a color no painter had yet invented.

Thanks Duke - I anthropomorphized Hong Kong as the make-up artist so you were spot on, with the Russian uncle and his effects on Chinese communism. When the Brits handed Hong Kong back to China, very recently, the HK people were promised they would have democratic elections, which haven't happened - and dissidents are still disappearing.

XiXi was a dissident in 1982. This is the vid I watched, from her short story/poem, A Woman Like Me. For some reason it affected me greatly. She was a lot more subtle in her allusions though, than I have been.