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| Seriously. |
Truth is stranger than fiction,
even stranger than the infamous science fiction of Godzilla vs. Whoever, which,
in a bizarre, déjà vu sort of way is exactly what I’m about to describe.
This, a dream of a viral “punk’d-op”
skipped YouTube and rocketed to hyper-reality, Emperor Zillah is a real place.
Awash in ignorance as I question the
appropriate meaning of “Zillah” to assign here, my fingers deftly head to Wikipedia. I look it up again with a
strict aversion to sci-fi entries. It seems the British coined the term (of Hindi
and Arabic derivation) around 1790 as they attempted to colonize India, it means: an
administrative district in India. There’s literally nothing admin about
this place although one could extrapolate it to mean the center of power. On to
the next def, in a biblical context Zillah was one of two wives of Lamech. Gen.
4:19 – strike two, something more Babylonian might have worked. The USS Zillah, a patrol boat, probably not – this is the freakin' mothership. Sigh, Definitely not
Zillah from Wuthering Heights. Zillah the vampire, perhaps in economic terms as
this place could suck the life out of any mere millionaire.
Zillah for these purposes might
best be applied in the context of a character of minimal significance in Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford. A novel describing
the journey from a tiny village to a new, worldly town where the affects of the
“new” impact an entire community as it moves from rural culture into the
future.
Even though I’ve taken great
liberties with the entire context, Lark Rise fits better than my initial inclination to settle for the "biggest, baddest, monster" def.
Allow me if I may, to transport
you to epicenter of excess, slightly southeast of the Shanghai World Financial
Center in the People’s Republic of China, of all places.
Emperor Zillah, the gated community introduced to Shanghai in 2008, is comprised of twenty-two,
9,000+ sq ft Zillahs (think châteaux) complete with swimming pools and your
very own ½+ acre slab of prime real estate. This new Emperor will no doubt
provide all of the bells and whistles to make the acute, affluently ordained olfactory
nerves sturnutate at the scent of a “vanilla” villa.
The real world metaphors are Bel
Air, West Chester County, and Lake Forest heavily influenced by Provence. You
get the picture. The places where the so-called “American Dream” resides in
Dolby® surround sound and dreamy white Technicolor®. These are the sort of
places, where as newly anointed drivers, we loved to travel to from our mind-numbing,
lower, middle class existence, just to do lawn jobs, steal real estate signs
and ultimately live up to Frank Zappa’s exhortations of knocking the jockeys
off the rich people’s lawns.
Those were days of American
capitalism at its shiny best and we of limited means needed a piece of it.
Hell, it was that hunger that empowered Risky Business to become the road map of a lost
generation in search of a short cut to fiscal irresponsibility.
We actually believed we were the center of the universe because our government acted like it.
We actually believed we were the center of the universe because our government acted like it.
$750 billion dollars not once,
but twice later, and after leaving the land of super-sized getting downsized, and a government relegated to self-inflicted grid-lock, I
have inadvertently found that delta at the end of the Great River of Money.
China.
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| The diamond encrusted Lambo-bling. |
It is a place where a late boomer
such as myself can become easily confused between capitalism and materialism. A
place where the excesses of consumption relegate the bling of Jay-Z and
Liberace to mere nomenclature on the Lamborghini. The Chinese super rich are as mesmerised as barracudas when it comes to “shiny new objects”. And while the audacity of out doing
the western world on its own materialistic terms seems hilarious at first in
the form of Emperor Zillah – it is the potent, hi-octane fueling the fires in
the bellies that keep this juggernaut a churn.
They are buying the dream as we once did with wholehearted government endorsement. And unlike what we had, a fiercely protective government and society, that while friendly to outsiders, rarely if ever allows them into the inner sanctum. And it seems rightly so at this point, to this casual observer.
The Chinese people are getting a taste of limited freedom promised by a series of five-year plans that has put them nearly a generation ahead of the economic reformers' (primarily Zhoa Enlai and Deng Xiaoping) projections of the seventies, eighties and nineties. (A different story that lends credence to Jesse Ventura’s concept of a no-party political system where officials work for, imagine that, the people!) They are pushing it to the limits both literally and figuratively. They work hard (any less would be a personal embarrassment by subscribing to the morays of the welfare states of the west [How dare everyone expect a trophy!]) and they play hard.
Two weekends past, 34 Ferraris were caught (well almost, it seems 26 eluded capture) racing from Shanghai to Zhejiang hitting top speeds of 213 kph or 134 mph on the public interstate on their way to, jeah – a racetrack.
The Chinese people are getting a taste of limited freedom promised by a series of five-year plans that has put them nearly a generation ahead of the economic reformers' (primarily Zhoa Enlai and Deng Xiaoping) projections of the seventies, eighties and nineties. (A different story that lends credence to Jesse Ventura’s concept of a no-party political system where officials work for, imagine that, the people!) They are pushing it to the limits both literally and figuratively. They work hard (any less would be a personal embarrassment by subscribing to the morays of the welfare states of the west [How dare everyone expect a trophy!]) and they play hard.
Two weekends past, 34 Ferraris were caught (well almost, it seems 26 eluded capture) racing from Shanghai to Zhejiang hitting top speeds of 213 kph or 134 mph on the public interstate on their way to, jeah – a racetrack.
The initial gust of a
jeweled, pavé encrusted typhoon, these are the early symptoms of an urban existence left
behind as the glimmering yellow brick road transports the Chinese dream at warp speed (or minimum at the speed of a 458 Spider). The Chinese people have a
vision and it is surpassing the western version of materialism as it drags the
populist into an era of consumption amidst dimming Confucian virtues.
In August of 2011, after a five
month housing slump, the Zillah roared to the rescue leading a resurgence, when one
850-square-meter (9150 sq ft) unit fetched 135 million Yuan, or $21.3
million US. They build more.
When I was a kid there was a crazy
American who once had a dream ( ... no not that one – he was sane by comparison) inspired by an awe of the immense potential of
an alien nation comprised of 800 million people (which he new would quickly grow to over 1.2 billion within
a generation). 800 million people he marveled to his henchman "What might they someday accomplish?" Perhaps more significantly, there seemed to be a sentiment of "We may not beat them so let's preemptively plan to join them".
So, he asked Hank to open the
door.
Unfortunately, that crazy man went completely, and then fell, of the wall.
A generation passed before we actually decided to step through that door.
Unfortunately, that crazy man went completely, and then fell, of the wall.
A generation passed before we actually decided to step through that door.
Ironically, Zhou and Deng exhibited the testicular fortitude and then some, of Richard Nixon as they introduced ideas contradictory to the Chinese Communist hardline of the time that could have killed them. These ideas embodied elements of free market economies. (Zhou worked with Kissinger to open China to the US visits in the early seventies. Deng is generally credited with developing China into one of the fastest growing economies in the world, improving the standard of living for hundreds of millions of Chinese.)
So, as Chinese tastes rewrite the menu of the material world we once consumed, the much anticipated Zillah of an ideological show down seems to have quietly passed with barely a struggle under the auspices of materialism. The aging, lone world superpower wallows in an uninspired political, anti-dream time, while a new, aspiring one dreams in 24 karat, hallucinicolor. One society seems to be looking to drive Bentleys, Bugattis and Ferraris, as the other seems to be resigning itself to pulling richshaws.
What happens next might be one of the few good things to come of the Nixonian era, an outlandish dream of an ambitious (and hopefully purehearted) individual asking "What if?", becoming the kick in the ass that America needs to again empower her people.
In the interim, I, being a recent political agnostic since "sleeping with Hope and awakening with a corpse", am looking forward to again returning to my middle class roots via the road to a new Chinese driver's license.
Shanghainese lawn jockeys prepare for battle.
What happens next might be one of the few good things to come of the Nixonian era, an outlandish dream of an ambitious (and hopefully purehearted) individual asking "What if?", becoming the kick in the ass that America needs to again empower her people.
In the interim, I, being a recent political agnostic since "sleeping with Hope and awakening with a corpse", am looking forward to again returning to my middle class roots via the road to a new Chinese driver's license.
Shanghainese lawn jockeys prepare for battle.
© 2012 Karl Shaffer
