A night at the symphony

[KarlMarx]

I didn't know where to post this one, but here goes....

The other night, my son and I went to watch the Binghamton Philharmonic play. One of the featured soloists was a young lady from China who played a piece by a Chinese composer by the name of Tan Dun.

The program stated that, as a result of Mao's cultural revolution, Tan Dun was forced to be a rice planter at the age of 8 and worked in the fields for several years.

A lady sitting next to me read that and became offended. "That's not true!" she stated, "they hype these things up!!!!" and so on...

I didn't say anything.

During intermission, she turned to me and asked what I thought of the piece and I told her that I thought it was "different"... then she sprang the question!

"Did you see the program? How about that rubbish that the composer was forced to work in a rice field at the age of eight!?!?!?"

I replied, "Well, it did happen. I know that Mao forced a lot of the intelligenzia onto farm cooperatives and the cultural revolution was responsible for about 30 million deaths..."

Wrong answer! "Well!", she sniffed", "HE (referring to the composer) did very well!!"

I answered, "yes, but many others didn't"

Whenever I brought up the atrocities of Chinese communists, it was in one ear and out the other. The woman kept talking and disregarded everything I said!

Then her husband chimed in "you know, the JAPANESE killed a lot of Chinese!"

"Yes, I know. Are you referring to Nanjing? I read that they killed...."

"Forty Thousand people in 24 hours!" the man interrupted

"Oh really? I thought I read 100,000, but nevertheless..."

"And that wasn't it, that was just ONE CITY!!!!!"

"Yes, I know...."

I've heard of Holocaust deniers, but this is the first time I ever bumped into Cultural Revolution deniers... Considering how indignant that lady was at the mere mention of the fact that someone subjected to forced labor by the communists. I don't think that lady could deal with the fact that COMMUNISTS committed horrible atrocities... so her and her husband switched to the ol' liberal standby World War II, where most of the atrocities were committed by fascists. They could deal with the right wing atrocities.... it somehow infringed on their opium dream that the Left does everything for humanity or something.

Well... there's more to this story.....

Somehow, we got on the subject of Roman emperors and I made the comment that, in many cases, the Roman army had emperors killed when they got tired of them and replaced them with someone else....

To which the lady replied "It's too bad they don't do something like that today!" Apparently, referring to President Bush....

I then said, "I, for one, do not want to be ruled by an army!" and ended the conversation....

It was interesting, but not surprising, to meet someone with this sort of attitude at the symphony. Let's face it, a lot of snobs are liberals (I'm a snob too, but a middle class conservative snob, there aren't too many of us! ) and I run into people with this attitude at cultural events from time to time. Actually, I think most people at this sort of event share here attitude, but I don't often run into someone spouting off like that.

You know, I get the feeling that if, God forbid, our country were taken over by an invading army, that people like this woman would be flocking to greet the conquerors.