How Mao Became a Hipster Icon

The D.J. with the bob haircut and sparkling leggings considers the question. Smoke from her waifish cigarette curls skyward. It’s shortly after 2 p.m., and she has only recently awoken. She is explaining why, in addition to disco music and vintage clothes, she counts herself a fan of the long-departed Chairman Mao.

“Some people say Mao was a punk,” Sun Peipei finally offers. She intends this as a compliment. She’s a punk, too.

She hunts for words. “He’s more edgy in his thoughts, and he puts his thoughts into actions very outrageously.” Well, yes, in a way. “He’s really different.” True, but. … She tries again: “The Red Guards greeting Mao in Tiananmen Square is like fans greeting a rock star.”

Finally, Ms. Sun, a 29-year-old fixture of Beijing’s alternative scene, comes to her idea: “Mao has done something that normal, sane people wouldn’t do. He was on the frontier of things.”

China can seem of many minds about Chairman Mao, who oversaw a period of mass famine and persecution. His portrait still adorns the money and still hangs exaltedly on the gates to the Forbidden City. But officially, at least, China has tried to tamp down enthusiasm for his ideas. Just a few weeks ago, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao referred to the Cultural Revolution as a “historical tragedy” and a “mistake” that ought not be repeated.

But amid the dizzying changes and surging consumerism of modern China, whose temples are Louis Vuitton boutiques, a different view of Mao can be found among many young people of Ms. Sun’s ilk — young, cool, weird, out of sync with their Burberry-chasing peers. Mao, chided by his own successors in power, becomes for these hipsters an imaginary figure who stands for equality, authenticity and a higher purpose —

The writer of the article thinks the cig smoke is waifish. Not the weirdo who digs mao. And I have no idea how it can be waifish. Maybe the writer was trying to say waft, and screwed that up. Or maybe it was an attempt to say it was a thin stream of smoke, like kate moss thin. Seems weird to apply it to that. There is a floor lamp right next to me that has some waifishness going on.

Here’s another one from the article:

“He, too, smokes to reach his thoughts.”

I bet he does. The vacuum between his ears probably sucks it right in.

Freegards

Don't need no Weatherman to see which way the wind
blws.

"Behind the Violence, Says Jane Alpert, Was Sex"

--November 09, 1981--
"The leaders of the Weather Underground, she believes, followed a similar pattern of constantly shifting sexual alliances..."
http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20080637,00.html
"He [Bill Ayers] also writes about the Weathermen's sexual experimentation as they tried to 'smash monogamy.' The Weathermen were 'an army of lovers,' he says, and describes having had different sexual partners, including his best male friend."
Source: New York Times, September 11, 2001: "No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen"
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02E1DE1438F932A2575AC0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1
"...the Weathermen, when not engaged in group sex, committed such revolutionary acts as parading with a Viet Cong flag through a local park on Independence Day and spray-painting the walls of a high school with the slogans, "Off the Pigs," "Viet Cong Will Win," and "F#$k U.S. Imperialism."..."
Campus Wars: The Peace Movement At American State Universities in the Vietnam Era

"What happens next bears watching closely, as does the response of the president, ex-Speaker Pelosi, and others on the left. Encouraged by leftists in the Democratic Party and funded by left-leaning nonprofit organizations and celebrity contributors, Occupy Wall Street may in time morph into something resembling the radical factions of the late 1960s and 1970s."
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/10/predicting_the_weatherman.html

The Osawatomie Coincidence
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2818309/posts

When I was stationed at the mental health clinic at Ft. Lewis back in the midsixties a couple of the social work officer types used to display Mao’s Little Red Book quite proudly and conspicuously in their offices and at staff meetings. Except for a couple of psychiatrists who seemed to share their attitude but not their entusiasm for such reading material, the rest of the staff tended to ignore their behavior as childish resistance and resentment over having to be in uniform and serve......

The article author and subject are asinine and obscene: Mao is the premier mass murderer.
Ayers the unrepentant user of women to make bombs called for the elimination of 25 million who would resist his revolution.
The party which pretends tolerance worships the most murderous of tyrants.
Tiananmen Square June 4, 1989, long after Mao was in a plastic box, Zhao Ziyang opposed the massacre of 2,000 students and thus fell from favor with Li Peng and Deng Xiaoping, was placed under house arrest until his death.
Today China continues to stifle freedom.
For a slavery which styles itself antireligion it is a jealous bunch of corrupt princelings in the shadow of the cult of Mao.
Now comes the Alinskyite with legendary background, the cipher ramming tyranny onto a people betrayed by spineless leaders.
Only maggots fawn over Mao and Obama.

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