Time To Take Out The Trash -- And One Country Is Making All The Rest Of Us Look Pathetic!

 

If you pay any attention to the news at all, you know that countries around the world are CLEANING UP AND CLEANING OUT.  There are a lot of public figures being pilloried, jailed and fired for all kinds of malfeasance.  One maniacal dictator after another has been toppled, and new governments formed, in the course of the Arab Spring. The previous French president and the second-to-last Italian prime minister are both in hot water right now for criminal activity, screwing around with public funds, you name it. Even South Africa, staggering under the loss of Nelson Mandela, is prosecuting a sports hero, "Blade Runner" Oscar Pistorius, for murdering his girlfriend.  

Here in the USA, we never seem to ruin out of fundamentalist Christian, Republican elected officials who are willing to proposition undercover police officers at highway rest stops.  As I type this, the Pentagon is investigating Montana Senator John Walsh for plagiarism on his War College master's thesis -- yeah, Senator, it must have been PTSD that made you steal someone else's work, just stick with that defense, why dontcha?   And let's not forget the abrupt downfall of Veteran's Administration Secretary Eric Shinseki for fiddling while Rome burned, by which I mean tolerating falsified paperwork intended to hide the fact that veterans were suffering and dying without medical treatment on his watch.  Even Lance Armstrong finally admitted to doping, and lost I know not how many endorsements.   It's like a race to see who can pile the most, and the worst-smelling, garbage in the public dump.

So, who's winning this race?  These guys:

 

 

They don't look that much like Batman and Robin, do they?  But in a cleanup operation that probably required several bulldozers and a fleet of garbage trucks, these ordinary-looking guys have removed or otherwise punished -- count 'em -- 200,000 corrupt Chinese government officials.

I doff my chapeau to Xi Jinping and his sidekick, Wang Qishan.  It will be quite interesting to see which direction China is going to go from this point.  If they play their cards right they may yet avoid a "Chinese Spring."

And the whole process is a lovely meditation on Chaos and Order, seriously.  The lives of public leaders and kids' heroes worldwide, from the "Cannibal Cop" Gilberto Valle to former Chinese security chief Zhou Yongkang, have been -- from their point of view -- thrown into Chaos.  But it only happened because someone, like the guy who chased Colonel Khaddafy into a sewer pipe and shot him, was trying to impose Order on a chaotic situation.  It makes me go all googly-eyed just thinking about it.