Category Archives: Seeking answers

Why do these conventions run so late?

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So once again, the only thing of the evening I want to see at the convention is on at 10 p.m. Like waiting for my man Joe last night. These people are keeping me up past my bedtime.

And why is that? It’s certainly not for the benefit of the delegates. The state delegations — South Carolina, anyway — have their daily meeting at some ungodly hour like 7:30 a.m., and then the next thing worth paying attention to is some speech at 10 p.m., and they all go out afterwards. No way to live, even for a week. It’s never made any sense to me.

Do the parties not think that maybe, just maybe, kids ought to be able to watch these things and learn a bit about their country’s political system? Yeah, I know, that’s a setup for cynical jokes about things not being fit for children’s eyes, but seriously — for good or ill, it’s educational.

Anyway, the schedules make no sense to me. But neither do a lot of other things about political parties.

But I’ll stay up. Hey, if I hadn’t stayed up last night I would have missed Joe, and that was the best speech of either convention so far. No, Joe’s no barnburner of a speaker, but it was what he had to say. The partisans in the hall didn’t know whether to clap or not at his best lines, because it was an UnParty speech, and not their sort of thing at all. I loved it.

Why isn’t it the Peking Olympics?

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Being pretty sure that I’ve had this explained to me before, and I just forgot the explanation, I’ll ask again: How come we say "Beijing" instead of "Peking" now?

Here’s the thing that puzzles me about this: It was supposed to be a phonic representation of the way the Chinese name sounds. So how could the West have been so wildly wrong about the way the name of that place was said for so long? "Peking" doesn’t really sound anything like "Beijing," or at least not enough so that if someone said "Beijing," we would make the mistake of writing it phonetically with a "P" and a "K."

And if his name was Mao Zedong, why did we hear Mao Tse-tung for all those years?

My theory is that one version of Chinese somehow won out politically over another. Like Mandarin over Cantonese or some thousand other variations, because I know there’s a bewildering array of them. Another theory is that the Chinese are just messing with the heads of us foreign devils, and maybe at the height of the Olympics, while they have the attention they’ve been craving, they’ll suddenly announce that the city’s name is pronounced "Vei-ling" or something, just to see if we’ll start calling it that. Then they’ll laugh their heads off.

But I suppose that’s just the paranoia of the Westerner who never truly understands the East, try as he might.