Day Four: The Boy Who Preached Coyote

210A. The Boy Who Preached Coyote

Before even the Bard and Beowulf
There was the story of the wolf.
And even before this story lupine,
If I may be so bold as to opine,
A tale of a peculiar pastor
Who preached from his pasture,
A tale more revealing than his dhoti
About a creature we call the coyote.

"Every flock is afraid of a wolf pack,
That they might get 'called back,'
So they let their hackles down
When an approaching dog is brown.
Still, it's such an unkempt creature,
Ears a devilishly pointy feature,
Who will more likely overpower
And then voraciously devour
A soviet of apple-polishers."

Scribbled from the western tit of Romulus, known as Ovid, by the shores of Lake Seneca, near Rome, Utica, and Syracuse, in a Pandora's box of Classical-Haudenosaunee place names

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Mao's Last Dancer (2009), the autobiography of Li Cunxin

Is this Mao's Last dance? The Chinese government from the highest command to the most local cadre must perform miraculously in a precarious balancing act. WHO is watching. Who is watching? The world. They know it; we know it.

If they send people back to work and school too early and this thing--this COVID-19--spreads before there is a vaccine or better understanding of transmission modes, this long period that I have referred to previously as the Quietude of Chaos will have accomplished very little beyond devastating their own economy and sinking much of the population into great depression. If they press pause too long, they will have a hard time, the next time a more or less potent disease emerges, in convincing anybody of the wisdom of waiting. Furthermore, the longer the delay, the more vulnerable the motherland becomes. Each day of economic anemia is a vial of poison for the regime. They know it; we know it.

Boys who have played at government in the United States for the last three years and one month and one day--Trump, Pompeo, Esper, and the like--may think to throw a match on the silk threads and see if they can burn their frenemy into compliance, but callow children are warned, "One should not play with matches." We know it; do they know it?