Running Capitalist Dog - Ice Girl

Chapter 6.

You can say that again, sang Leo, a broken-hearted brainwashed exhausted starving peasant practicing free speech with the fluency of intellectual rational objectivity at a Reform Through Re-education labor unit on the edge of the Gobi desert or Hell on Earth.

  He was short, fast and deadly.

  He was condemned to the labor unit for quest-ioning heavily armed moral authority at Beijing Abnormal University. It was the beginning of the Brand NEW Cultural Revolution lasting 10,000 brutal years.

Quanzhou, Fujian, China

  China was systemically dismantled and converted into a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. It was sold at global discount stores labeled Made In China By Poor Illiterate Sweatshop Slaves.

  Millions of educated people were purged from jobs. All social connections were severed. Informers prospered. Families turned each other in to save their skin. Dignity and self-respect devolved into humiliating samzen or self-criticism sessions.

  Yes, they cried. I am guilty, stupid and the cause of all my suffering.

  Yes, they wailed. I am a Running Capitalist Dog. Have mercy. Where do I sign my glorious true confession?

  Here, said Authority. On the dotted line.

  After accepting Leo’s coerced confession interrogation thugs dressed as acrobats rehearsing for a Beijing Opera beat Leo with tofu sandwiches and sand-filled rubber hoses.

A clandestine CIA torture manual instructed them how to adapt modern waterboarding tactics with ancient Chinese water torture techniques.

  Sink or swim sucker, said a diving instructor in a bell jar.

Unemployed and pregnant, Quanzhou, China.

  They hung Leo upside down in the asylum. They spun him around until he became a flashing strobe light jellyfish. A literate starving peasant applied electrodes to his genitals. An illiterate starving peasant cranked up the juice on an old car battery.

  Leo talked. Leo stuttered. Leo cried for mercy.

  Leo screamed, Why me? Not me!

  Denial will kill you, said interrogators. You are an enemy of The One State. You are a clear and present danger to social harmonious stability. Questioning authority is forbidden. Repent Running Dog!

  Leo screamed, I’m a mongrel cur. I will never ever ask another quest-ion, have mercy. They cranked up jungle juice shocking Leo back to a Brave New World.

  His memory was erased.

  This happened because corrupt Chinese party leaders choking on greed, concubines, estates, and gold plated chopsticks with their futures on the line were not pleased one lost day when, in a Correct Political Thought class, Leo had the temerity to ask, Why do we have to read Mao’s Little Red Book, it contains nothing of value, it is outdated, filled with mush for pigs, doublethink ideologies and peasant socialist agrarian social big brother control plans, mindless propaganda and is obsolete.

  Shock and awe filled airless silence.

  Leo was denounced before the entire population. Leaders took care of Leo. They executed all his relatives. That’ll teach the little SOB, said a bureaucrat.

  Authority has spoken, leaders said, standing with Leo wearing shackles of regret and loss and remorse code watching his ancestral Sichuan home erupt in a blazing inferno, hearing his ghost parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, grandmother, and grandfather scream for mercy in Dante’s fire.

  I will get revenge, Leo reflected in the Gobi. Someday I will stand in front of a tank on Main Street in Beijing screaming, “Run me over you bastards!”

 Until then, Leo’s task based re-education reform activity or Understanding by Design pedagogical reality meant hauling buckets of night soil shit out of labor unit shacks near his straw and mud hovel.

  All day. Every single fucking day.

  He fed it to pigs on Animal Farm. Some pigs are more equal than other pigs. Oink, oink.

 After days, weeks, months, years, decades and centuries hauling loose smelly shit Leo received a Certificate Of Merit and Achievement at an award ceremony.

 20.5 million political-social prisoners witnessed the event.

  Maija, Fujian, China

Fat party work unit leaders exclaimed to tumultuous applause, You Comrade Leo, carrier of the people’s glorious shit, have learned your humbling life lesson through re-education and reform. You learned the hard way. The hard way is the smart way.

You have reformed your thought and behavior in accordance with Confusion moral and ethical social principles. You are now a skeleton, an example of a good, wise and moral person. Congratulations. You may now return to society as a useful citizen.

Here’s a map of the Middle Kingdom, a pocketknife, a handful of rice and a free bottle of water.

  Survivors exhaled with joy. They celebrated his freedom with festive drinking, eating, dancing and tons of free shit. If it can happen to him, it can happen to us, said one of 20.5 million.

  Shouldering his bag Leo wandered out of the Gobi. It was hotter than hell and almost as expensive. It’s a long fucking walk and I lived to tell the tale. I am alive. Leo experienced freedom from anger and attachment with mindfulness.

 Walking, whispered Antonio Machado a Spanish poet, makes the road.

 Timeless metaphorical themes of love, hope, despair, treachery, revenge, betrayal, alienation, loneliness, boredom, loss, choices, consequences, morals, ethics, values, principles, free will vs. determinism, and abandonment coagulating with DNA in a cosmic soup struggled to find clean water, education and medicine expressing irony, symbolism, satire, comedy, weather and sex. 

 Ice Girl in Banlung

Maija, Fujian, China