Sweetness, I was only joking when I said I ...

You can always count on romance in early February, I guess. Glancing at the newstand, it seems that almost every domestic magazine has devoted an issue to love. Glazed with the veneer of chocolate-box romance, the season of war tastes sweet: the illustration for this week�s cover of The New Yorker features a soldier holding a simple valentine card, red heart on white paper, againgst the backdrop of guns cocked under murky sky, fighter jets flying overhead.

As portrayed by media giants like Conde Nast and Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, a nation's love will follow its soldiers into battlefield. An exceptional nation that appears to be looking out for the vested interests of its citizens should, in turn, elicit the same sentiment from its citizens, a sentiment that justifies and makes apparent the usefulness of the US's imminent annihilation of "alien" populations, the faces of which are left out of the picture, beyond the margins of the American reader�s sight.

...

Quickly: reading �Intersection�, the novella that inspired Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love. Of course, now I wanna go to Hong Kong, for romance with a city so different from Oakland, known so thrillingly through cinema and text.

. . .

However, Heron would rather take a flight to Beijing. Walk Tiannamen Square, a monument to class struggle. He explains that, during the 1989 student demonstrations, the State did not become brutal until workers joined the students' struggle. "A revolutionary worker is more dangerous than a revolutionary student."

. . .

Here's a quote from Max Weber, as clipped from a roast duck noodle soup-stained Zoetrope:

"The erotic relation must remain attached, in a certain sophisticated measure, to brutality. The more sublimated it is, the more brutal. . . . It is the most intimate coercion of the soul of the less brutal partner. This coercion exists because it is never noticed by the partners themselves. Pretending to be the most human devotion, it is sophisticated enjoyment of oneself in the other."

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