Our Un-Enlightenment

In about a month and a half, President-elect Barack Obama will be inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States.

The mid-January tradition will erase the “-elect” portion of Obama’s title and wipe clean the presidential slate tarnished by eight years of shady policies enacted by the Bush administration.

Upon assuming his duties, Obama will be forced to address the most pressing issue in the minds of many voters: relations with China.

You thought I was going to say the economy, didn’t you?

I’ve heard enough about the economy, and I’ve said enough about it, too. The United States interaction with the Far East’s superpower will prove to be much more important in the long run.

The economy works in relatively short-term cycles. A few bad years are typically balanced by a decade of economic success not too far down the road.

China should be a larger concern because people, unlike abstract economic factors, can hold grudges. A grudge match between the States and the couple billion people of China would present some frightening potential scenarios.

The good part about Obama’s election is that many Chinese see his rise to prominence as a sign of improvement in the U.S. Some Chinese did not believe America was capable of electing and respecting a black president. While we still have to work to prove the latter half of the statement, the former portion has obviously been refuted.

Americans can only hope our ideals are not misinterpreted because of an obnoxious, irrelevant voice rising from the muddled, pretentious American entertainment industry.

We don’t need Kanye West, on national television, to proclaim China’s hatred of black people, as he did of President George W. Bush during 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. Verbally attacking your president is protected under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, but provoking an emerging superpower could impose a much more costly penalty than a horde of slanderous retorts.

I hope these famous buffoons — primarily the half-witted Hollywoodites who can’t keep a foot out of their mouths — can figure out when exactly is time to hush up.

We don’t need incendiary figures like Guns ‘N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose to reemerge onto the national scene pushing an anti-China agenda.

I don’t know how seriously China would react under a series of individual call-outs by overzealous American idiots, but given their less-than-stellar human rights record, I would rather not test the waters.