Yay! My Amazon order arrived yesterday, which means that soon I can start reading Band of Brothers, and the third book of His Dark Materials trilogy. I just have to finish off my book of Readings on the Middle Kingdom . I'm on the section on Communist China now, so I am almost finished. Here is a little bit about true love, Revolution style, from a government-produced movie:

"The young lady . . . twenty-five years old and an engineer by profession, discovers her [boy]friend after midnight in his office. He has fallen asleep over a weighty mathematical computation, the results of which will be required by the factory in the morning. Until dawn, she works out his mathematical formula and leaves before he wakes. This too is a sign of love . . ."

And here is a poem by Mao Zedong himself:

The Snow

All the scenery in the north
Is enclosed in a thousand li of ice,
And ten thousand li of swirling snow.
Behold both sides of the Great Wall-
There is only a vast confusion left.
On the upper and lower reaches of the Yellow River
You can no longer see the flowng water.
The mountains are dancing silver serpents,
The hills on the plains are shining elephants.
I desire to compare our height to the skies.
In clear weather
The earth is so charming
Like a red-faced girl clothed in white.
Such is the charm of these rivers and mountains,
Calling innumerable heroes to vie with each other in pursuing her.
The emperors Shi Huang and Wu Ti were barely cultured,
The emperors Tai Zung and Tai Zu were lacking in feeling,
Genghis Khan knew only how to bend his bow at the eagles,
These all belong to the past- only today are there men of feeling!

He had whole books of this stuff. Little Red Books full of them. When you're the supreme dictator of the most populated country in the world you can publish as much bad poetry as you want. You can even have music written for some of your more profound utterances and make the whole country sing the songs.
One day this is what I will do- you will have to sing Homie Bear pooems in big rallies on Parliament Hill. Instead of Little Red Books, though, I will have Big Brown Books o'Poo. Heck why wait? Preorder yours today.