If there’s anything in this world worse than being an aging, washed-up British glam rocker, it’s surely being an aging, washed-up British glam rocker who’s known worldwide as a child molester and kiddie porn peddler, someone who, for the rest of his life, will have the words “convicted pedophile” addended to his name. And the only thing worse than that is finding yourself booted out of Southeast Asia, a pariah nonpariel in one of the least civilized corners of the world. You know you’ve hit rock bottom when even Thailand wants nothing to do with you.

But hey, as Randy Pausch recently reminded us, brick walls are there to stop people who don’t want it bad enough. There’s something to be said for blind, pigheaded optimism.

Glitter vows to clear his name after ‘travesty of justice’ in Vietnam

Gary Glitter vowed to clear his name in Britain after claiming that his conviction for molesting children in Vietnam was a “travesty of justice.”

There’s a game foreigners visiting Vietnam like to play, a parlor diversion that doubles as an intellectual and moral exercise. It’s called “How Can I Justify Not Giving This Person Any of My Money?”

A casual listener can hear any number of people engaged in this game at tourist-packed corner cafés in Saigon on a typical evening, when the street hawkers and hucksters are out in force. It starts when a Vietnamese person of any age approaches a foreigner who is otherwise busily engaged – in sitting down, for example. The solicitor could be a toothless local man carrying a case full of remarkably inexpensive name-brand timepieces. Or maybe it’s one of the legions of booksellers who lug around five-foot-high piles of haphazardly photocopied paperbacks. The game’s early stages involve players ignoring the vendor and his or her repeated entreaties to buy, until said vendor moves move on to the next table, where the ritual begins anew. One player then sighs, turns to another and utters the game’s official opening line: “I’d love to help every one of them, but…”. This is the cue for a companion, or any nearby English speaker, to reply with, “But you just can’t.” Thus the game begins.

The object, of course, is for you and the other players to successfully rationalize brushing off the endless parade of Vietnamese men, women, and children who approach you with goods or services in the hope that you will exchange money for those things, usually much more money than you think they’re worth. Extra points are awarded for using the phrase “At least they’re working” and/or making a veiled – or not veiled, whichever – reference to supposed abusers of federal welfare programs “back home.” Points also are given for comparisons to grifters, swindlers, and idlers in one’s home country. Extra credit is awarded for the exchange of knowing glances if, while playing, you’re approached by someone selling something, especially if they’re under the age of five.

In the tourist-choked District 1 of Ho Chi Minh City, street vendors – and, more rarely, handout seekers – operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They zero in on foreigners like guided missiles, programmed not to take no for an answer, or at least to pretend not to understand the meaning of the word in English, until the target’s body language has taken on the aspect of a cornered dog being force-fed a bowl of steamed beets.

Their tactics are creative, visceral, and brutally effective. A sweet-faced youth of perhaps four, clutching a few packs of chewing gum, might wander up to you where you sit, place one hand up on your knee, and look at you with deep, soulful eyes, eyes that couldn’t possibly belong to an ordinary four-year-old. “Please, mister,” she’ll say. “You buy gum.” This appeal is difficult if not impossible for any semi-sentient, warm-blooded mammal to resist, especially when one takes into account the asking price, which in most developed countries is the kind of money you wouldn’t bother picking up off the street if you noticed it lying there.

Ironically, an odd characteristic of Vietnamese currency makes parting with such a pathetic sum much more difficult for the average tourist. The currency in Vietnam is the dong, a single one of which is worth roughly as much as a hundredth of a paper clip or, if you prefer, a dozen or so of the little sprinkles that go on Christmas cookies. In other words, one dong by itself is pretty much worthless. Yet the Vietnamese insist on expressing sums of money this way, which has the practical result of making them sound like much bigger amounts than they really are.

A cup of coffee, for example, might be priced at VD 13,500. Thirteen thousand and five hundred?, you think to yourself, scrambling for a calculator. That’s highway robbery! Or maybe you’re presented with the bill after an average meal for two at a low-key Vietnamese restaurant. A hundred and twelve thousand dong?! We’re gonna have to cut this vacation short, if things continue this way. The western brain has difficulty dealing with such big figures, forgetting that a thousand dong is considerably less than a dime, therefore failing to grasp that the coffee clocks in around .80 cents and the meal sets its two owners back a total of about $7.

I’ve often thought that the Vietnamese government would do itself a lot of favors if it retired the dong in favor of a more muscular unit of currency – say, the kilodong. Or better yet, the millidong. It’s got a nice metric ambiance about it, and it’s worth ten thousand of the other kind, bringing it into closer parity with western currencies. A typical dinner for two would cost MD 11.20 under my plan, and that coffee’s now MD 1.30. This puts the perceived value of the millidong (but, crucially, not the real value) somewhere between the dollar and the Euro. Americans would feel just as inferior visiting Vietnam as they do in France, and Europeans might be a little less inclined to throw around those sneering, post-colonial attitudes. Everybody would take Vietnam a little more seriously, if you ask me.

But until that happens, you’ve still got to deal with a puppy-dog-eyed Kewpie doll barely out of diapers asking you for several thousand somethings, presumably so that she can someday go to school and avoid a life of drug-addicted prostitution.

And she’s only the barest tip of the iceberg. The Vietnamese know the value of youth all too well. Around 9pm each evening, the streets swell with an army of mothers who carry sleeping newborns and infants around in the crook of one arm or draped over a shoulder while walking from cafe to cafe. In their free hand, they carry small, individually wrapped packs of facial tissues for sale. Maybe you’ve got the stones to send a four-year-old packing, but are you man enough to show the door to a mother-and-child team who look like they stepped out of a History Channel documentary on Dustbowl-Era Oklahoma?

The combined mass of street vendors, xé ȏm drivers, and pleading restaurant touts make negotiating the sidewalk on De Tham or Buy Vien streets as mentally hazardous as running a gantlet of pitchforks and shovels. The sheer salesmanship on display would bring the canniest used car dealer to his knees.

“Hello friend!” “Hello boss!” “Hello chief!” “Mister you help me please? I sell nothing all day.” “You need motorbike?” “You buy t-shirt? Give you good price, very cheap.” “You want DVD? All new release.” “You like fruit? You buy please. They so heavy.” “You need wallet? Real leather. How about Vietnam postcard? Twenty postcard one dollar.”

Watches and backscratchers, bracelets, rings and keychains. Toothbrushes, nail clippers, shampoo and Q-tips. English-language newspapers and magazines, cologne, fans, cigarettes and lighters. Pirated anything and everything.

Eye contact is to be avoided at all costs. Stepping into a cafe or restaurant is no guarantee of a reprieve. Vendors patrolling the street walk right into open-air restaurants, stopping at every table to see if you wish to become the owner of a bobble-headed rubber horse or a new pair of sunglasses to accompany the ones you’re already wearing. Cafe owners are curiously unperturbed by this, rarely giving the hawkers so much as a glance – simply stepping around them to deliver food to the table.

Not everyone is selling hardware. Beggars, often disfigured, are free to hobble just about anywhere they like – into stores and through restaurants, stopping often to display gimp arms, hunchbacks, and stumps, hat held between your nose and a meal you were formerly planning to enjoy.

I’m in awe of two Cambodian kids, brothers, who work De Tham Street downtown, a.k.a. backpacker central. They’re performers of the old-school style, despite being approximately 6 and 8 years old. Dressed in garish, handmade costumes at once too big and too small, they specialize in the classic sideshow arts: fire-breathing, snake-swallowing, hot-coal-eating, and the like. After a typical ten-minute sidewalk performance, they walk through the seated cafe crowd soliciting tips. I’m always tempted to give them a big bill, something special for the effort, but I’m worried one of them will try to staple it to his forehead for an encore.

Like most of this workforce, these boys are smart. A friend used to dismiss them as “hacks,” claiming the snakes were rubber fakes. I always felt this was a little harsh. Personally, I can’t see much difference between the difficulty levels of threading a long green plastic piece of rubber down your throat and doing so with a similarly-shaped live reptile; I’m impressed and disgusted either way. But these snakes are real, which my friend discovered to his dismay one night when he was a little too loud in his denunciation and suddenly found one draped around his neck, dripping in saliva and heading down his shirtfront.

I tend to like the kids best, especially when they’re selling something, because they’re so easily distracted from their mission. There’s a little girl of about five who has the De Tham Street cafe my friend owns on her circuit every night starting around 8pm. I don’t know her name; she’s still got a lot of baby fat on her, so she walks with a little bit of a waddle. It’s pretty clear she’s getting enough to eat. The only English she knows is “Buy gum?”, but I always like to have a little fun with her. Like all the working kids her age, she’s a great actor. She shuffles/waddles up to you and fixes you with a look that bespeaks a life of deprivation, tedium, hopelessness and hunger – although as I’ve said, this last one is a little hard to believe. The overall effect is a portrayal of despair that Brando could have admired.

It’s good, but it’s no match for the tickle monster. One finger in the ribs and her technique falls to pieces. She giggles and shrieks, squirming in delight, and then an instant later she’s back in character, looking even more serious because she’s on the clock and she’s got a job to do, and tickling’s not in the rulebook. But she’s also easily distracted by typical childhood pleasures. My cheap cellphone has a game on it called “Rat Xenia” that’s as dull as any videogame I ever saw. In it, squiggly, pixelated blobs that are evidently supposed to be rats scamper across the screen. Your job is to steer them, using four phone buttons, toward pixelated traps that appear randomly on the screen. It’s electronic boredom incarnate, but if she’s giving me the eyes of despair and keeping just out of tickle reach, I’ll hold up my phone for her. In a moment she’ll be leaning against me, clicking hypnotically, rapt with her mission of guiding rats to their dooms.

There are also the fruit ladies, or as I like to call them, the basket cases. Usually older women, this gang carries across their shoulders a two-meter wooden plank, notched at each end, from which hang baskets piled high with fruit – rambutans, mangoes, pineapples, local bananas, exotic dragon fruit, coconuts ready to be turned into boat drinks with one deft slice of a razor-sharp machete, and other bewildering varietals I can’t even begin to name. The women keep fairly busy with the locals, for whom they’re essentially mobile produce sections. But tourists are too easy a mark to pass up. A common tactic is for these women, who have calves of steel, to approach a foreigner and moan miserably about how weighty the basket is: “You buy please. So heavy.” Another bit of genius is to ask the target if he or she would like to try carrying the baskets. This works well on new arrivals, still in thrall to a place that has never seen a Starbucks. Having discovered for themselves just how heavy the baskets are, it’s that much harder not to buy something from her after they’ve had their fun and taken their pictures. As you might imagine, this one rarely works twice.

Foreigners sometimes try to draw a distinction between these workers and those who exclusively target tourists, supposing that somehow one is more “legitimate” than the other. But that doesn’t make sense to me. They’re all just trying to earn a living any way they can. That little girl’s act is perhaps a little more transparent, but not fundamentally different from the one put on for you by a realtor or an investment broker or anyone who’s ever worked in advertising.

Even the handicapped keep busy here. While many profoundly disabled persons do resort to begging, others ride around in three-wheeled carts powered with a vertical hand crank that sits in the area between what would have been their legs. One morning a few months ago in Hoi An, while I sipped a cup of coffee at a cafe with a view of the river, I watched a gentleman pump toward me in one of these contraptions, stopping just in front of the cafe, which was set a few steps above the street to prevent it from being inundated when the river flooded. He gummed a huge smile at me and waved an English-language Vietnamese magazine over his head, something I’d be no more likely to buy than I would a copy of Grit. I shook my head and found an invisible object a hundred yards away with which I suddenly became intensely preoccupied. Not to be deterred, the man threw himself out of the cart with a calculated thud and began dragging himself up the steps toward me, in the manner of a cat who’s just been hit by a speeding car and is returning home to die.

“No thanks!” I said, panicking. “Really, I’m fine! I’m allergic to ink, that’s all!” I tried to catch the eye of the cafe owner for a little help, but he was stepping over the man’s torso on his way to another table with a plate of toast.

It’s a challenge saying no to these people, I tell you. Vietnam is developing fast, but not so fast that it’s prepared to legislate disability benefits – or social security benefits, or unemployment benefits, or subsidized housing, or Medicaid, or homeless shelters, or really any sort of social welfare program at all. You lose your job or your legs in Vietnam, you’d better start working on those fire-breathing and hot-coal-eating skills.

So it’s no wonder that relatively wealthy westerners on holiday here, accustomed to those kinds of entitlement systems, get flustered, questioning the merits of handing over their hard-earned money to what they see as a pack of grifters and street urchins. My advice is to keep a few millidong handy and be generous with it. A pack of gum here and there won’t break the bank. And you sure don’t want to end up with a spit-covered snake down your shirt.

I have a not-so-secret fondness for a subject that ordinary Americans tend to avoid talking about in public. This is not because they fear getting arrested or anything (although it’s happened) but because doing so too often results in an argument. One of the nastier results of the so-called culture wars is that what used to be a perfectly manageable list of topics best avoided in casual company – God and politics – has ballooned into an encyclopedia-sized catalog of unmentionables, mainly because one group (I’m not naming any names) decided to conflate the two original items on that list, after which all hell, so to speak, broke out. These days you can’t use the noun “choice” without somebody calling you names and threatening to pitch a drink in your face. And pity the fool who mentions Parkinson’s Disease at a cocktail party.

My not-so-secret fondness – actually fondness is too mild a term, but it falls short of flat-out obsession – may rank among the dorkier ones out there. Yet despite this, it’s also one of the most currently inflammatory: evolution.

It’s not the sort of subject you want to bring up on a first date or, say, in the dentist’s chair, attitudes being what they are these days. But this is not new. Darwin put off publishing “On the Origin of Species” for 20 years because he knew that once he did, what followed would be the cultural equivalent of a giant record needle scratch sound effect. And he was right. And that sound was followed by the din of all Christian humanity screaming at the top of their lungs.

Curiously, almost exactly 150 years later, theyʼre still screaming. Why this is, is a mystery to me. In 1859, you could understand the reaction. Here he was, overturning thousands of years of institutionalized belief and dogmatic conditioning. He was lucky not to have been burned alive, as he most certainly would have been just a few hundred years earlier. Galileo, who pulled pretty much the same surprise on this gang in 1610 with his notion that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system, was forced by Inquisition thugs to take it all back, and even then he barely escaped with lifelong house arrest instead of the stake.

It took the Catholic church 382 years to grudgingly acknowledge that maybe Galileo had had a point (this was 23 years after the first moon landing). So maybe it’s not too surprising that so many Christians are still resisting Darwin’s genius. If the past is any measure, they’ll be throwing fits about evolution for another 233 years before finally coming around.

In the meantime, appalling numbers of people continue to pretend that the cornerstone of modern biology and the fundamental explanation for the staggering diversity of all past and present life on earth is nothing more than a conspiracy cooked up by scientists designed to separate people from their religion. Polls show that more than of Americans believe the world, mankind, and all creation came into being in a divine puff of smoke a few thousand years ago, and that none of the creatures in it, particularly us, have changed one iota since that moment. They attribute the entire fossil record to Noah’s flood, wave away radiometric dating as too complex to make sense, and explain vestigial limbs in whales as God’s idea of fooling around.

Many of them are convinced that in order to acknowledge the incontrovertible physical evidence of evolution in the fossil record and in the DNA of all creatures (and it is incontrovertible), you also have to become a card-carrying atheist. But that’s just plain silly. Many of the the world’s most intelligent, eloquent spokesmen for evolution have mused on how the wonder of Darwin’s revelation, in its sublime beauty and elegance, makes them more likely to believe in a Creator, not less. And I ask you: how much more amazing is a God who set into motion such a remarkable process than one who merely snapped his fingers and called it a day? Even the Catholic church, that paragon of scientific enlightenment, recently noted for the record that as far as it’s concerned, Genesis and evolution are as compatible as milk and cookies.

The genius of evolution by natural selection lies not just in its simplicity but in its simple plausibility. It’s not difficult to grasp, at least not in its fundamentals. And when you do understand it, it makes perfect, beautiful, exquisite sense.

Yet deniers persist, even flourish. Ideology turns out to be much stronger than scientific evidence, at least when that evidence is twisted, suppressed, ignored, unseen, or willfully misinterpreted, as it is every day by people who feel their own ideologies are threatened by the fact of evolution. Part of the problem is that, the Pope’s copasetic attitude notwithstanding, lots of the more fundamentalist brand of Christians feel that learning anything at all about evolution would be like having dinner with the Devil. As far as they’re concerned, the less they know the better. As a result, there’s a frightening gulf of ignorance among people about just what evolution is and how it works.

Also, there’s the inconvenient issue of the Bible having its own version of how things got kicked off, a version literalists tend to take, well, literally. If the Bible contradicts an overwhelming body of evidence and the world’s entire scientific community, to them that can only mean the scientists are either all wrong or all lying.

“Evolution is only a theory,” they like to say say. Well, sure, but in scientific terms so is Relativity. E = MC² = “theory.” That’s the way science works. Scientists are always open to the idea of somebody finding hard evidence that changes the whole ballgame, so they’re unwilling ever to sound too positive about anything. But you don’t hear Christians questioning the scientific validity of what will happen if a nuclear bomb is dropped on their head. That’s only because the Bible is strangely silent on the subjects of Relativity and quantum physics. If Genesis had suggested the sun was made of the fiery flatulence of heavenly angels, you can bet that today we’d be arguing over whether to teach astronomy in public schools. “Nuclear fusion is only a theory,” they’d say.

So I’m gratified beyond words when I see people standing up publicly for reason, common sense, and the willingness to actually use the mental faculties that we’ve been endowed with. One of my favorite of these people is Olivia Judson, the author, journalist, and evolutionary biologist who’s been writing a weekly column for The New York Times since January called The Wild Side.

One of the great things about Olivia is that she’s not preachy or didactic; her columns are usually about the wonder and the majesty and, yes, sometimes the mystery of the evolutionary process, from its business at the very bottom of biological systems, at the level of DNA, to its operation at the top, at the level of hungry crocodiles, intestinal parasites, blind salamanders and serenading humpback whales. But yesterday’s column was an exception, and a welcome one. In it, she argues for the critical importance of teaching evolution in schools, for having the courage to pit 3.8 billion years of irrefutable evidence against blind ideology and see which one emerges victorious. I’m pasting it below so you can read it (and please, for all our sakes, do) without clicking all the way over the The New York Times’ website. I hope they don’t mind.

My hometown friend Ida Becker is traveling the globe on a personal mission right now. She’s asking people everywhere she goes to tell her one thing they believe with all their heart. “With no criteria or requirements for participation,” she asks, beyond simply stating “something that particular person believes to be true.”

Ida’s a long way away at the moment, in Thailand, and she’s not likely to be in Vietnam for several more months. But I’ve thought about her challenge for a long time. And I’ve often thought that if I were asked to choose one thing that I believe in with my entire body, heart, and mind, it would be that evolution by natural selection is the single most marvelous, transcendent, influential, beautiful, paradigm-changing, life-affirming idea ever conceived by a human being. Bigger than fire, bigger than the wheel, bigger than sliced bread, Darwin’s revolutionary epiphany lifted humanity to an entirely new plane of intellectual and spiritual existence and, at long last, told us where we had come from. Evolution is the best and most important thought ever thought.

Yet as Judson and many others have observed, the field of evolutionary biology has made astonishing progress since that first light went on 149 years ago. In the intervening years, thousands of people have refined, elaborated upon, and transformed that most excellent of thoughts into an entire new realm of scientific inquiry. The understanding of evolution today has about as much in common with Charles Darwin’s original idea as an F-18 fighter jet has with the Wright brothers’ first flying machine.

Incidentally, you might ask where God fits into all this. The answer is, anywhere you like. Not least of the wonderful things about evolution is that it doesn’t require God – but it doesn’t preclude Him, either. And that’s fine with me.

******

Optimism in Evolution

By OLIVIA JUDSON

Published: August 12, 2008

LONDON

When the dog days of summer come to an end, one thing we can be sure of is that the school year that follows will see more fights over the teaching of evolution and whether intelligent design, or even Biblical accounts of creation, have a place in America’s science classrooms.

In these arguments, evolution is treated as an abstract subject that deals with the age of the earth or how fish first flopped onto land. It’s discussed as though it were an optional, quaint and largely irrelevant part of biology. And a common consequence of the arguments is that evolution gets dropped from the curriculum entirely.

This is a travesty.

It is also dangerous.

Evolution should be taught – indeed, it should be central to beginning biology classes – for at least three reasons.

First, it provides a powerful framework for investigating the world we live in. Without evolution, biology is merely a collection of disconnected facts, a set of descriptions. The astonishing variety of nature, from the tree shrew that guzzles vast quantities of alcohol every night to the lichens that grow in the Antarctic wastes, cannot be probed and understood. Add evolution – and it becomes possible to make inferences and predictions and (sometimes) to do experiments to test those predictions. All of a sudden patterns emerge everywhere, and apparently trivial details become interesting.

The second reason for teaching evolution is that the subject is immediately relevant here and now. The impact we are having on the planet is causing other organisms to evolve – and fast. And I’m not talking just about the obvious examples: widespread resistance to pesticides among insects; the evolution of drug resistance in the agents of disease, from malaria to tuberculosis; the possibility that, say, the virus that causes bird flu will evolve into a form that spreads easily from person to person. The impact we are having is much broader.

For instance, we are causing animals to evolve just by hunting them. The North Atlantic cod fishery has caused the evolution of cod that mature smaller and younger than they did 40 years ago. Fishing for grayling in Norwegian lakes has caused a similar pattern in these fish. Human trophy hunting for bighorn rams has caused the population to evolve into one of smaller-horn rams. (All of which, incidentally, is in line with evolutionary predictions.)

Conversely, hunting animals to extinction may cause evolution in their former prey species. Experiments on guppies have shown that, without predators, these fish evolve more brightly colored scales, mature later, bunch together in shoals less and lose their ability to suddenly swim away from something. Such changes can happen in fewer than five generations. If you then reintroduce some predators, the population typically goes extinct.

Thus, a failure to consider the evolution of other species may result in a failure of our efforts to preserve them. And, perhaps, to preserve ourselves from diseases, pests and food shortages. In short, evolution is far from being a remote and abstract subject. A failure to teach it may leave us unprepared for the challenges ahead.

The third reason to teach evolution is more philosophical. It concerns the development of an attitude toward evidence. In his book, “The Republican War on Science,” the journalist Chris Mooney argues persuasively that a contempt for scientific evidence – or indeed, evidence of any kind – has permeated the Bush administration’s policies, from climate change to sex education, from drilling for oil to the war in Iraq. A dismissal of evolution is an integral part of this general attitude.

Moreover, since the science classroom is where a contempt for evidence is often first encountered, it is also arguably where it first begins to be cultivated. A society where ideology is a substitute for evidence can go badly awry. (This is not to suggest that science is never distorted by the ideological left; it sometimes is, and the results are no better.)

But for me, the most important thing about studying evolution is something less tangible. It’s that the endeavor contains a profound optimism. It means that when we encounter something in nature that is complicated or mysterious, such as the flagellum of a bacteria or the light made by a firefly, we don’t have to shrug our shoulders in bewilderment.

Instead, we can ask how it got to be that way. And if at first it seems so complicated that the evolutionary steps are hard to work out, we have an invitation to imagine, to play, to experiment and explore. To my mind, this only enhances the wonder.

Olivia Judson, a contributing columnist for The Times, writes The Wild Side at nytimes.com/opinion.

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What’s not to like?

It’s been a while since I mentioned it, but I have another blog – a sister blog to Man and Ultraman called The Daily Edamame. I once described that blog as “the lima beans to Ultraman’s corn” in an effort to make a succotash metaphor about the two, forgetting that a) edamame is made from soybeans, which makes for a confusing metaphor, and b) not all that many people really know what succotash is, and even fewer actually like it. The inevitable result is that people stayed away in droves from Edamame, worrying probably that it was a blog about obscure ethnic vegetable dishes.

Fear not. The Daily Edamame is nothing more than a photoblog featuring some of the many thousands of pictures I’ve taken since I’ve been in Japan and Southeast Asia. I’m not a professional photographer, which will be obvious, but every once in a while I get lucky. Now that I’m back in one place for a while and in possession of a new laptop, I thought it made sense to crank things back up. So forget everything you ever heard about beans and get over there, pinto. Er, pronto.

China has not been at the top of my “Must Make Friends With” list since, well, ever. There’s something about ruthless authoritarian governments that treat people like mindless, sub-human pets that tends to get my goat. But even I have to admit that last night’s opening ceremony for the Olympics was pretty flippin’ impressive. On one hand, yeah, I know that the entire thing was nothing more than a splashy piece of pure, Grade-A communist propaganda. I don’t believe for a second that a single member of the National People’s Congress gives a rolling rat’s ass about a “harmonious society” or “one world, one dream” or any of the other painfully saccharine slogans they’ve cynically tacked on to the Games to put a friendly face on an Orwellian mug. And sure, I realize that with a budget of $40 billion, almost anything short of a moon shot is possible.

Still, I’ve gotta say that last night’s program got me right right where I live. I’m the kinda guy who gets misty just hearing the Schindler’s List theme song. Stray kittens put a lump in my throat the size of an eight-ball. And sweet-faced, oppressed Asian kids running around in glowing electric body stockings to form the shape of a giant dove? Game over, man. I got verklempt at the giant globe, I choked up at the little girl flying through the air beneath the kite, I actually “Oooohed” out loud at the thousands of martial artists doing their synchronized Jackie Chan impressions. And the umbrellas that unfolded to reveal faces from kids in every nation? It was shameless, hypocritical, blatant manipulation – and I lapped it up.

If I ever have kids, I’m gonna be the world’s biggest pushover. All they’ll have to do is hum the theme song from Shindler’s List and make the form of a giant dove. Game over, man.