The last hútòng (胡同) I explored was in the year 2000, in the southern suburbs of Beijing. Many of its residents still wore drab green or grey uniform ‘Mao’ suits. A hútòng is a neighborhood of streets and narrow alleys separating blocks of one- or two-story traditional Chinese multi-family houses containing common courtyards. You’ll rarely find a hútòng in any populous city in China. During the past quarter century — yes, it’s been that long, most hútòngs have been razed and replaced by towering modern apartment blocks. Hundreds of thousands of hútòngs gone. During that time, China’s economy has advanced 600%; 850 million of China’s  1.4 billion people were lifted above the poverty line,  and by 2030 (only four years) it is predicted by Western analysts that 27% of Chinese adults with have college educations — that same percentage as Germans. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy has grown 310% since 2000, the number Americans living under the poverty line has increase from 12.2% to 15.9%, and literacy has dropped to 79% to 80% — meaning that one out of every five Americans struggles to read, 21% are functionally illiterate, and half of the population reads at no better than a sixth-grade level (an 11 to 12-year old level). These declines have demonstratively shifted American politics. In the nearly four decades 1988, only two Republicans have won the White House: George W. Bush and Donald Trump. Thoughtful, probative, and politically experienced Republican nominees as Robert Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney lost elections. Starting in 2008 to compensate, the Republican party largely stopped campaigning about policies that compete with those of Democrat candidates and began competing about what it calls ‘cultural’ ‘ issues: the Starbucks coffee chain no longer printing ‘Merry Christmas’ on its cups, Barack Obama wearing a brown suit, there being ‘transgendered’ athletes (perhaps hundreds of them within a nation of more than 300 million people!) competing in scholastic athletic games, about immigrants allegedly eating natives’ pets, wind turbines allegedly causing cancer, scientifically-proven human-caused climate change being a ‘hoax’, alleged Jewish ‘space lasers’ causing forest fires, about the 66% of Americans who are Christians allegedly being discriminated against by the majority of Americans, and other dingbat conspiracy theories and what I call ‘conservative twinkie’ issues that rile the gullible and illiterate among Americans into voting for whomever deceitfully utters such lies. Hence, a minority of American voters (i.e., slightly under […]