Dates of show: Nov. 7 and 9, 2008
On the American Presidential election.

Hands up if you can remember the year in which Hu Jintao was elected. Don’t worry, there are more than a billion Chinese whose hands aren’t up either, because Hu Jintao wasn’t elected, or anyway he wasn’t elected by them. He just emerged, by a mysterious process taking place somewhere within the only Chinese political party that counts. Nevertheless the fiction of elections is maintained, even when the reality doesn’t exist. It’s a kind of lip service, a tribute that unlimited power pays to justice, just as hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.