One of my two particularly brilliant insights yesterday — the other being the invention of “.nut”, a proposed Top Level Domain reserved for crackpot websites — came to me after eating a reaonably good plate of Kung Pao chicken for lunch. Out came the fortune cookies, invented, doncha know, not half a mile from where I sit here in my office. Mine read something like “If your desires are not extravagant, they will be granted.”
Very Chinese. And yet for a moment I read it as one of those wonderful old Paris Enrages slogans, thinking it read something like “If your desires are not granted, they were not extravagant enough.”
And then I think “This really would be a better world if fortune cookies were written by Cohn-Bendit’s old Nanterre cronies from May 1968. They would be inspiring and fill one’s heart. ‘Be Realistic: demand the impossible!’ ‘The more I join in the revolution, the more I want to make love.’ Like that.”
And then I think “and that’s really what that whole glorious time came to, isn’t it: memories of slogans that could be reduced to cookie fortunes and foisted on incurious tourists.”
Sigh. I think I need to go for another walk.
