Mongolian Sandstorms

The Mongolian sandstorms have reached southern Taiwan today. Strangely enough, there are no stories of this in English posted on the Taiwanese newspapers on line. Air quality in Taipei was supposed to be really bad today, and down south, the sky was yellow -- it looked like tornado weather in Minneapolis and Leo and I have had a phlegmy cough for weeks. Spring sandstorms are presumably rather common affairs now in Taiwan and rumor has it that the desertification and deforestation of Mainland China has produced spring sandstorms that travel from the Mainland to Korea, Japan and drift down Taiwan.

It gives us a taste of the environmental damage caused by China's rapid industrialization and economic growth. But who can deny that prosperity is better than poverty? And wasn't some cultural studies guy who suggested that enviornmentalism was a conspiracy of developed nations against developing nations? As we read Adorno's and Horkheimer's critique of Odysseus today, my students all admired Odysseus as a survivor and asked why I thought A&H were perhaps a little bit critlcal of the Attic hero's impeccable survival instincts...then, one of them said, "We've watched too many Hollywood films." And it's true, they do watch a lot of them.