Who Needs Transformers?

I enjoy going to a podunque little Chinese buffet around these parts. At least some of the amusement comes from the misspelled sign over the Mongolian Beef, which reads "Mongonian Beef". This always makes me chuckle as I think about Outer Mongonia and Ulman Batoor and what Genghiz Khan would think of all this Mongonian business.

But there's more. There is the ubiquitous tray of "General Tso's Chicken". There really was a General Tso, who served as a general and statesman in China in the last half of the 19th Century, and was responsible for putting down a great many revolts and uprisings. Depending on who you listen to, General Tso was responsible for over 100,000 "enemy" dead, most of them apparently during the Taiping Rebellion.

So this is why you need a good PR firm on your side. You spend the bulk of your life putting down rebellions, only to turn into a chicken dish at the end of your life. Is that a fitting reward for a senior military commander?

But worse things have happened to others. Paun von Hindenburg, for example, served as a field marshal in the German Army in WWI and went on to be President of Germany (where he contemptuously referred to Adolf Hitler as "the Bohemian Corporal") before he was suddenly transformed into a Zeppelin ("But still a gasbag," one imagines his critics remarking). Imagine his dismay when he burst into flames over New Jersey. "Pfui! I should have remained a field marshal!"

Or Charles de Gaulle, who for years was the symbol of French nationalism, French pride, and French hubris before suddenly becoming an airport known mostly for diesel fumes and congestion.

I plan on becoming a variety of meat loaf sandwich in my declining years.