BEIJING – It was a spectacle like no other.
Amid grandstands full of flag-waving, nondissenting comrade citizens and a parade featuring thousands of lion dancers, gaudy fireworks and the latest high-tech military hardware designed to kill millions of people worldwide without their ever knowing what hit them, China on Tuesday celebrated the anniversary of its founding at a swollen, malaria-infested muddy riverbank in what is now Hangzhou province some 5,888 years ago by simple tribesfolk whose descendants would later flee for their lives to Taiwan, Hong Kong and San Francisco.
“China,” President Xi Jinping said from the grandstand dais during a speech marking the occasion, “look how far you’ve come, baby!”
As a parade float designed like the Imperial Palace Museum and emblazoned with dual Alibaba-Starbucks branding slowly drifted by, Xi, outfitted in a Mao-inspired Armani black one-piece and rocking a fresh Gangnam ’87 pompadour, smiled beatifically and waved nonchalantly to the attendant masses.
Following in quick succession were a float featuring the newly minted Asian Marvel character Iron Minge chain-smoking Long Life cigarettes; a Geely Auto X7 Sport pimped out to look like a ’57 Cadillac Cup DeVille; “running” human automatons in some kind of freaky gyroscope signifying China’s inevitable takeover of the known universe; a Disneyesque hellscape float of dead pandas, stylized grotesqueries of endangered species’ innards and a litter of “Hello Catties”; scores of Han Chinese dressed in traditional ethnic costumes and styrofoam cowboy hats; and, finally, one carrying dozens of African country representatives surprisingly not painted in blackface but allowed to display their own features.
Xi stressed in his speech that all of the Chinese people around the world lived together as one, except for the pimp gangsters of Taiwan who would someday pay in blood and most likely get the excreta squeezed out of them one tiny rivulet at a time for the illegal touting of their fraudulent and far-fetched democracy.
He also mentioned Hong Kong: “To our brothers and sisters in the Fragrant Harbour who were sold on down the road hundreds of years ago by a now long-dead feudal, opium-addicted dynasty, I can now say to you that a modern, loving, fair and just society awaits to reabsorb you back into its bosom! And when you return to the moist, comradely embrace of China, your jobs at the Harmonious People’s Rock Mine will still be waiting for you! It will be like you never left!”
Xi concluded his speech by inviting all the world’s people to visit China, but added that they should please remember to bring toilet paper, penicillin and a second passport from a third-world country just in case.