Suspenders on China

As Satiricus pointed out, he’s a budget junkie. After listening to the presentation on TV (all right, all right, so he took a few winks in between), he always lapped up the commentaries for the next few weeks. Then of course, would come the main event: the chops to the budget by the opposition.
Satiricus always enjoyed the Suspenders’ take on the budget. After all, he was a bookkeeper for all those donkey years. If he didn’t know about numbers, who would? Lately, however, Satiricus had been having some problems with Suspenders’ reports. Seems that since Suspenders became a lawyer two years ago (was it that long??), he spent less time on the numbers and more on long-winded opinions.
So as he perused the Suspenders’ take on the 2013 budget, he wondered who’d want to know what the bookkeeper thought about Chávez and UG? Satiricus figured he’d listen to the guy if he confirmed that 2+2=4. But as to why Sean Penn went to Chávez’s funeral, he’d stick to CNN. But what took the cake was the lengthy feature of “China and Guyana”.
Satiricus was happy to find out that Henry Kissinger quoted Lucian Pye, ‘the American Political scientist’, that China ‘was a civilisation pretending to be a nation state’. Satiricus admitted that he wasn’t the brightest bulb around, but even he had to ask as to whether Pye had ever asked China whether it was a nation state or a civilisation. Pye had left China as a child: What did he know?
But what did this have to do with Guyana and its budget? Satiricus wondered. But finally, he figured it out. Suspenders was desperately trying to prove that he was not a bookkeeper any more. He was now a lawyer. Just out of law school, but a lawyer. Just some cases he’d volunteered his services (such as they were) for free. But he was a lawyer. He might have been the oldest codger in law school: but he was now a lawyer.
Satiricus could just picture him, with his thumbs stuck behind his suspenders and chest puffed out as he walked across his office and dictating to his poor bookkeepers-in-training about Zhou Enlai’s bon mot on the French Revolution. He would have interpreted the fella’s wide-eyed look as one of admiration for his ‘vast erudition’. In reality, the poor stiff was probably panic-stricken that he’d never become a bookkeeper with this kind of training. He’d probably have to go to law school to gain some status when he became an old man.
But Satiricus sadly detected a note of racism in Suspenders’ essay on the Chinese in Guyana. The neophyte lawyer (Satiricus was prepared to give Suspenders nuff respect) declared that Guyana’s population increase of 1.5 per cent was due to an influx of Chinese. Surely, if Satiricus, who was so much less a bright bulb than Suspenders, had seen and heard about the invasion of Brazilian miners, the newly-minted member of the bar would also have done so?
Satiricus was left scratching his head.