The Republic of Wine

must not let this simplest of issues have us running around in circles. At noon today I am going to open the first annual Ape Liquor Festival for benefactors, including Chinese-Americans and our brethren from Hong Kong and Macao. They deserve the best.
    From where I was standing at the rear of the hall, I saw the deltoid muscles below the neck of my mother-in-law’s husband grow taut and turn red when Diamond Jin mentioned the words Ape Liquor. The old fellow had been salivating for most of his adult life over thoughts of the supremely wondrous liquor of this legend. For the two million inhabitants of Liquorland, turning the legend of Ape Liquor into a container of liquid fact would be a dream come true; a task force had been formed, with extraordinary funding from the municipal coffers. The old fellow had headed up the task force, so whose deltoids would tense up, if not his? I couldn’t see his face. But I believe I know what it looked like at that moment.
    Dear students, let the following sacred image take form before our eyes: A school of ecstatic sperm, lithe tails flapping behind them, like an army of bold warriors storming a fortress. Oh, they may be wildly ecstatic, but their movements are sprightly yet gentle. The Fascist ringleader Hitler wanted the youth of Germany to be quick and nimble as ferocious hunting dogs, tough and pliable as leather, and hard and unyielding as Krupp steel. Now even though Hitler’s idealized German youth may be somewhat analogous to the school of sperm wriggling before our eyes - one of which is my very own nucleus - no metaphor, no matter how apt, is worthy of being repeated, especially when the creator of that metaphor was among the most evil men who ever walked the face of the earth. Better that we use domestic clichés than the best the foreigners have to offer. It’s a matter of principle, nothing to take for granted. Comrade leaders at all levels, take heed, do not be slapdash in this regard, not ever. In medical books sperm cells are described as tadpoles, so let’s set those tadpoles a-swimming. A cloud of tadpoles, one carrying my origins with them, swims upstream in my mother’s warm currents. It is a race. The winner’s trophy is a juicy, tender white grape. Sometimes, of course, there is a dead heat between two of the competitors. In cases like this, if there are two white grapes, each competitor is awarded one; but if there is only one white grape, then they must share the sweet nectar. But what if three, or four, or even more competitors arrive at the finish line at the same time? This is a unique case, a particularly rare occurrence, and scientific principles are abstracted from general conditions, not unique cases, which require special debate. At any rate, in this particular race I reached the finish line ahead of all the others, and was swallowed up by the white grape, becoming part of it and letting it become part of me. That’s right, the most vivid metaphor imaginable is still inferior - Lenin said that. Without metaphor there can be no literature - that’s Tolstoy. We frequently use liquor as a metaphor for a beautiful woman, and people often use a beautiful woman as a metaphor for liquor; by so doing, we show that liquor and a beautiful woman share common properties, but are individuated by distinctive properties within those common properties, and that the common properties within the distinctive properties are what deindividuate a beautiful woman and liquor. Seldom does one gain true understanding of the tenderness of a beautiful woman by drinking liquor - that is as rare as phoenix feathers and unicorn horns. By the same token, it is difficult for one to gain a true understanding of the qualities of liquor via the tenderness of a beautiful woman - that is as rare as unicorn horns and phoenix feathers.
    His oration that day had us dumbstruck, we shallow college students and slightly less shallow graduate students. He had consumed more liquor than we had drunk water. Genuine knowledge comes from practice, my dear students. A marksman feeds on bullets; a drinking star is steeped in alcohol There are no shortcuts on the road to success, and only those fearless people who have the courage to keep climbing on a rugged mountain path have any hope of reaching the glorious summit!
    Truth’s glory shone down upon us, and we responded with thunderous applause.
    Students, I had a miserable childhood. Great people struggle their way out of the seas of