Editorial: Take that, ‘Great’ Wall!

Photo by Tom Worger

The Mongols

Wow, that wall of yours sure is amazing. I do have to say that I’ve never quite seen a wall like that. Although I have to admit it doesn’t look quite as impressive on this side. You know I almost broke a sweat climbing over that? I was afraid we were going to need a bigger ladder or something, but the foot stool turned out to work just fine.

You know, our people have stared at this wall in amazement for generations? Oh yeah, it touched us real deep that you would send so many people to die in order to build your impenetrable defense. And I mean a lot of people! To think that you spent over a millennium building more and more onto the wall, sacrificing millions of your countrymen in order to finish it; I almost feel bad about how easy it was to cross. You guys spent so much in order to keep us out, but now it seems all we needed was some rope and a free afternoon. I mean, we were thinking of tearing it down to make way, but we could probably all cross today without having to move a stone. Why didn’t we think of doing this before?

But in all honesty it is a pretty nice wall. I wouldn’t exactly call it great, but nice. Hey, I’m just saying that I won’t mind it when it’s decorating our border. That is now that we’re taking over. Oh, you didn’t know? Yeah, we’re taking over down here. We were all just sitting around the yurt the other day when Genghis came in and asked if we wanted to invade China. We weren’t doing anything else, so we said okay. I never thought that it would be this easy. Why don’t you guys just give up now? I mean, if this wall is any representation of your defensive capabilities then we can leave our swords at home and take over this place in a week using wet bags full of cats.

Well, in any case, it was a nice wall. We hope you don’t take this too badly. I mean you did your best, but maybe you should have tried putting, like, an army or something in our way rather than a little fence. See you in Peking.