Let the great gods, / That keep this dreadful pother o’er our heads, / Find out their enemies now.

On my last trip before completing this book, I visited Zizhou county, about 200 miles north of Yan’an, where peasants had tried to engage a lawyer to defend themselves in the courts against the oppressive and brutal control of local Party officials. Not much had changed here in the seventy years since Mao’s Long March and his ‘liberation’ of the peasants from their ‘cruel landlords’. Now, the peasants were afraid not of landlords but of the Party officials who prey on them just as the landlords once did.

Tom Robbins, whose cosmic-absurdist, stoner-philosophical novels have moved undergraduates to scrawl So true!!! in the margins for decades, has again deputized himself to carry the freak flag of irreverence and fleshly indulgence.

Allow additional burns enables you to create a multisession CD, which can be used again to write more data.