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He also resorts to vivid metaphors in urging that counterrevolutionaries not be executed. "A head isn't like a leek," he said. "It doesn't grow again once it's been cut." Mao's most recurrent metaphors refer to the digestive process, which evidently fascinates him. In his Lushan speech, in which he characteristically called on his colleagues to join him in discharging their feelings of guilt for the failures of the Great Leap, he concluded with this scatological flourish: "Comrades, your stomachs will feel much more comfortable if you move your bowels and break wind."
Although the replies of Mao's comrades are not generally included in these papers, there is evidence that this style of polemic has been characteristic of secret meetings. When Mao seemed taken aback by the criticism leveled at him during the stormy Lushan conference, Peng Teh-huai, who had long received more than a fair share of abuse from the Chairman, lashed back at him. "You f—ed my mother for 40 days," Peng told Mao, "so why can't I f— yours for 20?" Recalling the incident later, Mao wryly observed: "Even 20 days wasn't enough, and so we had to abandon our work at the meeting." The Chairman, of course, had the last word. After the conference, he sacked Peng as Defense Minister and Politburo member.
Under heavy attack at Lushan for the shortcomings of the Great Leap, Mao acknowledged that he had taken sleeping pills three times for tension. He was ready to shoulder the blame for his catastrophic scheme of building backyard steel foundries. Citing Confucius' Analects to the effect that the man who initiates something evil will be severely punished by God, Mao revealed that he had been struck down by the very punishment prescribed by the sage—the loss of his sons. He disclosed that one of his two sons had died in battle (presumably in Korea) and the other had gone insane. Then, in a cry approaching agony, he asked his audience: "Because of my guilt, should I be deprived of my posterity?"
Though Mao is well educated, he retains a country boy's contempt for intellectuals, for learning and for city ways. "The more one reads, the more foolish one becomes" is one of his favorite adages. "Being an unpolished man," he says, not without pride, "I am not too cultivated." Doctors are a frequent butt: "Medical education needs reforming. There is altogether no need to read so many books. How long did it take Hua T'o [the father of Chinese medicine] to learn what he knew?" Mao, who has succeeded in destroying the Chinese educational system in order to radicalize it, has this to say: "Schools are small tombs with great evil emanations and shallow ponds with many snapping turtles."