The best non-answer ever

It's the 1970s, and Henry Kissinger is talking with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai. Kissinger asks, "What do you think of the French Revolution?"

An awkward question for a leader in a repressive autocracy, no? How to respond? "Well, Hank, I want to spend more time with my family"? No! The nimble Zhou said:

It's too soon to tell.

Imagine your boss asking you what you thought about X, and your response simply being, "It's too soon to tell." You'd be sent out on your ear (or ought to be). Maybe there is something specific you are waiting to find out, or you think it doesn't matter, but you've got to know something. "It's too soon to tell" is nothing. (And if you really can't tell anything about a social event after almost 200 years - three healthy human lifetimes - your analysis is likely meaningless anyway.) Or more accurately, it can *always* be too soon to tell. Zhou could have said, "This too, shall pass," but then the listeners would have yawned. We've heard that before.

But Zhou's gem was novel, and somehow, people seemed to, and keep seeming to, buy it. Not, "Umm, he didn't really say anything," but, "Wow, the Chinese, they really take the long view. They have such a subtle understanding of the consequenses of actions." The story's even become a sort of fable* to be trotted out whenever someone wants to demonstrate their own profound, long-term perspective. (The meanest-looking Muppet on Earth told this tale Wednesday in an FT editorial on Rove's legacy, which is what set off this current post.)

* I think I've heard it said that the exchange didn't really go down as commonly recounted. So much the better. It's such a brilliant non-answer that people are willing to deceive themselves to make it happen.

P.S. I think this may become a canonical rant.