Policies were poor, execution dreadful and leadership misdirected, but each initiative seemed to create a centripetal force, as everyone looked toward Beijing to see how to march forward (or avoid being trampled).
The place seemed quite out of step with visiting presidents, as it was typically simple with metal tables and stools arranged around well-trampled lino in a cube of white tiles.
The album seems constructed of metal and velvet, trampled flowers and blood.
Human rights are traduced, betrayed, humiliated and trampled on by a cabal of unilateralists who seem determined to drag us into a world already beleaguered by too much agony, economic upheaval, famine, bird flu and gruesome death scenes.
So it's appropriate that Robert De Niro's Locanda Verde, which replaced the critic-trampled, short-lived Ago, in the Greenwich Hotel, seems at first glance rather high-end faux, or, as one diner put it, "like a restaurant in Denver called Tribeca".
The riff that powers In My Time Of Dying is authentically churning and queasy, Ramble On sounds not like a song that's been brought out of mothballs for a benefit concert but wrigglingly, obscenely alive; Trampled Underfoot's conjunction of jittering funk and squealing, metallic guitar seems more bizarre and beguiling than ever.
Some groups of organisms just never seem to get much attention from scientists or the general public: those quiet, subtle things always being trampled underfoot by the mega-fauna soaking up all the glory.
But, mostly, what one feels is an almost unbearable poignancy – particularly hearing Waits's recurrent plaintive wail in "Trampled Rose", or that familiar clarinet descant cutting across the slow calliope waltz of "Live Circus", which seems to derive from some great reservoir of loss at the heart of the American Dream.
"It was a dilemma how to show Nazi symbols without seeming to promote them," Ms. Gawron said, "but in this case, though some people are shocked, it clearly works — the swastikas are there, but they are being trampled underfoot".
