betelnutblogger

SnagFilms Film Widget

2009-02-23T03:12:00.001+08:00

Dylan Does LBJ

2007-10-29T12:47:00.000+08:00

It's been a wild week, what with paperwork and Halloween and all. I got up to Taipei Saturday and went to 101 to buy shirts (I threw out several almost new Brooks Brothers shirts last week, when I placed the laundry bag in the garbage bag spot. Yes.) But we didn't go up to the top this time, so no photos. I did get a couple of hours in reading the third volume of Caro's LBJ bio. I am now on page 387 of a 1,000 page volume. Amazing stuff, but still... And I got word that Caro's bio of Robert Moses just arrived in the mail. Yahoo! There will be more LBJ blogging, but for the moment, this picture of somebody doing Dylan doing LBJ will have to do. Hat Tip: Getty Images.

Cloud FormationOn Mountain

2007-10-29T12:43:00.000+08:00

Imagine being there to see a sight like this. Imagine having a camera, and the skill to take this photo.

Levitt To Fail?

2007-10-21T23:23:00.000+08:00

Stunning news today from the housing industry. (Yes, we are eclectic – we know very little about very many things). Levitt and Sons has ceased all construction and is on the verge of bankruptcy. From the South Florida Sun-Sentinal:

Levitt and Sons, the cash-strapped Fort Lauderdale company trying to survive the housing slump, said Thursday it has temporarily stopped building houses as it tries to restructure its debt.  The builder's parent, Levitt Corp., said last Friday the subsidiary faces an uncertain future if it can't work out a deal with lenders. Builders in Florida and across the nation are struggling as the once-vibrant housing market keeps deteriorating. Last month, Levitt Corp. said it was laying off as many as 200 of its 573 employees because of the housing downturn. Most of the cuts were planned at Levitt and Sons.   The builder did not pay $2.6 million of interest payments due last week to its five primary lenders. Levitt Corp. said it has loaned $84 million to Levitt and Sons through Sept. 30 but is unwilling to loan more money unless the builder can negotiate better financial terms with the lenders.   Levitt Corp. said it doesn't expect to recover the money it loaned to the builder. The builder began to lose momentum starting in the 1970s, said Wayne Archer, director of the Bergstrom Center for Real Estate Studies at the University of Florida.  " In the last two or three years, they've been trying to come back to being one of the major players [in the industry]," Archer said. "But it's not a good time to be a big builder."

I grew up in a Levitt development, in Bowie, MD, and spent much of my youth lamenting it. As I wrote in the late Washington Star in 1978 (whoah – another story there):

“These houses were not built by house builders any more than the assembly-line worker who puts on hubcaps is a car builder. The danger is apparent. As John Steinbeck said, “When our food and housing and clothing are all born in a complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking.”

Very prescient, John. The danger was, indeed, apparent, but they didn’t listen. Now Levitt is gasping on the tarmac. But the late David Halberstam had a more sympathetic take on the company in his book “The Fifties”:

William Levitt was indeed applying the principles of mass production that had worked so well in the auto industry to housing. There was a desperate pent-up demand for housing in the wake of the war: “In 1944 there had been only 114,000 new single houses started; by 1946 that figure had jumped to 937,000: to 1,118,000 in 1948; and 1.7 million in 1950.” Levitt, virulently anti-union, got rid of skilled craftsmen, replacing them with relatively well-paid workers responsible for doing one very limited job again and again. The most complex part of building a house was putting in the basement, so he dispensed with basements, replacing them with concrete slabs. The slabs required a flat surface, so the terrain was flattened first by bulldozers. Union carpenters carrying their lunches in bulky lunch boxes was deemed an inefficiency, so workers were fed a pre-prepared “Levittmash”© from long troughs. The construction trucks would come in and drop off the building materials at intervals of exactly 60 feet. Twenty-eight separate teams of perfectly choreographed workers would then assemble the house, on an assembly line in which the workers, not the product, moved.

“There were floor men and side men and tile men and men who did the white painting and men who did the red painting. By July 1948 they were building 180 houses a week or, in effect, thirty-six houses a day.” This in an industry in which, prior to the war, companies who built five a year were considered quite productive. To ensure there would be no disruption, Levitt made their own nails, cement and lumber. One pool was built for every 1,000 houses. Schools and churches were inserted at similarly regular intervals. And Levitt workers, non-union status notwithstanding, were well-paid. As Alfred Levitt said: “The same man does the same thing every day. It is boring; it is bad; but the reward of the green stuff seems to alleviate the boredom of the work.”

(By the way, there is one teenie-bitsy fabrication in the above. Just checking to see if you were paying attention. The rest is all accurate paraphrasing and quotation. – ed.)

I have an early memory of watching out my window as a huge, tractor-like device thundered through the fenceless back yards. The lawns had no grass, but had been seeded, and this monster was shooting hay out of a funnel onto the lawns, presumably to keep the seed from blowing away. Apparently, in the original Levittown, if people didn’t mow their lawn, the company would come and mow it for them, then send them the bill. One of the paradoxes in reading about this quintessentially capitalist enterprise is how often you encounter these quasi-socialistic, nanny-state characteristics. This firm but fair paternalism defined the company’s way of relating to its customers. (But not always fair. The company had an abysmal record on discrimination against blacks. My hometown was the site of rather prominent civil rights protests in 1963, which would have been just before we arrived. Levitt was defying the Kennedy administration’s new civil rights housing law).

I hadn’t known they were still around. I’d just read an article in the Times about the sixtieth anniversary of the first Levitt development. The company, and its development, personified a callow anti-historical kind of contemporariness that I just loathed. Nothing about the place grew or evolved organically from its surroundings. It was a place without plangency. The bones of nobody’s ancestors were buried there. But their passing, after sixty years, would be sad; would be an important bit of meaning and post-war history lost to the wind.

Hat Tip: Peter Bacon Hales; University of Illinois at Chicago.

Edge of Hurricane

2007-10-20T17:08:00.000+08:00

I had a high school buddy who ended up going to the Merchant Marine Academy. Led his class freshman year in demerits. Last I heard, he was captain of the football team. I think of him when I see a picture like this - to be out there with a very small crew on a very big ocean, in charge of this enormous, but dwarfed vessel. To see something like this coming, and to feel you'd been properly trained to handle it and your boat was up to it - that would be pretty cool.

@!%!**#~@#!!

2007-10-13T21:00:00.001+08:00

This has absolutely nothing to do with my inability to post three incredibly concise and insightful posts in consecutive order, but I was recently looking for one of those cartoon curse strings, and I decided to google it, naturally. And that's when I realized - what are these things called, anyway? Now, I know there are clever columns dedicated to arcane questions like this in highbrow magazines, but that's just not me.

I've decided to name these things plotives. No, the name is not already taken. The plotive that denotes a sound like "p" or "t" with a brief, violent blast of air escaping through the lips is long vowel plotive, and you can tell everybody that John's neologism has a short o. Plot. ive. The plotive above, by the way, is from Beetle Bailey, which I'm quite sure is the New Times Roman of plotives.

Brazilian Robert Johnson

2007-10-13T08:33:00.000+08:00

I think I just came upon this while following links at Utube. A Brazilian tribute to Robert Johnson. Great Johnsonesque guitar backing, and I presume the Portuguese is a narration of the crossroads myth, though I'd love to know what he's saying. And the footage? Who knows? An intriguing melange, though. I take this out every couple of weeks or so, and it's always compelling.

Al Gore Wins the Nobel!

2007-10-13T06:43:00.000+08:00

I've always been sceptical of the idea that Scandinavian intellectuals have some kind of morally centered vision that the rest of us lack. (Jimmy Carter? Ack!) But, then, the rest of the world has no input into the election of American leaders who arguably shape their world more than their own leaders, so I guess they're entitled to their two cents.

What makes Gore such a powerful force in Democratic politics is that he is also emblematic of an entire set of arguments. For many, his rise is a natural rebuke of the current president, but it's also become a rebuke of the perverted political process in which style is rewarded over substance. This is an argument that Gore expands on and applies to policy in his recent book The Assault on Reason.
- John Dickerson in Slate

I choked up during An Inconvenient Truth. Not at the part where Greenland melts - oy!, I don't know anyone who lives in Greenland! - but during the recounting (indeed!) of the denouement of the 2000 election. It snuck up on me, it did, but before I knew it, there I was with a big bathos thermal wafting up into my head.

Normally, I'm pretty impatient with the old "I'm a bad campaigner, but I'd make a great president" line. Yeah, me too. And my friend Dexter here, he has the same problem. But Al Gore would make a great president. It's only to his credit that he loathes the idea of getting back into phony campaign world. I forget who it was, but some old Washington Lion was being interviewed recently and he was talking about how twisted virtually all of the presidents he'd known were. He cited Gerald Ford, the only one not elected, as the one truly normal, decent human being among the bunch.

I admire Hillary, but the dynastic issue is real, and troubling. I'm an Obama supporter, but, honestly, I think only a Gore inauguration would make me feel we were really getting a fresh start with someone experienced at the helm.

FUBAR

2007-10-08T04:17:00.000+08:00

Well, that didn't come out the way I'd elaborately planned it. Please read the following in I, II, III order while I go kill myself.

Bush and Realignment III

2007-10-08T00:09:00.001+08:00

Over the past six years, the Bush administration has operated on the assumption that if you change the political institutions in Iraq, the society will follow. But the Burkean conservative believes that society is an organism; that custom, tradition and habit are the prime movers of that organism; and that successful government institutions grow gradually from each nation’s unique network of moral and social restraints.” - David Brooks

Green, in The Atlantic, again capturing the essence of the Bush/ Cheney/ Rove project:

“The Middle East failure is all too well known - the vaulting ambition coupled with the utter inability of top administration figures to bring about their grand idea. What is less appreciated is how Rove set out to do something every bit as audacious with domestic policy. Earlier political alignments resulted from historical accidents or anomalies, conditions that were recognized and exploited after the fact by talented politicians . Nobody ever planned one. Rove didn’t wait for history to happen to him – he tried to create it on his own. ‘It’s hard to think of any analogue in American history’, says David Mayhew, a Yale political scientist who has written a book on historical alignments, ‘to what Karl Rove was trying to do.’”

I think it’s important not to fall into the trap of historical anthropomorphism – that is, trying to make moralizing generalizations about the agents of historical epochal changes (hence, the perennial kindergarten question at movie time –“Is he good or bad?”). We (most of us) stand in awe of, and admire, a Lincoln or a Roosevelt. And we never tire of hearing their stories retold, because they’re edifying – the good guys are on the side of historical change. The modern world was forged in the confrontation between the puritans and the older, Saxon communities of the marches. Okay: Cromwell - good or bad? What about when the agents of change are out and out sons of bitches?: Mark Hanna, or the extinguishers of the North American Indians? We avoid these stories as instinctively as we avoid atonal music. But, still, I’m determinist enough to concede that, yes, resistance to these was, indeed, futile.

These changes were driven by technological changes and the tectonic shifts that attend them. The story of the crushing of the Progressives is poignant and disheartening, but I laugh along with everyone else when a Jacques Chirac says that the future of Europe lies in agriculture. Fact is, historical change is values neutral, and the agents of change don’t fit into any neat moral boxes. Karl Rove set out to be one of the bastards who allow themselves to operate outside conventional moral rules, but whose crimes are mitigated by the zeitgeist exemption – "The Spirit Was With Them". Most people don’t make that decision, because they have a sober realization of the limits of their own vision. Bush has made much of his Christianity, and the Manichean rhetoric of good and evil; but the policy choices, as well as the biographies of Bush/Cheney/Rove identify them as Machiavellians rather than Christian moralists. We’re not talking Woodrow Wilson or Jimmy Carter here. Bush and Rove made a Machiavellian gamble, and the only way to redeem oneself in such a context is to be right; to be effective; to succeed. These guys didn’t even come close.

This from Robert Kaplan’s essay on Machiavelli:

Machiavelli believed that because Christianity glorified the meek, it allowed the world to be dominated by the wicked: he preferred a pagan ethic that elevated self-preservation over the Christian ethic of sacrifice, which he considered to be hypocritical… In an imperfect world, Machiavelli says, good men bent on doing good must know how to be bad. And because we all share the social world, he adds, virtue has little to do with individual perfection and everything to do with political result. Thus, for Machiavelli, a policy is defined not by its excellence but by its outcome: if it isn’t effective it can’t be virtuous… Like Machiavelli, Churchill, Sun-Tzu and Thucydidies all believed in a morality of results rather than of good intentions. So did Raymond Aron…. Aron wrote, “A good policy is measured by its effectiveness,” – not its purity.

Bush and Relignment II

2007-10-08T00:07:00.000+08:00

“Before he ever came to the White House, Rove fervently believed that the country was on the verge of another great shift. His faith derived from his reading of the presidency of a man most historians regard as a mediocrity, Anyone on the campaign trail in 2000 probably heard him cite the pivotal importance of McKinley’s election in 1896. Rove thought there were important similarities.
‘Everything you know about William McKinley and Mark Hanna’ – McKinley’s Rove – “is wrong, he told Nicholas Lehmann of the New York Times in early 2000. “The country was in a period of change. McKinley’s the guy who figured it out. Politics were changing. The economy was changing. We’re at the same point now: weak allegiances to parties, a rising new economy.’” – Green, The Atlantic.

Caro writes eloquently about the wave of Populism that briefly broke in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, and the hope it elicited:

“But the hope was vain; the cause was as lost as the one for which many of the Populists had fought thirty years before – Bryan’s campaign was gallant but underfinanced, and the Republican Party, run by Mark Hanna, who shook down railroad corporations, insurance companies and big-city banks for campaign contributions on a scale never before seen, won what one historian calls ‘a triumph for big business, for a manufacturing and industrial rather than an agrarian order, for the Hamiltonian rather than the Jeffersonian state.’… perceptive historians find great significance in the campaign of 1896 –‘the last protest of the old agrarian order against industrialism.’”

This from a July 1999 Washington Post story by David Von Drehle:

"The swami of McKinley Mania is Bush strategist Karl Rove, who got hooked two years ago during a class at the University of Texas. A tenacious student of political history, Rove dug deeply into the story of a canny, soothing heartland governor whose party was riven by tactical and religious squabbles. Raising money on a scale previously unimagined, while scarcely leaving his front porch, McKinley remade the party in his own charming image -- inclusive, pragmatic, noncontroversial. Republiicans dominated Washington for the next thirty five years."

David Brooks expounds on how profoundly unconservative a vision this was:

“Over the past six years, the Republican Party has championed the spread of democracy in the Middle East. But the temperamental conservative is suspicious of rapid reform, believing that efforts to quickly transform anything will have, as Burke wrote “pleasing commencements” but “lamentable conclusions.”

Hang in there with me. this is all coming together.

Realignment and Bush I

2007-10-08T00:02:00.000+08:00

There are lots of smart people out there, with lots to say, and sometimes it’s just useful to link together quotes of various things I’ve been reading to limn a train of thoughts. So, I’ll just sit back on this one and let the pros talk, and maybe add a few thoughts at the end (of course):

“Mark Crispin Miller, the author of “The Bush Dyslexicon,” once made a striking observation: all of the famous Bush malapropisms — “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family,” and so on — have involved occasions when Mr. Bush was trying to sound caring and compassionate.
By contrast, Mr. Bush is articulate and even grammatical when he talks about punishing people; that’s when he’s speaking from the heart. The only animation Mr. Bush showed during the flooding of New Orleans was when he declared “zero tolerance of people breaking the law,” even those breaking into abandoned stores in search of the food and water they weren’t getting from his administration.” Krugman’s most recent.

From Wikipedia:

"A wealthy industrialist, Hanna [...] believed that government existed primarily to help business. He once told the Ohio attorney general, who sued to dissolve Standard Oil, to drop the suit. 'Come on,' Hanna pronounced, 'you've been in politics long enough to know that no man in public life owes the public anything." Linking Rings: William W. Durbin and the Magic and Mystery of America, James D. Robenalt, Kent State University Press, Ohio, pp. 11-12

Fifty years ago, political scientists developed what is known as realignment theory – the idea that a handful of elections in the nation’s history mattered more than the others because they created “sharp and durable changes in the polity that lasted for decades….” – Joshua Green, The Atlantic, September 2007

Green goes on to sight the elections in: 1800 (Jefferson); 1828 (Jackson); 1860 (Lincoln); 1896 (McKinley); and 1932 (Roosevelt) as consensus choices by historians.

Typhoon morning

2007-10-07T06:39:00.001+08:00

You know that Curious George where George tries to clean up the ink puddle by opening up the garden hose on it and floods the whole room and the furniture is like islands in it? Oh, come on, of course you do - "Curious George Gets A Medal." Well, that's what my classroom looks like today. Fortunately, most of the books were on the shelf this time, though the phonics classic "The Mouse House", alas, will not be found around this hound pound any more.

It's a pretty good blow. I'm on the eleventh floor, and we've been rockin' and rollin' all night.

Amusing Signs

2007-10-06T19:38:00.000+08:00

Woof! Woof! Bark! Grrr! Good Signs!

As so often, Hat Tip to Big Tom and his formidable network of correspondents!

Petey's Back!

2007-10-04T05:13:00.000+08:00

I got stoned by black children during the first weeks of my attendance at Archbishop Carroll High. Terrible, scarring racial incident. I was progressive enough at that time to have chosen to go to Carroll (60-40 black at the time) from a predominantly white suburb. There were things I was not entirely ready for: like wearing the bottom hem of your pants five inches above the ankles would get you stoned in the parking lot (In the biblical sense, or perhaps the intifada sense). In class I asked my black classmates, who hadn't been stoners, "What's a Bama?" "A Bouma? (chuckling, given me a skeptical up and down appraisal). "Hey, Beetle, you got a ink pin you can borrow me till tomorrow? I swear I 'll pay you back." "I will give you the ink pin if you will tell me what a Bama is." "A Bouma" (archly) is somone who cain't dress. Where de flud, bro? Get you some new pants, sno cone, and my cousins won't throw rocks at you." I did, and they did. But when Petey in this classic footage "How to Eat A Watermelon" refers to "Two stone cold Bamas", I think I know who he's talking about. You see, old, traditionalst, very conservative Catholic black Washingtonions felt inundated by much poorer, less bourgeois blacks who were flooding into Washington in the 60's from the Gulf States. Most whites were clueless about these kinds of tensions, but I had been watching Petey Green and listening to WOL under the tutelage of my friend Lonnie Barksdale and my pals at school. Marion Barry was (I guess, is) the king of the Bamas. You see what I mean. Anyway, now Don Cheadle's got a movie out where he's playing Petey. I've liked Cheadle in everything I've seen, and this one sounds good. Probably everybody in America's seen it already. Well, here's Petey at his best, expanding on the subject "How To Eat A Watermelon."

Old Skool Senate

2007-10-04T04:09:00.000+08:00

Caro has an amazingly concise, illuminating and entertaining history of the senate in the first section of "Master of the Senate". A primary suspect in the institution's less than stellar performance in the first decades ofthe 20th century was the seniority system:

Democrat Carter Glass had ascended to the Chairmanship of the Appropriations Committee in 1932, when he was seventy-four. During the 1940s, Glass was very ill - had been very ill for years, sequestered in a suite of the Mayflower Hotel that always had a guard at the door. He had not even appeared on Capital Hill since 1942. By 1945, there were even suggestions that perhaps Glass, then eighty-seven, should resign. But, as Drury reported, "from the guarded suite...through whose doors no outsider has passed in many months to see whhat lies within, has come the usual answer. Mrs. Glass has replied for the Senator. The suggestion will not be considered." In Glass' temporary absence, the seventy-seven-year-old McKellar presided over Appropriations. "In his day", Allen Drury wrote, "Old Mack from Tennessee had been the most powerful and the most ruthless man in the senate", but that day was drawing to a close. More and more frequently during the 1940s, after he had been presiding over a committee meeting for hours, he would pound the gavel to signal the session to begin. (McKellar was sensitive about his age. Once he was politely asked in a Senate corridor, "How are you today, Senator?" As Russell Baker relates, "In reply, the old man, interpreting the words as a reflection on his failing health, raised his cane, thwacked it angrily against the fellow's collarbone, and passed on without a word."

The indispensible Wikipedia adds the following connection:

In 1952 McKellar stood for a seventh term, despite being by then quite elderly (age 83). He was opposed for renomination by Middle Tennessee Congressman Albert Gore. McKellar's reelection slogan was "Thinking Feller? Vote McKellar.", which Gore countered with "Think Some More – Vote for Gore." Gore defeated McKellar for the Democratic nomination in August in what was widely regarded as something of an upset.

I haven't read the meat of the book yet, but I have a feeling this crotchety old men's club is about to get shakin' and stirred by a certain young dynamo that you really can't help but feel drawn to.

Nothins Too Good fer the Irish!

2007-10-02T03:16:00.000+08:00

From Anne Warner, Traditional American Folk Songs from the Anne &
Frank Warner Collection, #29, pp, 101-103. From the singing of
"Yankee" John Galusha of New York State. Collected 1940.

Nothing's Too Good For the Irish!

Nothing’s Too Good For the Irish
I'll tell to you a story that was told to me
A good old story, Gramachree.
When my mother she was dying, "My lad," says she,
"Nothin's too good for the Irish!"
When we come over, me and my brother Dan,
Says I, "We will do the best we can."
They made me a copper, and him an alderman
Nothin's too good for the Irish.

Chorus
Dutchmen were made for to carry coal and shovel snow,
Italians for organs, the Englishmen to mash,
Chinese for washing, the Japs for a juggling show,
Negroes to whitewash, the Jews were made for cash,
Cubans for cigarettes, the Portugese sail the seas,
Scotchmen for bakers, the French were made for style,
Rooshians for mining, Americans for liberty,
But men made for bosses are sons of Erin's isle!
Hip hip hurrah! Erin go bragh!
Nothin's too good for the Irish.

Dear Newfoundland have I got to leave you
To seek employment in a foreign land?
Forced from our nation by cruel taxation
I now must leave you dear Newfoundland.

Dear Newfoundland with your fisheries failing
Your sons and daughters must leave you each fall,
Forced by poverty and cruel taxation
To the shores of Boston, a home for all.

Book Report

2007-09-27T02:40:00.000+08:00

One lesson hammered home in amazing detail by Caro’s Johnson bio is the paramount power of money in politics. Duhhh. Yes, but there is a level of detail and documentation in these volumes that is authoritative, and would simply be impossible in any account of more recent events. We get the perspective provided by the passage of sixty years, but the events (and even many of the names) are eerily familiar to readers of the paper this morning.

Johnson’s career was bankrolled from his first run for Congress by Brown and Root, a small, unassuming contractor you might have heard of from the Houston area. In election after election, Johnson spent sums that were unprecedented for congressional and senatorial campaigns respectively.

The Marshall Ford Dam. In the late thirties, Brown and Root had already started the dam that they would build their fortunes on, but they had two problems: (1) the dam was not authorized by Congress, as mandated by law, and (2) the dam was actually prohibited by law, because the land on which it was built was not owned by the federal government. These problems had originally been surmountable because the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee was committed to using his position to overcome these obstacles. But in February 1937, “Buck” Buchanan died at a most inconvenient moment for Brown and Root. Johnson was financed by the company in his first congressional campaign, in Buchanan’s district, specifically for the purpose of resolving these problems. It was make or break time for Herman Brown.

Johnson won his seat, and Brown got his dam, which was to be the financial cornerstone of the company’s future success. Caro seems to stand in awe of the sums available to candidate Johnson:

“A rough rule of thumb, occasionally violated, among Texas politicians was that a respectable statewide campaign could be waged for between $75,000 and $100,000. Johnson was thinking of money on a completely different scale. He always had. His first campaign for Congress, in 1937, had been one of the most expensive campaigns – possibly the most expensive campaign – in the history of Texas. During his first senate campaign, in 1941, men handed him (or handed to his aides, for his use) checks or envelopes stuffed with cash – checks and cash in amounts unprecedented even in the free spending world of Texas politics – and with these contributions of hundreds of thousands of dollars, he had waged the most expensive senatorial campaign in Texas political history. Now, in his last chance, he planned to use money on a scale unprecedented even for him.

He had it to use. After Johnson’s 1941 Senate campaign, George Brown had delivered to Johnson Herman Brown’s pledge to finance a second Senate campaign as lavishly as he had financed a first. Since that time, the federal contracts Johnson had helped Brown and Root obtain had gotten bigger; profits had mounted from millions of dollars to tens of millions – and at the same time fierce Herman Brown had glimpsed the wealth that could come to his company through the efforts of a Senator, rather than a mere Representative. In 1947, the pledge was renewed; if Lyndon wanted to run, the money would be there – as much as was needed.”

It was these huge sums that allowed Johnson to employ a dang helicopter – of all things! – in the ’48 race. This was a huge advantage, not only in covering the vast Texas distances, but also for attracting crowds for the novelty of the ‘Flying Windmill’.

Blackwater

2007-09-25T04:09:00.000+08:00

Lots of new stuff breaking in that big Blackwater story. Hey, I don’t know nothin’, but: absolutely zero chance these guys actually get kicked out of Iraq. Blackwater is making quite a name for themselves among Iraqis as trigger – happy, State Department gangsters. I guess the questions that come to mind are: (1)Who (besides Bush) are their political patrons?; and (2) How is it (in detail) that they help Republicans get elected?

And remember the Blackwater guys who got strung from a bridge in ’94? According to the lawyers of their families, the company is counter-suing them:

Raleigh, NC -- The families of four American security contractors who were burned, beaten, dragged through the streets of Fallujah and their decapitated bodies hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River on March 31, 2004, are reaching out to the American public to help protect themselves against the very company their loved ones were serving when killed, Blackwater Security Consulting. After Blackwater lost a series of appeals all the away to the U.S. Supreme Court, Blackwater has now changed its tactics and is suing the dead men's estates for $10 million to silence the families and keep them out of court.

Okay, this is where I get the coveted Brass Pacifier – just like the one I was awarded for innocence and naivety in supporting the invasion of Iraq… Is this true? Is it possible that it could be true and I haven’t read about it in The Washington Post? Stop laughing! This is either weird left-wing kookiness, or it’s going to be a big story, right?

I knew the name of Cofer Black, the Blackwater vice chairman, rang a bell. Here he is quoted in Ron Suskind’s “The Thirty Percent Doctrine”, in a dialogue with another CIA veteran:

Mowatt-Larsen: “When you’re talking about torture, the question is, who sets the standard of evidence required for taking ‘expedient action’?”

Black: “What do you think the standard should be?”

Mowatt-Larsen: “Evidence is the key word. Because a lot of people are suspected of knowing things that they may not. If your assessments of who should know what are not sound, you could end up hurting a lot of people – and creating a lot of new enemies.”

Black: (nodded) “Fine. What about a case where a person may know about the staus of UBL and a bomb? And finding out what he knows could save a lot of lives. Then, what’s your standard, buddy?” (poking a finger at Mowatt-Larsen) “What do you do, then?”

Hmmm. Making unsound assessments of innocence and guilt. Hurting lots of people. Creating new enemies. Sounds like our boys!

America Trip Photos

2007-09-25T02:06:00.001+08:00

Wang Chien-Ming, move over: the real "Glory of Taiwan"! In a Starbucks in Portland, Maine.

Family portrait in Dining Room

Professor Rob and the author all Margheritaed up in Texas

"The friendliest people and the prettiest women you've ever seen!"

The Johansons. Transplanted Texans, but they fit the bill. Thanks to Mr. Johanson, something of a rock star in the Wills and Estates field, for what may very well have been the best steak of my life.

Monkey Penguin Joke

2007-09-18T18:01:00.000+08:00

Completely unforgivable. Also completely irresistable. What can I tell you: I have a soft spot for a guy who knows how to tell a joke.

Hat Tip: Big Tom

People's Drug

2007-09-16T02:39:00.000+08:00

Shorpy has a cool photo of a pre-1932 People's Drug Store. I don't go quite that far back; I remember the store from Maryland in the 1970's. A name can be pretty evocative. The single residual memory - out of all the hundreds of times over a twenty year span that I went to People's Drug - is of my redoubtable Grandmother Sullivan, who probably only visited the place one time.

The memory is a diptych.The first part has her leading us crossing the road, taking it for granted that the cars on Route 450 would just stop. They did. It must have made quite an impression on my eight year old brain; something on the order of: "Shit, I didn't know you could do that!" What I remember of the lunch at the soda fountain with my New York grandma (and I'm certain I remember it with fidelity) was her mirth at a sign behind the counter: "Tipping is now permitted." I had only the foggiest idea at the time of what tipping was, or why the sign was so amusing, but there you go - the memory is planted.

These days a guy like me doesn't have to go moping around thinking: "I wonder whatever the hell happened to People's Drug?". Wikipedia fills us in, but alas, People's Drug, it turns out, has been inhaled by CVS. What Wikipedia doesn't tell us is how the chain got its rather commie sounding name. New Deal era, perhaps? But, no... founded in 1904, so probably a bit more of a William Jennings Bryan - type thing than a Franklin Roosevelt or a Leon Trotsky.

Robert Caro's Johnson

2007-09-15T19:35:00.000+08:00

While staying in Lydon Johnson's Austin residence a few weeks ago (ahem!), I idly began picking through a copy of Robert Caro's multi-volume biography that was on the shelf, expecting it to be a bit ponderous and entirely too detailed for my needs. This is a book I've passed over without much curiosity in countless bookstores. I knew it had been critically acclaimed, but it was just too damn big! It didn't take me more than half a page of reading, though, to realize I'd stumbled onto something special. The incumbent champion of all biographies in betelnut-culture has always been T. Harry Williams's "Huey Long". I read it when I was 17 - 800 pages in a single feverish four day session during summer vacation, mostly deep in the night. (Adding to the sense of being swallowed whole by a book is that this one comes with a sound track: my favorite Randy Newman album, "Good Old Boys", was clearly written under the gravitational influence of the book).

I'm not 17, and I've got a day job, so the intensity will never be quite the same, but this biography embodies the same combination of assiduous scholarship and the art of story-telling. Like "Huey", it draws you into into a three-dimensional, parrellel, doppelganger kind of world. It's said that if you asked Faulkner at any time of any day what a particular character in Yoknapatawpha County was doing, he could tell you. That's how real the world Caro draws is. Anyway, this is just a warning that future posts are coming. Caro's book is basically a series of remarkable stories folded into the larger narrative. I'll throw in a post now and then summarizing a few of them.

Urban Grit Model Train

2007-09-15T18:35:00.000+08:00

Now I know I have time management issues, but it absolutely escapes me how I can't seem to manage to find the time to clean my apartment, when there are people in the world who are able to do this.

Anyway, this is pretty remarkable stuff. Model railroad renditions of what trains really look like - at least in gritty urban settings. When you think about it, the impressions of people a hundred years from now of what our world looks like will be unavoidably warped the tendency of people to prefer to record places that are more aesthetically pleasing. On the other hand, the painstaking recreation of these kinds of urban settings reminds us that, hey, if you bring enough kundalini to the table, it's all beautiful.

Hat tip to Your Daily Awesome

Slip and Slide

2007-09-09T18:19:00.000+08:00

Good clean fun in the backyard. The really ballsy guy is the first one to go down. Truly no way for him to predict what will happen!

Marinating In Maine

2007-09-09T05:52:00.000+08:00

My absolutely stunning wife, relaxing in sleepy Maine after a whirlwind week of living in the fast lane in Austin. She was a good sport through mountains of Mexican food and thick Texas steaks; post-midnight best music in the whole world concerts; and bracing swims in the legendary Barton Springs pool.

You Lookin' At Me?

2007-09-09T05:39:00.000+08:00

Picture of myself in repose on my vacation. Actually, I believe this one is from Kenting.

Clouds

2007-09-09T05:35:00.000+08:00

Thank God this kind of thing is available for free to everyone, or it would definitely be out of my price range.

Sunrise in Taichung

2007-09-09T05:27:00.000+08:00

Indulging myself with a shot or two of the sunset from my window. Mind you, I don't see the sun rise in this lifetime unless I've been up all night, but I've seen a few this summer.

Taichung Skyline

2007-09-09T05:23:00.000+08:00

A view of the Taichung, Taiwan skyline from my window. It's changed a lot in the last ten years.

Taking Camden

2007-09-09T05:20:00.000+08:00

Joanne and Felisa looking smashing in Camden, Maine.

Johnson House

2007-09-09T04:26:00.000+08:00

The back yard of the Johnson house on Deeson Street. Felisa had severe jet lag, so she went back early on a couple of nights while I heard music on 6th Street. She had a couple of shaky moments, but I can testify that the big old unfamiliar wooden house was a bit creepy late at night. The tennis court in the backyard is easily visible on Google Earth, by the way.

Brush With Fame

2007-09-09T04:15:00.000+08:00

Yes, since you ask, we did stay at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Austin residence. Here's the old Lyndon, Lady Bird, and the two little birds in residence in 1948, the year the old rascal got elected to the senate.

America trip

2007-09-09T03:31:00.000+08:00

And here is my beautiful wife on a cliffside in Kenting.

Wendell's Chinese Adventure

2005-07-27T06:27:00.000+08:00

"Soon after nine p.m., as the publisher (Gardiner Cowles, Look magazine) recorded in his privately published memoirs, 'there was a great clatter in the courtyard. The Generalissimo marched in, visibly furious. He was accompanied by three bodyguards, each carrying a little Tommy gun. Trying to restrain his rage, the Generalissimo bowed coldly, and I returned the bow.' Chiang asked where Willkie was. Cowles said he did not know. He then offered Chiang tea. After they had drunk this in silence, the Generalissimo repeated his question, and Cowles repeated that he had no answer. At that, Chiang stormed through the house followed by his bodyguards. He searched every room, peered under the beds and opened cupboards. Not finding what he was looking for, he left without saying anything. Cowles sat up drinking more Scotch. At 4 a.m., he recorded, 'a very buoyant Willkie appeared, cocky as a young college student after a successful night with a girl...Willkie stomped off to bed, but was up a couple of hours later for breakfast. He had a speech to make and asked Cowles to go see Meiling and tell her she could not fly to the U.S. with him. The publisher inquired where he could find her. Willkie suggested an apartment on the top floor of a hospital for women and children. With her own private guards protecting them, that was where they had gone the previous night.

An interesting review of a book on Wendell Willkie in the New York Times. It sounds like a book well worth the read, but what I was looking for was a reference to this incident treated at length in Jonathan Fenby's Chiang Kai-shek bio. Chiang's wife had clearly married him for power, but the limits of Chiang's usefulness were becoming apparent in 1940, and she was clearly looking to move on an even more central stage . Willkie's loss to Roosevelt was clearly a tremendous disappointment to her. It is often said of the three Soong sisters that one loved money, one loved China, and one loved power. Meiling certainly played her part. In New York, later that year, Meiling met with Willkie's man Cowles again:

"She told the publisher that her union with Chiang was a marriage of political convenience, and recounted the story of his having said on their wedding night that they would not have sex - a tale which , as Cowles recorded, he was not sure he believed. Next, she moved into the reason for inviting him. She was sure Willkie could get the Republican presidential nomination, and urged Cowles to do all he could to achieve this. 'I was to spend whatever amont of money I thought necessary,' he wrote in his memoirs. 'She would reimburse me for all my expenditures.' Funding to buy the presidency for Willkie would have come, in part at least, from the residue of U.S. loans sitting in the American bank accounts of the Chungking regime. 'If Wendell could be elected, then he and I would rule the world,' she told Cowles. 'I would rule the Orient and Wendell would rule the Western world.' It was, as Cowles noted, a totally mad proposal, 'but I was so mesmerized by clearly one of the most formidable women of the time that this evening I would not have dismissed anything she said.'"

The Willkie book sounds interesting. I wonder if it includes any more background on this story. At any rate, I suspect we're all better off for old Franklin Roosevelt getting elected in 1940. Roosevelt was reported to have departed from his usual practice of sitting on a sofa with visitors when Meiling visited the White House, insisting that they be seperated by a table, in order "to avoid being vamped." Fooling around with a secretary is one thing, but Willkie's Chongking adventure seems right up there with Kennedy's sharing a girlfriend with a mobster in the annals of irresponsible cheating. Great leaders know when to get out the table.

Google Earth

2005-07-23T03:27:00.000+08:00

I only read about the incredible GoogleEarth program after donating to the public my tongue-in-cheek invention (filming the earth from an airplane, etc.) GoogleEarth is not as good as the BetelnutSpyPlane screen installed in your local bar would be, but it's cheaper. Actually, it's one of the coolest things I've seen. The quality, alas, is quite a bit higher for the U.S. than for, say, Taiwan. You can still see plenty, though. I've been playing around with it for hours - an incredible teaching tool, too!

Taiwan's Jack Problem

2005-07-23T00:48:00.000+08:00

For some time now, there's been a tremendous exhibition of photos of Taiwan displayed in front of Cave's books, opposite the Science Museum, here in Taichung. The images I can't reproduce here, so you'll just have to go down and see for yourself, but some of the text (very informative) I can share with you:

(Paraphrasing)A professor from Chung Shan University reports that "The degree to which Taiwan's coastline is being done over in cement is shocking." There is an average of one concrete mini-port every 4-6 kilometers. This is especially striking given that the Taiwan fishing industry is in decline. Are all of these ports really necessary? In addition to impedeing coastal currents, "dams built on rivers impede the ability of the shoreline to replenish itself with sand, so it is necessary to provide concrete wave breakers to reinforce the tidal flats. Over half of Taiwan's coastline currently bristles with concrete wave breakers and seawalls." Another reason for these seawalls is apparently the encroaching seawater caused by excessive pumping of groundwater.

When I first arrived in Taiwan, I thought these ubiquitous concrete structures lining the coasts, shaped like jacks, were to deter the impending invasion of the island. H.L. Mencken's account of a train ride through Pennsylvania came to mind: such aesthetic destruction of that which is by default beautiful can only be ascribed to a willful inclination toward that which is unsightly and dispiriting - "a libido for the ugly." It seems the things are there simply on account of the general ecological destruction of the island. It's easy for me to rail against dams, sitting here lit up like a Christmas tree (the apartment, not me). What I do know is that the coasts of other countries are not marred by these things on this scale. Surely, (he asks plaintively), there must be a way to get rid of these jacks, and give us back the coasts?

KMT - CCP Civil War History I

2005-07-20T09:36:00.000+08:00

An article in last Tuesday's Taipei Times ("Re-writers of History Ignore Truth") got my attention and my goat. My eyebrows always rise upon hearing that a professor or two has hold of that truth thang, and sure enough, this is a classic example of historical scholarship in the service of politics. The authors are introduced as Tai Da profs in journalism and political science respectively. Well, at least they're not history professors.

What seems to be bothering them is that the Communist Party in China is modifying its self-serving reading that the CCP had a virtual monopoly on resistance to the Japanese and now is conceding that there was joint cooperation. Having attacked the CCP for politicizing history, they then fall into the trap of feeling compelled to present an equal and opposite politicized version of history. "To this day, Chinese schoolbooks still maintain that the CCP was the main actor in the resistance. But the following facts show that it is possible to clarify the fact that the CCP did not direct the war effort against Japan," (and here’s the overreach) "and even that talk of a 'joint' resistance is a joke." Having adduced their facts, they conclude "Any talk of joint resistance is a shameless lie." They seem to be threatened by the history of joint resistance because they believe it would give credibility to today's KMT-CCP "united front". It's faulty reasoning and even worse history. The tragedy of Chinese modern history is that after the promising start by Sun Yat-sen, neither of the leaders who claimed his mantle presented the Chinese with a viable model of liberalism. Why in the world should it be threatening to democratic Taiwan that these two failed children of Sun's KMT cooperated in the war. Besides, it is simply a historical fact that there was extensive cooperation, albeit in an atmosphere of mutual distrust.

My coming across that article coincides with working my way through Jonathan Fenby's excellent Chiang Kai-shek bio, so I decided to do a little cross checking of facts.

"War histories from both Japan and the Republic of China clearly indicate the scale of the CCP's 'participation'. From 1937 to 1945, there were 23 battles where both sides employed at least a regiment each. The CCP was not a main force in any of these. The only time it participated it sent a mere 1,000 to 1,500 men, and then only as a security detachment on one of the flanks." Ming Chu-cheng, Flora Chang, Taipei Times

Autumn and early winter 1937: "Units of the Communist Eighth Army under the Long March veteran Lin Biao scored the one notable Chinese victory in the north… The Communists riddled the Japanese with gunfire and hurled down hand grenades, killing 3,000 men for some 400 casualties of their own. Bingxingguan went down in Communist history as a triumph for Mao's guerrilla tactics, but was hardly mentioned by the Nationalists." –Jonathan Fenby

"The Japanese seized cities and towns, main roads and railways, and launched regular, murderous expeditions to grab crops and try to pacify the countryside where guerrillas operated. For all their armed strength, however, their forces were badly overextended. One metaphor used was of China as a net with the strings and knots representing Japanese positions around the much larger holes. The parallels with the war in Vietnam are evident, underlined by the reflections of the Red Army commander Zhu De: "They cannot use animal transport, or human labor as our armies can. They cannot take advantage of the hill country, but must follow the easiest and most level route…So we always fight in the hills, not in the open country." –Fenby

The assertion of no CCP participation above regimental level by Ming and Chang seems factually incorrect, but I have no doubt that the accurate statistics would reflect that a vast preponderance of the fighting in major battles was conducted by the KMT. Mao's tactics, which he adhered to pretty consistently, were to live in the hills, attack only when there was a clear numerical advantage, then dissolve back into the country-side. The CCP during most of these eight years was indeed quite a bit weaker than the KMT, which is another reason why the KMT would predominate. There was significant cooperation, but the CCP would never have been the "main force" in most of these operations. Their growth was backloaded to the last years of the war and after. The CCP contribution was not negligible, however.

Prior to 1938, Chiang's (misguided) strategy was to engage the Japanese in major frontal battles in the Chinese urban heartland. KMT troops fought bravely, but it was a strategy which played to Japanese strengths. First Shanghai fell, then (notoriously) Nanjing, finally Wuhan. Only in 1938, forced to retreat to Chongching, did Chiang adopt a strategy that sounds a lot like Mao's: "Calling his principle commanders to a conference in November 1938, Chiang told them that, after sixteen months of war, the first phase was over. Instead of defending each position, they should adopt 'mobile front resistance'using guerrilla tactics to trap the adversary and hit its weak points." Both Mao and Chiang came to the conclusion that this was the best way to fight the Japanese, only Mao knew it from the start, whereas Chiang had to learn it the hard way. Even when Chiang adopted this strategy he was less effective than Mao. The guerrilla strategy required the enthusiastic support of the peasants. Where Mao integrated his military strategy with social policy by implementing land reform in the countryside, Chiang was resolutely against land reform and allowed warlords and local leaders to use coercive methods that alienated the peasants. Surely effectiveness should be a part of the calculus of who contributed to the resistance, not just counting up major battles. As General Patton said in the famous opening of the movie, the object is not to die for your country, but to make the other guy die for his.

The one time Mao departed from this strategy was explicitly because he was goaded by comments from the KMT Secretary General that the Red Army "has not participated in any great battles." The Hundred Regiments offensive was Mao's answer. The Communists made some initial impressive gains, then were beaten back, taking heavy casualties. "Though it petered out by the end of 1940, Mao sent a cable to the commander at the front pointing out that the publicity it had generated was needed as a weapon against Chiang." The parallel is unavoidable with the Tet offensive: a major military defeat that was undertaken for its propaganda value. Mao hadn't used this approach before, and he didn't use it again,because it was militarily ineffective. But it's hard to see how the sources of Ming and Chang missed the Hundred Regiments Offensive and Bingxingguan. One wonders how many others they may have missed.

KMT - CCP Civil War History II

2005-07-20T09:35:00.000+08:00

The article in question seems to ignore entirely the period after the Xian incident, when a genuine "united front" existed in Wuhan. It was not Mao representing the Communists here (he was an ally, but a wary one), but his rival Wang Ming. Mao followed a more Trotskyite strategy of rural peasant rebellion, while Wang Ming found favor with Stalin by pursuing "bourgeois revolution" alongside the KMT. In Wuhan at this time, according to Fenby, "A free press flourished, as did the arts and literature transplanted rom Shanghai. The secret police was restricted to tracking down Japanese collaborators, rather than going after the regime's rivals. In the words of the historian Stephen McKinnon, 'democracy reached a twentieth century zenith'." Besides the Communists, there were many smaller parties present. "This meant that , though the biggest group, the Kuomintang was in the minority." Clearly, the claims of exclusive ownership of the resistance by the KMT arenot founded in fact. "Any talk of joint resistance is a shameless lie," Ming and Chang tell us. Wuhan tells a different story.

"Many KMT soldiers died without understanding why. If they were not able to match Japanese troops on the battlefield, they would raise the KMT flag and move towards the CCP's troops, only to be met by sweeping machine-gun fire. They had enemies front and back. These are facts that have been recorded by the CCP itself." – Ming Chu-cheng and Flora Chang, Taipei Times, July 12.

The Wuhan period of cooperation ended in 1941 with the New Fourth Army Incident. Chiang felt threatened by the growth of this Communist army in the east, a problem exarcerbated by the fact that they were standing astride important opium smuggling routes. He invoked his powers as commander of the united front and ordered them to march north into a Japanese buzzsaw. The Army declined the suicide mission and marched south instead, after Zhou Enlai believed he had negotiated safe passage for them with Chiang.

"Zhou went to see the Generalissimo who dismissed the reports from the battlefield; he had agreed to a safe passage for the Fourth Army, he recalled, so it could not have been attacked…. On January 12 the Nationalists unleashed an intense artillery and bombing attack. Two days later, Mao sent a message saying that Chang had agreed to a ceasefire. By then the battle was over. Estimates of Communist dead ranged from 2,000 to 10,000; Mao said at the time 7,000 had been 'finished off.' Survivors told of women being raped, and captives being marched 400 miles to a camp – 'when they sickened, they were beaten; some were shot and other were buried alive.'"

It is in this context that the incident to which the authors are apparently referring occurred: "The New Fourth Army Incident had broken the united front; in one engagement north of the Yellow River, Communist troops were seen attacking Nationalists fleeing from the Japanese. Not that Mao and his colleagues were immune from assault. The Japanese launched a campaign against their main base area known as the 'Three Alls' – kill all, bun all, destroy all. By the time it ended, the base population was reduced from 40 million to an estimated 25 million, and the party was plunged into its worst period since the Long March."

Excuse me, but invoking the incident in which the Communists fired on retreating Nationalists without mentioning the context of the New Fourth Army Incident is intellectually dishonest.

KMT - CCP Civil War History III

2005-07-20T09:33:00.000+08:00

"Peter Vladimirov from the Third International, or the Comintern, who was sent by Moscow to Yan'an as a liason between the Chinese and Soviet Communist parties, kept a detailed record from 1942 to 1945. The CCP refused his requests to visit the frontline. He later found that the CCP and the Japanese never engaged each other in fighting. So what were the CCP doing? "They were planting opium in Shaanxi!" he said. They used the huge profits from the sale of opium to buy arms to strengthen their position and wipe out KMT troops." –Ming and Chang

"Vladimirov was an unquestioning Communist, though, as a patriot, he was alienated by what he saw as Mao's 'organic dislike' of the Soviet Union. This colors his broader ideological verdicts, but, as reportage of what was going on in Yan'an, his diaries leave no doubt of the need for serious revision of the picture propagated after the Communist victory. This cannot be taken as a vindication of Chiang's regime vis-à-vis his major foe, but it does show that, as so often during the Generalissimo's life, the black-and-white picture of events which became conventional wisdom after his defeat in 1949 should be shaded in grey." – Jonathan Fenby

It is instructive to keep in mind what the thesis of the authors is: In response to the CCP's recent admission that the KMT did play a large part in the resistance, the authors maintain that, in fact, the traditional KMT account is entirely vindicated: the CCP not only didn't fight the Japanese much between 1942 and 1945; they not only financed themselves with opium sales in that period; but these things were exclusively so of the CCP, while the KMT had an exemplary record of fighting valiantly with hands clean of opium selling.

Fenby makes it clear that Stalin never believed the Maoists could gain control of the country, and the Soviet leader consistently chose to make alliances with Chiang rather than with the Maoists. Vladimirov's account is historically useful, but with the caveat that, as Stalin's envoy, he was a hostile witness. It is true that after being decimated by the Third Army Incident, the Three Alls campaign and the Hundred Regiments campaign the Red Army didn't do much fighting of the Japanese. The same is true of the Nationalists. Fenby describes a KMT offensive starting in late 1939 and the aftermath:

"Overall the campaign was a considerable failure. By April 1940 it was all over. As a result the Generalissimo and those around him reverted to their belief in a long-term struggle dependent on the United States’ eventually going to war and defeating Tokyo. The failure of his last big offensive further decreased Chiang's authority over the regional power barons, including the Communists. To try to counteract this, he increasingly deployed central army troops to keep regional forces in check and assert Chungking's presence, rather than putting them where they could best fight the Japanese.”

Note the dates: by April 1940, Chiang had mounted his "last offensive" and repositioned his troops to contain the Red Army at the expense of the war against the Japanese. By contrast, the Hundred Regiments offensive took place in late summer of 1940; the New Fourth Army Incident in January 1941 and the Three Alls campaign in 1941. The evidence suggests that the KMT deprioritized the struggle against Japan earlier than the Communists.

The opium charge is similar. The Communists did, in fact, sustain themselves in Yan'an with extensive sales of opium – accounting for 40% of their revenue at the peak – and, yes, this is in stark contrast to the official CCP version. But the implication that the Communists were exclusively financing themselves from opium is outrageously at odds with every objective account of the KMT's history. The Communists, according to Fenby, were clean of opium during the Long March period, and after the war they dealt with the problem conclusively, which the KMT had never done when they were in control of the country. Opium was in the DNA of the KMT. Their very roots were in the notorious Green Gang of Shanghai – an opium syndicate. There was never a time – before the war or during – when opium was not a crucial source of funding for the KMT. To puncture the myth that the CCP never indulged in this business is one thing – to suggest that the KMT was comparatively clean defies belief.

KMT - CCP Civil War History IV

2005-07-20T09:31:00.000+08:00

"The CCP's own party history says that from 30,000 troops at the outset of the war, the ranks expanded to 1.2 million regular troops and approximately 2.6 million to 3 million militia by the end of the war, giving it a total of between 3.8 million and 4.2 million troops. Following the Japanese surrender, the CCP launched a civil war which resulted in the KMT army being routed and fleeing to Taiwan." - Ming and Chang

(Speaking of December, 1945, on arrival of Gen. Marshall in China): "The American drive for a coalition government could only help the Communists, and the search for peace inhibit the re-conquest of Manchuria. While Chiang was anxious to fight his domestic enemy as quickly as possible, and on the widest scale, the Communists' interest lay in delay to gain time to build up political and military strength." – Fenby

Fenby does not give figures for the size of the respective armies at the end of the war, but it's clear that the Communists at that time were far weaker than the KMT. General Marshall was slandered in the McCarthy era as a pro-Communist. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The sad truth, however, is that the post-war truce he negotiated in the hope of sparing China a civil war unwittingly gave the CCP time to experience exponential growth between 1945-1949, riding a wave of popular disgust with the way in which the KMT had prosecuted the war. That's a far cry from the authors' contention that the Communists husbanded their resources while the KMT bravely fought the Japanese, then surprise attacked a weakened KMT at the end of the war.

The vast disparities that still maintained at the cessation of hostilities are reflected in the terms of the truce negotiated at the time, "to cut government (KMT) forces to a maximum of 700,000 and the Red Armies to 140,000 in eighteen months. Chiang would remain in supreme command, and the Communists would pull out of their southern base areas. Yan'an regarded the agreement as a success in that it was recognized as a negotiating partner rather than a target for destruction." Neither side had the slightest illusion that a civil war could be averted, but the Communists needed time and the KMT was absolutely dependent on U.S. aid. Within three months, the truce was not holding in Manchuria, but again it is notable just how superior the KMT forces were:

"The Nationalist build-up in Manchuria meant that the Red Army, now renamed the People's Liberation Army (PLA), was outnumbered three-to-one. Against such odds, it retreated from most of its urban centers into the countryside, only fighting when it was sure of winning, and then moving off swiftly after grabbing the enemy's weapons. In a final bid to check the Nationalist offensive which was sabotaging Marshall's mediation efforts, Washington slapped an embargo on military aid.”

This is a completely different account of events than Ming and Chang's fantasy of a rested Red Army gratuitously attacking a weakened KMT force.

In the summer of 1948 the "first decisive stage of the civil war" would be fought in Manchuria, and the Reds, enjoying a two-to-one advantage in manpower, would win decisively. What had happened in the intervening period of time was that the house of cards that was the Nationalist regime collapsed, because they'd lost the trust of the Chinese people. When they retook areas that had implemented land reform in their absence, they used brutal methods to reinstitute the old system. Inflation was through the roof. (One of my favorite quotes of the entire book is from the corrupt KMT Finance Minister, the H.H. Kung: "Inflation! Inflation! There is no inflation in China! If people want to pay twenty- five dollars for a fountain pen, that's their business, it's not inflation. They're crazy, that's all. They shouldn't pay it.” In 1940-41, food prices in Chungking increased by 1,400%). The economy was run for the benefit of the top families. The army was politicized. When the people of China turned on the Nationalists, it happened with breathtaking speed.

Some in the Green camp seem to feel that if the KMT and the CCP are invoking the united front it is necessary to deny its existence. The tragedy of China in the twentieth century is that from the promising proto-democratic KMT of the twenties were born the two political parties that would dominate Chinese political life for generations, but neither came close to following through on their rhetorical commitment to democracy. The DDP doesn't need to feel threatened by that. But, most importantly, what some Greens are peddling is just bad, false history.

Typhoon Update

2005-07-19T04:35:00.000+08:00

As I suppose everyone reading this knows, we are in the midst of a rather formidable typhoon these days. Taichung tends to be protected by the mountains, and what we get is a faint echo of the mayhem going on over on the east coast. Last night we got plenty of wind, with almost no rain. Early in the morning, I stood on my balcony watching the tin covering of a chimney - like structure on a roof across the way slowly peeling back. "If that thing comes off and falls onto the street, someone's going to get killed." A number of clueless scooter drivers drove by, and the garbage men came on schedule, all unaware of the drama unfolding above their heads. I couldn't watch any more, so I went inside and turned on the T.V. They were interviewing one of the guys who deliver newspapers to convenience stores, who said in that good-natured Taiwanese way: "My boss said we had to do it, so I guess we do." I couldn't help thinking: "Is your boss going to raise your kids if you get chopped in two by a flying piece of tin roofing?"

Things were quiet all day. Just an overcast day. People said there was more to come, but I was doubtful. We'd had our blow, and then it passed. Tonight at three, having only eaten one meal today, I was starving, so I went out to the all-night Teppanyaki place. It was coming down in sheets at the time, but there was very little wind. Bad call. The glass door of the restaurant exploded from the force of a gust while I was eating. No joke. Indeed, the world had changed while I was in there. Very scary fifteen minute ride home. Better to be lucky in this world than wise, it is said - and so, I am lucky yet another day.

Great Ideas

2005-07-18T04:52:00.000+08:00

Many people think of Henry David Thoreau as a congenital slacker whose mama brought him lunches in the woods while he wrote. Actually, according to a book I read ages ago (and probably remember spottily) it was Thoreau who invented the now indispensable Pencil With An Eraser Attached To The Latter Tip. Told that he should patent it and set up a factory to make a pile of money, he said something appropriately lapidary like: "I would not do again and again what I have already done once." Whoah. That blew me away when I was twenty. I've pretty much lived my life subsequently on that model, coming up with brilliant ideas and scattering them over the land in spasms of insouciant fecundity, while holding down a modest Taiwan English teacher's job. I'm not really talking about the idea I had immediately in the wake of reading the Thoreau anecdote – although I still think the can opener with an eraser on the tip is a keeper.

My latest great idea (and I'm actually half-serious about this one) came to me on a flight last year from L.A. to Austin. I was sitting there in my uncomfortable window seat, looking down as all these fascinating topographical features scrolled by, with occasional nameless urban outbreaks, and I had this brainstorm - a kind of braintyphoon, actually: what if you had a camera on the underside of the plane and filmed the entire stretch from L.A. to Austin; then, when you put it on film, you provided a streamer with a constant strand of information telling people just what they were looking at? They could watch it in their own homes, instead of in a cramped airplane seat! Or how about in a bar? (Marketing note - People who own bars are more likely to invest in something like this, because they're usually heavy drinkers.) Instead of watching some lame sit-com, you'd pop in "Chicago to Phoenix". Unlike a show, it doesn't interrupt conversation – it moves at its own pace, in real time, and you can sip your beer and talk about Manicheanism or whatever and kind of check in now and then at your leisure and see just where you are.

Pretty cool, huh? Just attribute it to Betelnutblogger when you're making your initial investment, and give me a symbolic ten percent cut of all profits, and I think we're still friends. There was this gunner on the Brazilian basketball team years ago who, after scoring about fifty points one night when his team lost, was asked by a reporter if he thought his teammates resented his taking so many shots and never passing the ball. His response was: "Some people are meant to play the piano; some people are meant to carry the piano up the stairs." No offense, amigo, but that's kind of my approach: you do the bricks and mortar work, here, all right? I'm an idea man. Just give me a little something to wet my beak when you get rich, eh?

New Olympic Sports

2005-07-16T12:34:00.000+08:00

On the subject of Olympic sports, I've been giving some consideration to the question of which sports should replace baseball. This is a topic which should should be approached with a certain amount of gravity, since the games come from Greece, were founded by a Baron and have all that slow motion footage of athletes in agony and stuff. I have two sports, admittedly close cousins to each other: okay, you need to construct a special pool, but it's worth it. You have two diving boards facing each other, five meters up and about ten feet apart. The object is to have two guys (or two gals - even better!) dive off at the same time and grapple with each other in mid-air on the way down to the pool. Whoever is on top wins. I think the Bulgarians would be very good at this. A related sport: you know that contraption from down at the old swimming hole where you grab on and go sliding down a rope into the water? How about attaching a trapeze bar to the rope and suspending it above a diving tower? You with me? It would be high, so that only international -class divers with the best altitude could just grab on as they spring off; then they grab the bar and as the bar is sliding down into the pool they do amazing gymnastics flips and turns. Entries are important! If you know somebody on the appropriate committee, tell them quick! Just give attribution to Betelnutblogger and everything's cool.

Baseball Scotched from Olympics

2005-07-10T11:24:00.000+08:00

"Baseball's biggest problem is that it's American.
Yet baseball is going to be just fine here without the Olympics. As Brewers pitcher and 2000 Olympian Ben Sheets noted, no baseball player grows up in the U.S. dreaming of playing in the Olympics.
But they do in Cuba. It means something in South Korea and Mexico. It's the other countries that will be most hurt."

Baseball and women's softball have become the first sports voted out of the Olympics in sixty-nine years, in a secret ballot, and with no explanation given. The reaction from the heartland was that this was a European dominated group slapping around the Yanks, which I must say, seems plausible. Of course, the people who will be hurt most are the Taiwanese Koreans, Japanese, Cubans, etc. who have taken so enthusiastically to the game, and follow Olympics' baseball a lot more enthusiastically than the Americans do. Collateral damage. Living in Asia, I can't quite join in the derision heaped on ping-pong, badminton and judo by the Whittier paper, because I know those sports have real followings. That doesn't mean I have to desist from snorking at synchronized swimming, or - how about that one where they go cross-country skiing and then shoot? Ping-pong I can muster respect for; but a sport where people played ping-pong, then jumped into a luge wouldn't make the straight face cut. It appears the voters took the line that they weren't anti-American but, after all, the American Big Leagues don't let the best players in the world compete, so... Then they gave the game away by kicking out women's softball, where the best players in the world do compete, but the U.S. has dominated competition.

This is a great opportunity for Major League Baseball to get together with the other leagues around the world and do something for the international game. The Olympics' format would not be very credible for providing a test for the games best players, anyway. There ought to be a Baseball World Cup every four years. A credible format would be three weeks - two groups with eight teams each, playing each team two games a piece, for a total of fourteen games. The winners of the two groups then play each other in a best of five series. Baseball needs to adapt to the intenationalization of the game, but that does not have to mean being supplicants at the Court of Weenies. How about a U.S. - Dominican five-game finale, in Kaohsiung, with a Clements versus Pedro kick-off game?

China Unocal Bid

2005-07-02T12:43:00.000+08:00

"'If we were to say no to [CNOOC's bid], it would likely stimulate just the sort of nationalist reaction in China that we should want to discourage,' said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. 'We have a national security interest in integrating China into the global economy, and this [permitting the Chinese takeover of Unocal] seems to me one way to do it.'"

A subject like this should induce an unwonted spasm of humility and deference to experts in most of us commentators. Whether this is something to be alarmed about is essentially a question involving a level of expertise far above my head, but I tend to agree with Richard Haase. A warning flag goes up for me when I see that both of the legislators legislators mentioned as opposing this are from Texas. Despite what Chinese nationalists maintain, the U.S. is not in a containment mode with China, nor should it be. An invasion or embargo of Taiwan would be a trip-wire for such a policy, but we are not there yet, and I hope we never will. We can't be scolding China about its values-free energy grabbing policy in Africa, then forbid them from obtaining energy in legitimate ways such as this. My impression of the textiles debate is similar: it seems to be driven by U.S. domestic politics more than anything. But it is a technical issue - have the appropriate international trade organizations adjudicate it and abide by the judgement. The politicians in America who are suggesting that textiles are indispensible to America's economic heath are as out of it as Jacques Chirac and his assertion that agricultrue is the key to Europe's economic future.

The Singapore Dream I

2005-06-29T13:44:00.000+08:00

“The anti-Americanism that surged through much of the world over the U.S. war in Iraq shows modest signs of abating, although distinctly negative views persist in the Muslim world, and many Europeans now have a more favorable view of China than of the United States, according to a major new international poll.”
- International Herald Tribune, Friday June 24

In Bali for five days of vacation, I had a chance to read the International Herald Tribune, which used to be a staple of my Taiwan reading, but has largely given way to online reading in recent years. Still an excellent paper. Friday's edition, virtually side-by-side, ran three stories interesting for their juxtaposition. The first, "Anti-U.S. Sentiment Abates Yet Still Lingers", reported the results of a poll documenting attitudes toward the U.S.

Countries with the lowest opinion of the U.S. were Jordan, Pakistan and Turkey, with 21%, 23% and 21% respectively. India had the highest positive rating, at 71% Other positives were Poland (62%) and Britain (55%). Notable ratings were Russia (52%), France (43%) and China (43%). Comparing China and the U.S., in France the pro-China spread was 53%/43%, in Germany 46%/41%. Pakistan had the largest pro-China tilt, 79% for China, only 23% regarding the U.S. favorably. Poland, on the other hand, was 62%/36% pro-U.S. The single country where a majority believed the Iraq War had made the world a safer place was India, by 45% to 26%. Most others were lopsidedly against the war. In a poll asking "Which country is your land of opportunity?", only one country named the U.S. - you guessed it: India. The single country to name China as the land of opportunity was Pakistan. Most Europeans expressed support for the idea that the world would be a safer place if there was another power to balance the U.S., but even those who had a more favorable view of China did not want China to play this role. Lamentably, results for Taiwan, Japan and Singapore were not reported.

Singapore Dream II

2005-06-29T13:43:00.000+08:00

“Promoters of democracy in the Middle East will doubtless shudder at the idea of autocratic Arab states finding solace and refuge in soft-authoritarian Asia. Shaaban's (Muhammad Shaaban, advisor to the Egyptian foreign minister) belief that the process of democracy 'should take root through evolution and not through revolution' resonates strongly in Asia, where democracy has been slow to evolve. Shaaban thinks the time has come to look east for peace solutions. 'Asia is qualified to play a role', he told me. 'We are the East, be it the Far East, the Near East or the Middle East. Our common experience with the West was colonialism, so we have more in common than we have with the West.'"
- Herald Tribune, "Why the Middle East is Turning to Asia"

It is hard to know where to start responding to the second article, an opinion column by Michael Vatikiotis, "a visiting research fellow at the Institute of South East Asian Studies in Singapore". The essence of the argument being made here is that with the U.S. renouncing its "constructive engagement" mode of dealing with Middle East autocratic regimes in the wake of 9/11, there is an opportunity for the "Asian values" countries, led by Singapore, to cozy up to the alienated Baraks and Sauds. A rather cynical and opportunistic undertaking. Building on their tremendous success in helping Burma evolve toward democracy, the ASEAN nations seem to have decided to take their act on the road. A supporter of U.S. foreign policy might be tempted to ask: "Who are the idealists now?"

Painting countries as diverse as Singapore, Egypt, Saudi Arabia - or for that matter a true colonial trauma case like Congo - all with the same brush and indicating that they have some sort of common experience of colonialism is just not convincing. Egypt's encounter with western colonialism was primarily from about 1880 to 1945, not including the brief invasion by Napoleon in the previous century. That's a pretty brief time frame compared to, say, the centuries they were colonized by the Ottomans. Ten percent of Egypt's population is Copt Christian, and as recently as a hundred years ago a full one quarter of Egypt's population was non-Muslim. For those older populations, the last fourteen hundred years have been an experience of colonialization and marginalization. India, which had a far more protracted and profound experience of colonialism, is today the world's largest democracy and seems to be getting about the business of making their way in the world. The real problem for Egypt is not colonization but the encounter with the modern world, and the inability to adapt to it.

Arabia was under British suzerainty during the interregnum between the wars, but the Brits were mostly interested in controlling the coasts and sea lanes, protecting the routes to India. The interior was "controlled" by paying subsidies to the tribes – about 12,000 pounds to the Hashemites and 5,000 to the Wahabi- Sauds in 1919. The fact that the junior partners drove the favored patrons of the British off the peninsula hardly conforms to the idea that this was a conventional or heavy-handed colonial yoke. The western powers did traduce the tribes into rising against the Ottomons during World War I, and then broke their promise to grant them independence after the war. The colonialists, however, did not leave a deep mark on the culture and mores of the indigenous population. If anything, given the phenomenon of T.E. Lawrence and other "sand mad Englishmen", it was the English who were culturally infatuated. If the British had been more assertive colonialists, the more moderate Hashemites, and not the Wahabis, would be in control of all that oil and the sacred places of Islam, and the world would be a better place today.

Singapore Dream III

2005-06-29T13:41:00.000+08:00

“More interesting was a speech by Tommy Koh before the play ('Viva Viagra!') began. He spoke in English about his pride in being Asian. He pointed out that bureaucrats were not always 'bad guys'; they could be 'good guys', too. This splendid new theatre was made possible, was it not, by the active support of the Singaporean government. The audience applauded. A blue spotlight, bouncing off Koh's glasses and the grey-blue highlights in his perfectly coiffed hair, gave him a weird shine, as though he were polished with wax. Many people, he continued, perhaps a bit incongruously, said that it would take many years to recover from the Asian economic crisis. But he didn't share that pessimistic view. The Asians were clever and industrious, and they had pulled off miracles in the past. A new economic miracle was just around the corner. However, the next step in the Asian miracle would surely be cultural. After Asian economic power, there would be Asian cultural power and, so Koh was happy to tell us, the whole world would sit up and take notice. Indeed, it was already happening now in Singapore. More applause. Ekachai, the ACTION Theatre's director, professed how moved he was, thanked Koh for all his help, and said there was a surprise in store. The lights dimmed, Koh blinked, and from the back of the theatre about fifteen actors and actresses came in, carrying a huge cake and singing, 'Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Tommy…' I thought here was an example of what was wrong with Singapore.”
Ian Buruma, "Bad Elements"

"'Moderate voices are in danger of being drowned out by extremist voices,' said Tommy Koh, a veteran diplomat who chaired the Singapore meeting."

Singapore, of course, has had a very different colonial experience from Egypt or Saudi Arabia. It was not colonized so much as it was a creature of colonization. The people who live there are the descendants of people who chose to live there because they found it more desirable than the places they were from. They learned the ways of the modern world under the (often insufferable) tutelage of the British, and graduated with top marks to become the peers of their teachers. There's a rather breathtaking lack of gratitude in Singapore's leaders ascribing all the positive things about Singapore to their own enlightened leadership, then joining the Egypts and Saudi Arabias in excoriating colonialism. Lee Kwan Yew, the city's patriarch, was an English schoolboy first, then discovered his Chinese identity as an adult. If a person from the Middle East was given to ascribing to colonialism all the troubles of the world, they would not necessarily be a friend or ally of Singapore. Singapore is colonialism, or at least one face of colonialism- a highly distilled essence of the thing itself.

For me, the way in which a state like Singapore infantilizes citizens (described devastatingly above by Ian Buruma) is enough to discredit it is a potential residence. I've got lots of gratuitous opinions, which is why I blog, and I'm also afflicted with the idea that if a million of us are all throwing our ideas around it actually (strangely enough) has a salubrious effect on society as a whole. But I have to admit, many of the people in Singapore don't seem to be put together the way I am, and seem pretty content. So is the Singapore model exportable?

The greatest danger of authoritarian government is the temptation of the oligarchy in charge to use their position to engage in corruption. The primary reason why Singapore has some claim to be taken seriously intellectually is that they've combined an authoritarian government with low levels of corruption. The question for people like Tommy Koh is 'Can you teach governments in the Middle East and Asia how to replicate this, or is the lack of corruption simply a product of social conditions specific to Singapore?' The Singaporean model is clearly widely admired by the leadership of China, and the cult has spread to leaderships in places like Burma and Egypt. Anti-corruption campaigns featuring executions and draconian penalties are a regular feature of life in China, but corruption continues to be a persistent and debilitating problem there. It is corruption in Saudi Arabia that has radicalized their population and sent them to the mosques for lack of any other outlet for their rage. An article in the Atlantic magazine last year documented how, among other abuses, restauranteurs who build up a successful business at a certain location are apt to get a visit from a Saudi prince, who will give them an offer for their restaurant at well below market price. If the offer is not taken, the restaurant starts getting a lot of unwelcome attention from government inspectors of fire regulations and zoning, as well as tax audits and the like. The restaurant doesn't last long. When such behavior becomes pervasive, and there's no political outlet, the link with radical Islamism is clear.

There's a guilty little secret behind the soaring American rhetoric about democracy:if the Singaporeans could really teach the Egyptians and the Saudis some magic formula by which those societies could become prosperous and corruption-free while retaining an authoritarian structure, most of us would heave an enormous sigh of relief, express fulsome thanks to Singapore's leaders and nominate Lee Kwan Yew for the Nobel Peace Prize. When I read Tommy Koh's remark about moderate voices being drowned out, it took me some time to figure out that he was referring to Barak and the Saudi princes. Oh. In Arabia, the principle constituency fighting corruption are the Islamists, who often adhere to a strict ascetic code while trying to deliver the world back to the seventh century. In Egypt there are genuinely progressive voices pressing for change, but many of them are in jail. Those are the moderate voices being drowned out, and Singapore has no intention of engaging with them.

The U.S. no doubt would prefer to see a genuine democracy in Singapore, but in truth, the U.S. is not really leaning very heavily on Singapore to "evolve" faster; but then, Singapore is not spewing terrorists out into the world like a pulsar, either. What makes me suspicious is that I didn't see the word "corruption" appear even once in the Herald Tribune account of this conference. If the formula can't be exported, Singapore is just an anomoly as a non-corrupt authoritarian city-state - one that is enabling and supporting a whole flotilla of authoritarian states that are very corrupt indeed.

Singapore Dream IV

2005-06-29T13:38:00.000+08:00

“China's rhetoric about third world solidarity has an almost antiquated ring to it, with quaint echoes of the 1960s that are questionable on at least two grounds. The country is pushing for membership in the club of industrialized countries – the Group of 8 – where it will attend its first summit meeting next month in Scotland as a special invitee. At the same time, China's awesome performance in many basic industries, like textiles, which is achieved in part through overinvestment, comes at the expense of many of the world's poorest countries, which simply cannot compete. So far, the Chinese bargain offered to these countries has been all about natural resources, starting with energy. Search as one might for a broader, more uplifting theme, but the essence of China's approach was best put by the deputy foreign minister, Zhou Wenzhong, when he was asked in an interview last year about how Beijing justifies its position as the biggest foreign investor in Sudanese oil in the midst of an ongoing genocide in that country. 'Business is business,' Zhou shot back."
--Friday's Herald Tribune, “Is See No Evil A Stone in Beijing's Global Path?”

“A Saudi delegate said there was a need for genuinely neutral and disinterested parties to join the quest for peace and called Singapore's effort brave and timely. But an Asian contribution to the single most important conflict confronting the world would require a significant rewiring of the diplomatic grid. China would need to weigh in with its newfound global clout. The United Nations would have to play a bigger role….”
-Michael Vatikiotis, “Why the Middle East is Turning to Asia.”

It's rare that absurd statements made in one article in a paper are so expeditiously rebutted simply by turning the page. The Asian values crowd has decided to join hands with the U.N. and offer their services to help end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Shaaban, a former ambassador to Europe and at the United Nations, says a fresh approach to making peace will need to start dealing with the problem without regarding all the players as security risks – without seeing everything through the lense of counterterrorism.” So, the way to bring the Singapore gospel to the Middle East is for Singapore to extend the hand of friendship in speeches, without even addressing the issue of corruption; then, building on that momentum, the way to solve the Middle East crisis is to ignore the terrorism that the unaddressed corruption breeds. And, of course we need to get China more involved in resolving the "world's most important conflict." This would be the China whose entire policy in Africa seems to be predicated on allying itself with governments like those in Sudan and Zimbabwe in order to gain access to energy resources? We can get some idea of the flavor of their neutral and disinterested mediation by examining the work of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, which is a virtual Who's Who of China's new friends: in addition to China – Sudan, Zimbabwe, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and Pakistan. Not surprisingly, 26% of this neutral and disinterested commission's condemnations have referred to Israel alone. Sounds like at the U.N., the Asian values crowd has already teamed up with the Middle East to make the world a better place.

Joe Strauss to Joe Six-Pack - New York Times

2005-06-20T02:10:00.000+08:00

"The middlebrow impulse in America dates at least to Ralph Waldo Emerson and the belief that how one spends one's leisure time is intensely important. Time spent with consequential art uplifts character, and time spent with dross debases it.
It's true there was a great mood of take-your-vitamins earnestness about the middlebrow enterprise. But it led to high levels of mass cultural literacy, to Great Books volumes on parlor shelves and to a great deal of accessible but reasonably serious work, like Will and Ariel Durant's 'The Story of Civilization.'
Middlebrow culture was killed in the late 50's and 60's, and the mortal blows came from opposite directions. The intellectuals launched assaults on what they took to be middlebrow institutions, attacks that are so vicious they take your breath away. "

The New York Times is planning to make people pay for the op-ed page starting in September, and I'm really going to miss David Brooks. His recent column is on the reduction in circumstances of middlebrow culture these days. Reading the article, I kept thinking about Matthew Arnold. Arnold was a poet, until at some point he realized he was never going to be a truly great poet. From that point on, he wrote literary criticism. He believed that no truly great poetry could be produced except from a generally high level of understanding of and discussion of poetry in the society at large, and henceforth this would be his role. It seems to me that in a field like fiction writing, something like this has happened: writing has lost its hinterlands of middlebrow readers, so that more and more it seems that the only people who read fiction are other writers of fiction. It's hard to produce great artists that way.

The column hit home in another way. Hey, let's be honest - it takes a hundred blogs like this to create the kind of intellectual ferment out of which emerges a single great mainstream journalist like, say, Geraldo Rivera. Lately, I am aware, I've been letting the side down - it's been a sparse ten days. It's mostly a matter of better time-management. There's been a lot of ranting during that time to the effect that "The modern world just isn't made to let people read a book, much less do some writing!" This is true. The modern world has promised to make my views under consideration and it will try to do better in the future.

May Chin Attacks I

2005-06-20T01:35:00.000+08:00

The Japanese treated aborigines as subhumans, the lawmaker said. "We were victims," she pointed out, "how could we tolerate the victims being honored together with their persecutors?"

I once had a non-salacious proposition for a close female friend, back in college days: "Okay, there's an angel, see, comes down from heaven and has a proposition for you: You can go down to Wrigley Field on a Sunday and have the entire three hours of the game to wander through the crowd – tens of thousands of handsome strangers sweating and cheering –and you're told by the angel that at the end of those three hours you can choose any one person from the crowd who will magically be made to fall in love with you and be willing to marry you on the spot. The only catch is, you must choose someone- a stranger whom you've only observed briefly - and you must get married to that person. Would you take the angel up on it?” She immediately said "No way", whereas I was, like, "DUDE, bring on the angel!”She then said, a bit too wearily, "Yeah, I know. I think most guys would say that. It's a fundamental gender difference.”I think of that conversation when I see aboriginal legislator and former actress May Chin (高金素美) in the news again. This is a woman of whom I can honestly say that, upon seeing her in "The Wedding Banquet", I would have been ready to make a life-long commitment then and there. All I can say is that every day's news brings home to me what a fool I would have been. And still, I have to say, at a convention of fools, she'd be the one that turned my head and made me nudge my buddies -“Damn, did you see that,bud? That was one good-lookin' fool!”

To generalize about the political inclinations of Aborigines on the island is tricky business, but it's probably not inaccurate to say that while there are plenty of exceptions, Aboriginals do seem to tend toward the pan-Blue KMT camp. As far as I can figure, this seems to be on account of the "the enemy of enemy is my friend" school of politics. The Japanese encountered resistance from both Aboriginals and Hokkenese on arrival in 1895, and dealt with both communities with the efficiency and ruthlessness characteristic of the Japanese government of the time. But Taiwanese seem to have learned to work – sometimes uneasily – with the occupiers, while the Aboriginals maintained a largely rejectionist posture.

When the KMT came along in the late forties, many Taiwanese had feelings of nostalgia for the Japanese reinforced as they realized that the Mainlanders were a rough and untutored bunch from a society that was at a distinctly lower stage of development than Taiwan. The 2-28 incident and the White Terror alienated Taiwanese further. Mainland soldiers often found it difficult to find Taiwanese brides, and a large number of them seem to have taken Aboriginals for wives (including May Chin's father). Perhaps the Aborigines thought that they could play the role minorities in so many colonized countries have played - the field bosses lording it over an oppressed native population. It didn't turn out that way for them. The loyalty the Aboriginals have shown to the KMT over decades of martial law has mostly gone unreciprocated. It doesn't seem to have improved their economic situation at all, for whatever reason, while the Taiwanese landed quite nimbly on their feet.

May Chin Attacks II

2005-06-20T01:33:00.000+08:00

Our friends at Zmagazine have an article on the earliest conflict between the aborigines and Japanese, the Mudan incident, proving that Zmag can be perfectly reasonable and informative as long as the subject doesn't involve the U.S. Mudan is located in Pingtung County, on the road cutting east from Che Cheng, and is near and dear to my heart. It's one of my favorite places to cruise on the scooter, and you can pull up in Shi Men, the main village, around dinner time in the summer and play volleyball with some of the friendliest people you will ever meet until the sun goes down. I have lots of friends there, as well as a former girlfriend.

She used to tell me about her grandfather. He was a chief, and one of the fiercest of the fighters against the Japanese. As the Japanese gradually got the upper hand, he was forced to take refuge up in the mountains with even less domesticated Paiwans. As a result, although their chiefs usually do not hunt, the grandfather became that rare anomaly – a chief who was well-versed in all aspects of survival in the mountains. After some years, he was allowed to come down into the village, and even was drafted into the Japanese army. For the rest of his life, she said, he would periodically get the itch and disappear into the mountains for weeks, living the old way, hunting by day, sleeping in trees at night. Later- an image that makes me think of Ike McCaslin in Faulkner's story "The Bear" - when he got old, he would just go and sleep in the tree outside their house - among the last custodians of a consciousness that was attenuating and disappearing forever. In a strange twist suggesting that there were complicated feelings unhinted at by someone like May Chin, my friend said that in his old age he used have a drink or two, dress up in his old Japanese uniform and march up and down the street, with the kids of the village trailing merrily behind him trying to march in time.

An editorial in the Taipei Times, which for some reason can't be gotten online, made some excellent points:

“May Chin's visit to Japan is controversial in Taiwan because everyone knows she is simply a pro-unification politician who often hides beneath the cloak of her Aboriginal status. Since May Chin's father is a Mainlander, it's not surprising that she never fails to echo the pan-blue camp's political arguments, but she does this as though she is representing the Aboriginal community….The absurdity of the situation is that many Aborigines are unaware that their ethnic identity is in danger of being usurped. For example, the Paiwan and Rukai tribes in Pingtung take the hundred-pace snake as their totem. The offspring of Mainlander veterans often opt for Aboriginal status, but when they return home for tribal festivals, the hundred-pace snake has been replaced with the Chinese dragon in their ceremonial regalia. This makes us think of Hong Kong movie star Jackie Chan's recent remark that Shanghai women should marry foreigners to help spread Chinese culture around the world. That Chinese are able to advocate interracial marriage as a tool of cultural conquest is really quite frightening.”

In America, when Big Business wants to push through legislation favorable to themselves, they know they really can't lobby for the legislation on those terms, since Big Business has some image problems. The solution to the problem is so-called "white hat" lobbyists –fronting the lobbying effort with groups that are more palatable. Small business owners paraded in to testify on behalf of legislation that primarily benefits large businesses are a common form of"white hat"lobbyist. The drama queen in May Chin, of course, finds irresistable the colorful costumes and opportunity to invoke the perennial cry of victimhood. Opportunities to dress up and give speeches through a bullhorn, tears running down face, voice cracking with indignation, are not to be passed up. Transparently, this classic"white hat" imagery is being put in the service of the political residue of one of the nastiest martial law regimes of the post-war era.

I want a divorce. But that Parminder Nagra - the one in“Bend It Like Beckham"? Do I hear wedding bells? In a second, dude, a millisecond. Let it not be said of me that I'm afraid of commitment to women I have never met.

May Chin Attacks III

2005-06-20T01:31:00.000+08:00

The Japan War-Bereaved Families Association is a powerful vote-gathering machine of the LDP. Traditionally, it has campaigned for state protection of the shrine and urged successive prime ministers to pay homage to the shrine in their official capacity. Koizumi admitted that during the LDP presidential election campaign four years ago, he asked senior members of the association for their support on condition that he would visit the shrine. But now, the association's head has urged Koizumi to refrain from visiting the shrine.

The Japanese Asahi Shimbun injects a note of reasonableness that is rare in these precincts lately in an editorial. They take note of the likelihood that at least some of those upset about the visits are not manipulating the issue cynically for political gain. The organization representing the dead soldiers, after initially getting a commitment from the Prime Minister to visit the shrine, has released him from the pledge. The possibility is being discussed of a new shrine being built that would avoid the loaded issue of the class A war criminals buried at Yasukuni. One feels on entering into this editorial: this is the way people in liberal societies go about the process of resolving difficult issues. It is a world away from the machinations of May Chin, a legislator who represents only a portion of the aboriginal community in Taiwan, but purports to speak for them all; who disdains going through the Taiwanese governmental department designated to represent that community's issues in negotiations with foreign governments; who stages a loud, emotional demonstration in another country; then accuses the Taiwan government of not backing her up.

It puts me in mind of another demonstration held recently by yet another old line KMT constituency: teachers, specifically intern teachers. Historically, teaching has been a classic government "iron rice bowl" profession, with the KMT requiring most teachers to be politically loyal in return for lifetime job security. The DPP has been trying to rationalize and mainstream the profession, getting them to accommodate the dramatically falling birth rates on the island and, who knows, maybe one day getting them to pay taxes like everyone else. The former policies assured the loyalty to the KMT from the older cohort; the latter policies seem to be doing a good job of alienating the teacher interns. Me, I believe in public schools. I'm mostly a free markets kind of guy, but I tend to make an exception for education and health care, which I believe help knit a society together. Reasonable people can disagree about whether the DPP reforms are being implemented properly or not. What I would insist on is that the goal of the public education system is to provide education to the island's children,not to be a jobs program. The people demonstrating need to make their case on those terms – how is giving them jobs going to make the system better at acheiving its goal? What I saw were an awful lot of signs saying that the government is spending so much money on the military and they should be spending that money on education instead. Well, the government is not spending a great deal of money on defense, considering the threat to Taiwan - only the KMT views the government as a defense spendthrift. This line of reasoning only reinforces the suspicion that this is just another KMT constituency digging in its heels against the evolution of the society away from the old single party, machine politics and patronage days. At the very least – bad P.R. move, guys.

It's sad to see some aboriginal leaders trying to hold their constituents in the old dependent relationship with the KMT. Did all those decades of condescending Confucian patriarchalism really benefit their community? The DPP may pay them the respect of challenging them - in somewhat the way Clinton challenged America's poor with his welfare reform - to join the modern world. It shouldn't follow automatically that Chen's party is their enemy. As for the future, as the KMT cozies up to the CCP, they might ask themselves: "Is life for the poor, minorities and labor likely to get better if unification comes about?"

Crime Over Courage In Iraq

2005-06-16T22:11:00.000+08:00

"Sordid details of thugs and kidnappers such as these cannot compete with the romantic images of Iraqi 'insurgents' taking desperate measures in desperate times, so don't expect to see Hayssam's story on the evening news here or on al-Jazeera's Arabic broadcasts."

An excellent examination of the people Michael Moore has described as modern-day Minutemen in today's Washington Post by Jim Hoagland. I can't imagine why, but George Galloway also came to mind as I was reading.

Early 70's Nostlagia Time

2005-06-11T03:29:00.000+08:00

I don't have any real deep thoughts to add to the revelation that Mark Felt, FBI Hoover loyalist, was the storied Deep Throat of the Watergate era. Nixon was a politico who, in the espionage unsavvy world of politicians, fashioned himself as a kind of worldly Big Fish dirty trickster in a pond full of Small Fish dirty tricksters. His problem was a bit reminiscent of a cliched scene from a dozen gangster movies: a thug tells the respectable citizen who'd always idolized gangsters and finally kills somebody "Now you've crossed the line. Now you're one of us, and we'll see how you do." Nixon played the tough guy who knew all the angles at the expense of people like Helen Gahagan Douglas for so many years that he seems to have convinced himself that he was a real graduate of spook culture, out of the Wild Bill Donovan School that so many tough guy wannabe's of his generation idolized. When Hoover died, he took on the Hoover loyalists at the FBI and, despite the huge institutional advantage of the presidency, they outspied him, outleaked him, out dirty-tricked him. He didn't (and doesn't) get the sympathy other politicians might, precisely because he'd eroded the fire-wall between politicians and sleuths that ultimately protects politicians. He was one of them now. Playing against the big boys.

Of course the Hoover loyalists were, if anything, an even nastier bunch. These are the people who taped Martin Luther King cheating on his wife, then threw a brick with the tape onto his front porch to try to get him to stop marching. Their fingerprints are all over the Malcom X murder. Elijah Muhammad's people were the ones looking for Malcolm to kill him, but no matter how much Malcolm tried to hide, they always seemed to know where he was, which was way beyond their espionage resources. It was Hoover with whom Robert Kennedy had to battle over the priorities of the FBI and the Justice Department. Hoover insisted on beating the dead horse of anti-Communist subversion, even as Kennedy made a credible case that the threat of organized crime was far more pressing. This is why Kennedy ultimately had to form his Justice Department team against organized crime outside the Bureau. Taylor Branch wrote in "Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years": "Like the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, the FBI's clandestine political arm (called COINTELPRO for 'counterintelligence program') adopted the premise that the civil rights movement was a disguised arm of Communist conspiracy. COINTELPRO grew into active use just as the actual threat of Cold War subversion diminished, expanding into new territory against the connective alliances of the civil rights movement." Nixon was completely correct in wanting to break the grip of the Hooverites on the Bureau. In a lot of ways, they remind one of the KMT old guard. He just didn't realize that he wasn't positioned to do so, which is the kind of thing politicians have to know. In the end, Nixon had to resign, the Hoover loyalists were brought to heel, and people like Mark Felt were convicted in court for at least a bit of their illegal wiretapping. Mostly, the system worked, but it was a rough ride.

Mostly, the re-emergence of the Watergate story evoked a wave of nostlagia for me, on account of my having been raised in Washington and, at twelve in 1972, just at the age of starting to read newspapers just as that story hit big. Of course, my family didn't get the Post, much as I'd like to report that the earliest stories I read were the Woodward and Bernstein classics. No, we were loyalists of the Washington Star, the Republican-leaning paper delivered in the evening. The Star was the older and more established paper, but evening papers were going the way of the dodo, and the Star, alas, failed to adapt. It was a great writer's paper, though, and a far more worthy counterpoint to the Post in the nation's capital than today's Washington Times.

It's remarkable how evocative these old pictures can be of a certain time and place. The hairstyles, the Never-Wear-Cotton sartorial preferences, and the before-the-deluge whiteness of the world in these photos all amaze me: "I was there!" More than any of the specifics, the very texture of life that comes through the photos is recognizable to me as from the stage of development when one has first arrived at the "age of reason", but the mind still retains much of the pliancy and retention of childhood. I don't mind confessing to a bit of pride at having made the long and far journey from there to here, with enough energy left intact so that- even if I don't have quite the horsepower I used to- like Curious George, you probably don't want to leave me unattended for too long.

My dad was a civil servant in the State Department, part of the security detail for the Secretary of State. He served as a bodyguard for both Dean Rusk and William Rogers, but he said Rogers was a cold fish. Rusk he worshipped. Rusk, a protege of George Marshall, was for my father everything a statesman and a man should be. Nothing I've read about Rusk in subsequent years has lead me to believe otherwise. On winter nights, in those sleepy days before Munich woke everybody up, my dad would take a blanket and a thermos to work the midnight shift. Mrs. Rusk would bring hot drinks out to him. Among my childhood brushes with great power, I can boast of having been taken in one night to see the desk of the Secretary; we also had a weekend at Camp David, as a treat to State Department staffers. It was puzzling to me why it was so terribly important to my parents that I play nicely with a particular little boy, but it was the only son of the Camp Commandant and apparently it was a rare thing for him to have a child his own age to play with.

The Watergate stuff made me nostalgic about my teacher, Willie Studevent. I was in sixth grade that year, and I'd accumulated a singularly colorful rap sheet in the previous five years as a hell-raiser and tantrum thrower. Of a staff of about twenty at our suburban school, Willie was one of only two black teachers (the other a woman), and one of only two male teachers. He was the only teacher who sat with the kids and ate with us at lunch. He told us "They just sit in there and talk about you guys every afternoon and I don't want to hear it. When kids come into my class in September I want to form my own impressions." He had a highly ritualized way of eating - just so many chews on one side of the mouth and just so many on the other - and he shared that with us, too. When he fought with his wife on the weekend, we heard all about it on Monday morning. Called us all by our last names, which was a new one on us - "Get your anatomy over here, Carlton!", he'd bellow at demure Jenny Carlton, who'd never in her life been called anything but Jenny, much less had reference made to her anatomy. But his language was infectious. You'd hear kids out on the playground yelling "Don't give me any of that shuckin' and jivin', Davis. Throw me the ball!"

Willie went to the same college in North Carolina as Earl Monroe - I think it was Winston-Salem College - and used to hang with the Pearl back in the day. He told how he stood by the tunnel one day after a Bullets game and extended his hand and said "Hey, Earl, it's me Willie Studevent!" and the Pearl just kept on going without a glance. He misted up when he told us that and I thought he was going to lose it, but that's the way it was with Willie - he shared everything with his class, uncensored and unguarded. Willie was on the football team and told us apochryphal stories about how, for instance, his coach made them not take a bath for a week before a big game they were underdogs in, and they stunk so bad they won going away. We believed every word - the boys, at least. Forced us to diagram sentences on the board, old school. When a whole world of fathers were commuting in to town, Willie was commuting the other way every day, and I don't think the teachers in that school ever really recovered. His protection was the white male principal of the school, who loved him. When that principal died in a car crash a couple of years later, Willie was toast. They wanted diversification, and that's what they got - and most of them didn't handle it very well at all.

That was a year of great opening up for me. I started reading the paper. Willie said he always started with the back of the paper, because the editorials was where all the action was. I still read the paper that way today. He'd tell us "J. Edgar Hoover's got files on every one of those senators and congressmen. The president, too. He knows every one who stepped out, who with, and when they did it. He sends them a letter telling them that in the course of routine surveillance his agents inadvertantly came across this image of the senator with his secretary. He tells them as a friend that they need to be more discreet, because the papers might get wind of it. Then they know Hoover's got the goods on them." Nobody'd talked to us like that before - like we were equals, who should know what was really going on. I didn't read the original Woodstein articles, but I know Willie did and, believe me, we got the synopsis and the free editorials for no extra charge on a regular basis. Circa-1972 blogging, and it was like a spoonful of wasabe shooting up my nose and into my brain and it woke up things there that haven't been able to be put back to sleep ever since.

Chinese Students' Top Ten Heroes

2005-06-04T02:37:00.000+08:00

“毛主席和周總理自然就不用說了，他們都是我們黨和國家的領袖，我也一直很崇敬他們。”劉翔說，“至於雷鋒能入選，我倒有點意外，我沒想到現在的中學生，仍然沒有忘記他，我覺得這是一件很好的事情，無論現在還是將來我們都需要雷鋒精神。”劉翔還談到了成龍，他說：“成龍大哥的入選也很說明問題，我想以前一位影視明星是不太可能進入前十位的，但成龍大哥的電影風靡世界，在電影中展示了中國人的風采，其實這是件很了不起的事。”

In a poll of Chinese Junior High students' Top Ten Heroes", Mao Ze Dong won first place. "Parents" were in second place. Of course it was Mao who told children to inform on their parents, and parade their elders about in the "airplane" posture. Good to see Chinese young people are still putting the Chairman first, in front of their parents. Parents were followed by Zhou En-lai, who used all his ormidable skills to try to mitigate the effects of Mao's madness. Third for him. Fourth place went to Cultural Revolution-era "model worker" Lei Feng. (I'm not sure if it was Lei Feng or some other model worker who, when the cement mixer down at the plant broke down, jumped into the vat of wet cement and began to flail around wildly in order to mix the cement. I love that story.) In fifth place, and the first contemporary - the first mortal, really - was Olympic hurdler Liu Hsiang. Sixth place was 成龍 himself, Jackie Chan.

Liu Hsiang, who seems like a nice young man, was interviewed for the article, and is quoted above. He says "Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou go without saying. They are both our Party's and our country's leaders. I have revered them as well my whole life." I think it's notable what an enormous shadow the Cultural Revolution still casts over this country, even over those who were too young to experience it. And because people's access to information about it has been managed and politicized by the CCP we can see the warping effect in that two of the three "heroes" exemplify the idea that this was a great and glorious time in Chinese history. The Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward are huge, undigested chunks of experience that this traumatized society is far from having digested.

"Liu Hsiang said 'As for Lei Feng, I have to admit I wouldn't have expected him to make the list. I would have expected today's Junior High students to have forgotten him. I think it's great, though. Whether it's today or in the future, we all need more of the Lei Feng spirit'....Brother Chan's inclusion also elucidates a problem: It seems to me that in the past a movie star could never have been included in the top ten list, but Brother Chan's movies have become all the rage. His movies exhibit the elegant bearing and panache of the Chinese. Actually, I think this is a great thing."

Jackie ("Taiwan's election was a joke") Chan is rapidly becoming the poster boy for the CCP's New China. Lyndon Johnson famously commented that he sometimes wondered if Gerald Ford hadn't played a few too many football games without his helmet on, and I'm beginning to wonder if Jackie hasn't done his own stunts a few too many times. We know what Jackie thinks because he has unfettered access to the media, but Zhao Ziyang, even posthumously, seems to be having a harder time getting his views on democracy out. Jackie's embrace of Chinese nationalism is a good career move, but the career of Ching Cheong, the Singaporean journalist who wanted to let Chinese young people read the words of Zhang, seems to stalled. As for Chan's native Hong Kong, I wonder if he thinks
their elections are a joke? I haven't seem him comment on it, but we can surmise that Jackie's not going to be making any bad career moves any time soon.

KMT Land I

2005-06-02T19:52:00.000+08:00

Bait them with the prospect of gain, bewilder and mystify them
Use anger to disrupt them, humility to make them arrogant
Tire them by running away, cause them to quarrel among themselves.
Attack them when they do not expect it, when they are least prepared
Be so subtle that you are invisible.
Be so mysterious thaat you are intangible.
Then you will control your rival's fate.
Use espionage and mystification in every enterprise.
All life is based on deception.

I've never really had much patience for the Sun-Tzu cult. I'm sure he's worth reading as an academic pursuit, on account of his having influenced countless generations of Chinese imperial courtiers and emperors,the same way you could spend your time reading through the works of Ptolemy because the idea that the planets revolve around the sun held sway for 1,500 years. Most people who passionately recommend that I read Sun-Tzu assure me his thinking is of blinding relevance to navigating the modern world. I remain a sceptic. One of the secrets of the success of the Western financial system that ultimately became the international system is that, whereas many business deals in the past had to be done based on trust,or faith, today there are elaborate and rather effective mechanisms to detect liars and cheaters. There's still a fair amount of the old school kind of trust-building around today, of course. Let's just say that if I were at a KTV doing the kind of trust-building socializing businessmen do, if my counterpart were to tell me he was a big fan of Sun-Tzu he would not be moving closer to sealing the deal. Most people who are convinced they are far more subtle, facile and clever than those around them are just frauds, usually shielded by privilege of one kind or another, with limited awareness of how transparent they are to others. In egalitarian situations, people get disabused pretty quickly of the conceit that they're masters of deception.

For people who've been vacationing on Mars, the KMT, as political parties are wont to do, has been trying to have a primary election to determine the next party chairman. Lien is the incumbent, having served as losing candidate for the party in two general elections. Now, flush from his handshake with Hu Jin-tao, he's back to preside over the ascension of a new generation of KMT leaders, with Ma Ying-jeou and Wang Jin-ping as contenders. Straightforward enough – for most parties. But the Kuo Min Tang is not most parties. There's an enormous weight of history, thousands of years deep, of mostly unedifying precedents imported from across the Straits, that keeps this party awake late into the night howling at the moon. The KMT's Old World is a world of imperial palace court intrigues, of thick-face-black-heartery, of feints and deceptions and an understanding of transitional politics as a show performed on a stage while knives are quietly unsheathed backstage. So it appears that, no, the KMT is not yet ready to conduct a normal democratic party primary.

For weeks, getting any sense of what was going on from news reports was like the old profession of kremlinology. The papers announced that Lien had said he was not going to run. He was going to hold a press conference in which he would announce his plans, and when it was held he informed the world that he did not intend to run for party chair. He sent a KMT spokesman out to say "Candidates should state clearly how they would like to lead the party, as well as the future development of it." Okay. Straightforwardness and clarity- good things. Lien then said – again- that he was not running. Hmm. "I'm not interested in joining the race," he reiterated on May 25. Okay. Godspeed to ya on yer way to the pantheon of whatever, oh noble knight! Good-bye. Good-bye. Wang Jin-ping offered that if Lien did run- which of course he had no intention of doing- he (Wang) would renounce his candidacy in deference to Lien, "to avoid splitting the party." When asked by the press if he, too, would fall on his sword, Ma made it clear that he intended to forgo that option and he would run for the position of KMT party chair. Full stop. Which part of I-intend-to-run don't you understand?

KMT leaders (Lien loyalists) announced a debate format that consisted of a thirty minute "report" by each of the candidates, followed by a question-and-answer session in which members of the Standing Committee (read Lien loyalists) would ask the questions. Enigmatically, so subtle that he was invisible, a black-clad ninja shadow on the rooftop, Lien stated once more for the record "I'm not interested in joining the chairmanship race.” But wait - a twist! (That Volkov – wasn't he third from the right of Stalin on last year's May Day viewing platform? And now, he's fifth from the right? What could it possibly mean?) Lien added "There is room for discussion if people still harbor doubts about he candidates" after the "debates". "The reports," the Taipei Times reported, "were arranged based on a proposal by KMT Chairman Lien Chan, who reiterated on Wednesday that he had no interest in seeking re-election."

KMT Land II

2005-06-02T19:51:00.000+08:00

Meanwhile, a KMT legislator, one Wu Den-yi, also reiterated that Lien had no interest in seeking re-election, suggesting that there was no implied disloyalty to Lien in Ma's running. "Arriving at KMT headquarters yesterday, Lien was tight-lipped when asked to comment on Wu's remark," the Times reported (wasn't Karamovski wearing a hat last year? Why isn't he wearing a hat?) "Wu also said that Lien had told him personally that he would not seek another term as party chairman." But then there were media reports that Lien (so mysterious that he was intangible) had called Wu in and rebuked him for saying these things. This was not denied by the KMT. "Commenting on the report, KMT spokewoman Cheng Li-wen said Lien made the move because he did not want the public to think he is siding with either Wang or Ma in the race." Huh? Wang gave further credibility to the idea that rebuking Wu was in the name of impartiality by enthusiastically endorsing it.

"But Wang also repeated his commitment that if Lien decided to seek another term he would quit the race for the chairmanship. 'We should allow Mr. Lien to think about this and make his own mind up,' he said. Wang also said that he could not understand why a senior party member (Wu) had accused party leaders of impeding democratic reform within the party. 'The spirit of democracy is diversity. If someone has made such an accusation he has probably failed to comprehend the spirit of democracy,' he said. Got that? Diversity is the spirit of democracy, which is why if the incumbent lets it be known through winks and nods that he wishes to run again, all other candidates should voluntarily remove themselves from the race and allow him to run unopposed.

The effect of Ma's not removing himself from the race has been to flush to the surface the palace intriguers; at least some of the palace intriguers. Lien continues to be subtle as the wind, a spectre moving in the twilight. But 22 members of the party's Central Committee (would this be the same "impartial" Central Committee that Lien designated to shoot impartial questions at the candidates in the format he insisted on instead of a normal debate format?) signed a petition "begging" him to serve another term. Then a group of elderly supporters with the words "support Lien to save the nation" on their caps got down on their knees to dramatize the request. Ma's father,Ma Ho Ling, an old KMT warhorse whose connections gave Ma his start in the KMT so many years ago, weighed in with the opinion that his son should not run if Lien wished to run. Then, as if to underline that we are not dealing with people here who have the slightest inkling of what democratic, modern societies are about, he offered helpfully that he would consider killing himself if his son did not withdraw. Now, my first thought on hearing this was that we may be dealing with an Alzheimer's patient here. The truly scary thing is that, on closer inspection, this does not appear to be the case. Ma Ho Ling appears to be, in the medical if not the colloquial sense, entirely in his right mind. He's just, like so many of the KMT old guard, from another time, another world altogether. As I was beginning this essay, I was watching on the news a Taipei City Councilwoman named Lu roundly lighting into Ma for his lack of filial piety and for not caring whether his father lived or died. Ma, deadpan, kept replying throughout the tirade "Thank you. Thank you for your concern. My whole family thanks you for your concern about my father's well-being." Ma's sister later showed up at one of his campaign events to make clear that he was by no means isolated within his family. Amazing.

KMT Land III

2005-06-02T19:45:00.000+08:00

A Taipei Times article says what needs to be said: "Similar charades from imperial times can be read in history textbooks. After a power struggle the victor would say that 'The support of so many people left him no choice but to take the throne.' It was a hackneyed ploy even back then, but Lien has never been one to avoid a cliché. It is time to say enough is enough and put an end to this soap opera, this comedy of horrors. By putting on such an outmoded spectacle, the KMT has once again demonstrated that it is out of touch with reality and with the democratic era." The Times's editorial on the most recent developments can be found here.

Credit does need to be given to Ma, however. The rap on him has always been that he was a bit to soft to be an effective administrator, too soft and deferential to the elders to represent a new generation of leadership for the KMT. He is fighting the good fight now, though. Taiwan does need a credible, modern opposition to the DPP to continue to develop democratically. The question is whether what Ma's fighting to save is worth saving. The constituency will still be there and will reform under some new banner, with the influence ofthe Old Guard vastly reduced. The KMT, with its vast, ill-gotten wealth acquired during the martial law era, and its control of a media empire, may not be worth saving.

The two most important cross-currents in Taiwan political life are: attitudes towards cross-straits relations and attitudes toward democratization. Of all the main players in Taiwan politics, Ma is unique in the degree to which he's wind-sheared by these two currents. Brought up by a father with a characteristically feudal way of thinking, he was then sent to Harvard Law School. He conducts himself as a man who understands and respects democratic processes, yet he believes, against all evidence, that Beijing would genuinely honor a one country, two-systems arrangement. He also believed in the KMT Old Guard. It's easy to jeer now that the incompatibility of these ideas is being brought home to him by his own father. But we might remember that Ma had another mentor/father-figure, Chiang Ching-kuo. Chiang was a classic henchman of the party through the darkest years of the White Terror period, but I believe he also did more to break the momentum of the authoritarian state in the last years of his life than any other figure. The late life evolution of Ching-kuo into a proto-democrat is one of the most implausible turn-abouts in Taiwan history and also one of Ma's most important early formative experiences. He'll wait a long time and cut an increasingly plaintive figure waiting for the others in Chiang's cohort to grow and evolve similarly, but he seems to be sincere.

An article from the Chinese-language Dong Lin News Service (which I apologize, I lost the link to) made a number of good points. First, Ma could probably not win a general election without the endorsement of Lien Chan, so he is in a very delicate position. On the other hand, what level of support could possibly be expected from people like Wu Den-ying if Lien were to actually run for a third time? We saw in the days following the visits to Hu Jin-tao that there was a crisis of limited duration and intensity for Chen Shui-bian in the wake of those visits. What we are seeing now is that the implications for the KMT are far more ominous, and the crisis deeper. The Dong Lin article concludes:

“Wang Jin-ping has also received a severe blow to his reputation. He has not had the ability to steer his own course in the wake of the meetings of Lien and Song with Hu Jin-tao. Ma has also had to struggle to find a viable path in the wake of the meetings. An example of the kind of dilemma that could become routine for the party in the wake of the rapprochement with the communists will come on June 4. Will Ma attend the commemorations of the Tian An Men massacre on that date, as he has every year previously, or will he not risk offending his party's new allies and stay away? The tectonic plates are shifting under the feet of the KMT, having received the kiss of death from Hu. Who would have thought that the fate of the KMT would rest in the hands of the Communist Party? It begins to appear as if the imprecation of Hsu Hsin Liang, uttered so many years ago, could turn out to be prophecy: “Let the Kuo Min Tang vanish from the face of the earth.”

Congressional Daydream

2005-05-27T02:13:00.000+08:00

"In a frosty exchange, NBA Commissioner David Stern bristled at a suggestion from Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) that last fall's brawl between Indiana Pacer Ron Artest and Detroit Piston fans should have triggered a test for steroids, which Lynch said are known to cause aggressive behavior."

Is it just me, or does it seem that the more off the wall the U.S. Congress gets on things like filibusters and end-of-life plug -pulling cases, the more they seem to be spending time on lecturing professional sports on the subject of steroids. In an interesting juxtaposition, last week a certain Mr. George Galloway visited the Senate from across the pond, which you may have heard about. Now Galloway appears to be a truly odious fellow, who's been in a particularly sour mood since the prospect of being held accountable as an enthusiastic supporter of Saddam Hussein has loomed. But that's not what I wanted to talk about, either. (What, you're in a hurry?) What's interesting is that virtually everybody, including people who consider Galloway untouchable without long tongs, agreed that Galloway slapped off their baseball caps and stole their lunch money in the joust, and everybody seemed to take pleasure in the spectacle. Characteristic was this passage from Christopher Hitchens:

In a small way--an exceedingly small way--this had the paradoxical effect of making me proud to be British. Parliament trains its sons in a hard school of debate and unscripted exchange, and so does the British Labour movement. You get your retaliation in first, you rise to a point of order, you heckle and you watch out for hecklers. The torpid majesty of a Senate proceeding does nothing to prepare you for a Galloway, who is in addition a man without embarrassment who has stayed just on the right side of many inquiries into his character and his accounting methods.

As it happened this morning I was all out of coffee and in need of something to get my capillaries open and my blood pumping, and I started to conjure this day-dream in which Ron Artest is being grilled by Rep. Lynch's committee, only now he is standing up, having had quite enough. Pointing a finger, he bellows "You have accused me of taking steroids without a shred of evidence in the most public of forums, Representative Lynch. You, sir, are a liar - and we've seen a lot more evidence here for that charge than you've ever presented to support your charges against me. As for the rest of you, you summon me here to testify,and smear up my name by doing so, just like you did when you brought Raf Palmeiro here, but you don't even have the cojones to admit what you're doing. You're not even made of the stuff to be principled, straightforward liars, like Mr. Lynch here.

I want to say emphatically for the public record that I have never taken steroids, and that I believe taking steroids is wrong because it is cheating. But I want to say one more thing" - and at this point, improbably, Ron Artest begins speaking in a booming, righteous, thespian Scottish brogue - "I recently did a bit of research on you fellows while you were so assiduously researching us. Did you know -but I bet you did - that in the 2002 elections, 96% of incumbents in this body won re-election? 96%! That in '98 and 2000 the number was 99%? Were you aware - but I bet you were - that in 2002, the average winning share of the vote was 68%? What a terribly popular group we are! No, no, Mr. Chairman, I'm not ready to sit down yet. I'm not finished.

And what I'd like to say is that what you are doing is wrong, and harmful to the nation. It is wrong for the same reason that taking steroids is wrong. GERRYMANDERING IS WRONG BECAUSE IT IS CHEATING,LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! And the only reason why gerrymandering is legal and steroids are illegal is that people like you use the former form of cheating and some people like me use the latter. Now, what I do for a living is not as important as what you do, but I'm proud to be a member of the NBA. A lot of people who are smarter than you or me both say that we do what we do a good deal better than you in Congress do what you do. I'm proud to be part of a genuine meritocracy. Truth is, if I had only a 2 or 3 percent chance of losing every time I took the floor, it could only be because the game was rigged, and pretty soon I'd be a fat and flabby and gassed out basketball player. Then there'd have to be a congressional investigation. And now, Mr. Chairman, I will sit down and you may speak."

That was my daydream as I was shaving today. Almost cut myself.

Ginsberg and Kissinger

2005-05-25T16:37:00.000+08:00

Henry Kissinger, unlike Nixon, did not tape his telephone conversations, according to the most recent edition of The Atlantic magazine, but he did have his secretary listen in and transcribe the conversations. "Some 20,000 pages of the transcripts....were opened to the public last year", covering the period from 1969 to 1974, Kissinger's salad days. Allen Ginsberg and Kissinger were, apparently, not even acquainted, but Ginsberg called Kissinger in 1971, cold turkey, in an attempt to arrange a meeting between antiwar activists and the national-security advisor:

AG: I am calling partly at the request of Senator McCarthy... My idea is to arrange a conversation between yourself, Helms, McCarthy, and maybe even Nixon, with Rennie Davis, Dellinger, and Abernathy. It can be done at any time.

HK: I have been meeting with many members representing peace groups, but what I find is that they have always then rushed right out and given the contents of the meeting to the press. But I like to do this, not only for the enlightenment of the people I talk to but to at least give me a feel of what concerned people think. I would be prepared to meet in principle on a private basis.

AG: That's true. But it is a question of personal delicacy. In dealing with human consciences, it is difficult to set limits.

HK: You can't set limits to human consciences, but -

AG: We can try to come to some kind of understanding.

HK: You can set limits to what you say publicly.

AG: It would be even more funny to do it on television.

HK: What?

AG: It would even more useful if we could do it naked on television.

HK: (Laughter)

I think if I had to spend the rest of whatever on a deserted island with a lefty, I would choose Allen Ginsberg. I know, I know - but then I'd have to listen to Sheryl Crowe talking about the Iraq War.

In keeping with the directive from Betelnut Headquarters to make all posts related in some way to the realm of the Yellow Emperor, I seem to remember reading a book by Annie Dillard about a trip by a group of intellectuals to China, one of the first such visits made posssible in the waning days of the Cultural Revolution. It's been many years since I read it, but I do remember being singularly impressed with the portrait of Ginsberg - gentle, funny,and wise. I don't imagine what they were allowed to see was very representative of the reality of China at the time, but then, seeing anything of China in those days was something special for westerners. And the trip would have been worth it just for the company.

Unfevered

2005-05-25T00:24:00.000+08:00

Personally, I think it's all bullshit; I don't think Chen has changed his position one iota. Why was there none of this "he's giving up on independence" outrage when he declared he would not seek independence in 2000? Or again in 2004? Or when he said he wanted to talk to China on the same basis as the 1992 talks?
Those times he was labelled as an insincere trouble maker, and yet he was saying almost exactly the same things as he is now. The media think he's turned from a rabid independence-supporter to a rabid unificationist overnight - when in fact he's been a moderate president all along.
Incidentally, on the split with Lee: remember we're a few days away from an election where the DPP and the TSU are on opposite sides. The TSU (and PFP) are trying to block the constitutional reform that Chen backs, so it's not surprising a few sparks would fly

This from David in the comments section a while back. Basically, from the vantage point of several weeks later - all points conceded. The entire China Fever phenomenon has deflated even more quickly than I could have guessed. Some quick reflections: first, it seems more and more clear that, looking long-term, China and the U.S. will vie for pre-eminence as deep water navies in the region. This does not necessarily mean war - in fact, acknowledging the adversarial nature of the relationship may help avert a war. But Bush had it right that they are "strategic rivals." Second, in this adversarial relationship, the fault line basically bisects the Taiwanese political landscape - that is to say, for all intents and purposes, the pan-Blues are on the other side from the U.S. If the "We are all descendants of the Yellow Emperor" rhetoric didn't make that clear, then the Blues' obstruction of the arms bill indispensible to Taiwan's defense certainly does.

What is interesting - and revealing - is that while two washed up Blue leaders made their tributary(朝貢) journeys, the two politicians vying to succeed them both declined to do so. The results of the National Assembly elections would seem to indicate why this is. The Taiwanese electorate seems to take the idea of maintaining the status quo so much to heart there are times when the U.S. seems positively hoist by its own petard. Before the Legislative elections, Chen seemed to be threatening the status quo, and the voters made an adjustment; this time, it was the Blues. It's sobering for the Greens to contemplate that, but for the botched assassination, they most likely would have been voted out of office last year. On the other hand, let us not forget that much of the Blue platform in the months prior to that election consisted of the Blues trying to co-opt (what Clinton made famous as "triangulation") much of the Green platform. Remember Lien and Soong kneeling and kissing the ground to dramatize their love of Taiwan? We didn't hear a lot about the Yellow Emperor then. It will be interesting to see in the next presidential election if the Blue candidate will be able to get away with the Formosa-kissing shtick, or if people remember the Great China rhetoric that came after the election.

Xia Yi I

2005-05-24T23:16:00.000+08:00

I swore I wasn't going to post about this but, here we go -into the gutter! Readers from outside Taiwan will be puzzled, but for those on the island in the habit of watching Taiwan T.V. news, the story of Xia Yi and Ni Ming-jan, the variety show actor who hung himself,has been 24/7 for several weeks, only seeming to lose its legs the last few days. I'm no expert on the details of the story for the perfectly good reason that the personal lives of these people is none of my damn business. It would seem that Ni, twenty years married and with two children not yet grown, was having an affair with a fellow actor, Xia Yi, about thirty. Ni appears to have been suffering the symptoms of bipolar disorder in the months before his death. Xia said he would call his friends and have long conversations, repeating the same things over and over again. He was in danger of losing crucial jobs, even as his financial situation eroded. When he started the affair with Xia, his wife moved to America, but then Xia had had enough of him and moved to Japan and wanted to end the relationship. Ni disappeared for two weeks, then killed himself. That's as clear as I can make it out.

The friends of Ni - a good slice of the variety show celebrity stable - have since risen as one and accused Xia of essentially being responsible for Ni's suicide. It seems it is Xia who left Ni's wife a widow and his children orphans. Who else? Certainly not the sainted dead –The Clown Who Brought Laughter To Others While His Own Heart Was Breaking. Ugh! There are various sub-plots, including a dispute about whether Xia Yi should have the copyright to a play the two worked on together, but this is the essence of the story that has sent Taiwan's media into paroxysms of ecstasy.

Xia Yi didn't exactly help things by getting on a plane and flying right into the eye of the typhoon the minute the funeral services concluded. This set the scene for a classic Taoyuan airport scrum that made the reception given to Elton ("Vile Pigs! You're all animals!") John look tame by comparison. A press conference followed in which Xia stood holding a microphone for several minutes while the camera people jockeyed for position, interrupting her repeatedly by roundly cursing each other in gangster Taiwanese. Xia tried to explain herself point -by -point, but in the subsequent twenty-four hours the verdict from the Friends of Ni was emphatic. Murderer. Harlot. Tramp. “I'll never set foot on a stage with her again!”That sort of thing.

Xia Yi II

2005-05-24T23:14:00.001+08:00

Thus, universally vilified, Xia Yi was compelled to hold another press conference in the presence of all her accusers. In a scene of ritual humiliation resonant of Cultural Revolution self-criticism sessions, Xia Yi for the first time conceded that she had, in fact, been romantically linked to Ni. She also, if I am not mistaken, handed over rights to the play to Ni's family. Newsreaders, in the manner of reporters counting the ovations given during a State of the Union address, kept count of the times she broke into uncontrollable sobbing and couldn't continue (was it nine times or eleven?). She apologized to Ni's wife, to his children, to the friends of the actor who had said such terrible things about her for weeks and now sat by in stony-faced vindication. In an apotheosis of the excruciating, she even apologized abjectly to the assembled media for her outrageous behavior at the airport (apparently lacking the athletic skill of Robbie Williams, who sprinted through the terminal, Xia Yi had had her way physically impeded and had yelled at them and called for the police). Now we know what hyenas look like when they're being apologized to.

The lack of any admirable party in all this is part of my initial disinclination to write about it. But then, that's not exactly true: through the entire affair, Ni's wife declined every invitation to excoriate Xia Yi, then immediately after the funeral, she boarded a plane for America. Think about that –hundreds of microphones craning her way and she declines to speak; scores of cameras trained on her and she gets on a plane and just leaves! But then, she alone among the principals is not Show People. When I'd get to thinking that I was being too hard on the variety show celebs, I'd think of Ni's wife and be reminded that, no, regular people with any sense of decency or dignity don't, in fact, behave this way.

About twenty years ago, this group of variety show actors and actresses had their start in a vaudeville-like circuit that basically pre-dated T.V., or at least cable T.V. Here in Taichung, in the neighborhood around the intersection of Zi You and Gong Yuan Roads, there were venues ("Show-場") where there were live shows ("做 Show") where most of these people got started. You can still see the signs, and the places themselves, all boarded up, because the neighborhood has pretty much gone to seed since. When T.V. came in, there were only three channels, so most of the actors were out of luck, but the top echelon of performers made the transition and did quite well for themselves. Ni Ming-jan was one of these. Ten years ago, I can myself remember that these variety shows were all the rage. Since then, various game shows and the like, tailored specifically for the medium, have gradually edged them out, especially with younger viewers, but people still have a nostalgic attachment to the aging group of performers from the variety shows.

Xia Yi III

2005-05-24T23:14:00.000+08:00

Basically, I think this is the way a certain type of person mourns:“Ah, Davie, he was a good boy! A living saint, he was, and he never did anyone a bit of harm in his life." (Okay, I have Irish relatives - but the phenomenon is not unique to Irish funerals, I don't think). And, of course, if Davie was a blameless saint, then someone must be responsible for his death. Call it the Recriminatory School of Mourning:“You killed our Davie!" And it's hard to put a check on this sort of thing without appearing to be disrespectful to the dead, so it just snowballs. What I'd like to say is that if a fifty year-old man leaves his wife, if his finances are a wreck, if he hangs himself–well, he may have been a good man with many sterling qualities, but absolutely no one but himself is responsible for the end he came to. As to the dispute about publishing rights, isn't that what courts of law are for? Since when are legal disputes about publishing rights adjudicated in press conferences, with the deceased friends as jurors? But since the Taiwan's press seems to have unlimited access to airports, police stations, hospitals and courts, maybe they've convinced themselves they're pilots, cops, doctors and judges. Nobody seems inclined to disabuse them.

Not to muddy up one of my personal idols with being mentioned in the same breath with a group I consider to be of somewhat dubious talent, but I keep thinking of the story of Woody Guthrie when I read about this. As in the case of Ni, Woody's behavior became progressively unpredictable and erratic over time, so that even people who loved him deeply, like his wife, moved away from him. And as with Ni, Woody's problem was essentially neurological- Huntington's Corea in Woody's case, and (apparently) bi-polar disorder in Ni's. Woody, like Ni, ran to the arms of a younger woman who had no idea that he was mentally deteriorating because of a medical condition. In both cases, the younger woman was initially flattered by the attention from a "legend", only to find out the truth the hard way. In either case, blaming the "other" woman for the demise of the entertainer just strikes me as ludicrous.

Xia Yi has several strikes against her among the Friends of Ni: she's one of the very few younger talents in a circle of graying, fading performers; she is a woman, and for some reason in Taiwan, when a single woman has an affair with a married man the greatest weight of recrimination seems to fall on the woman rather than on the man. (Who can forget the case of Chu Mei Feng, the Taipei City Councilwoman who divorced the Mayor of Hsinchu? Later, she was secretly taped, in her own home, having sex with a married man. CDs were made of the tryst and copies inserted into a magazine for mass distribution. She was subsequently forced to leave the island in disgrace. Her humiliation was justified by many on the grounds that she had an affair with a married man, but the man's dignity received barely a scratch. People even complimented him for being such a stud on the tape); also, she is a mainlander, from Shanghai, while Ni was a native son. What has descended on Xia is a kind of inverse "This Is Your Life", in which every single person who had contact with her is now compelled to come forward with a story casting Xia in a bad light. The day after the Cultural Revolution self-criticism press conference, it was Bai Bing Bing, who helpfully recalled that when Xia was her understudy she had always been polite and respectful, but when she started to get choice parts she became proud and haughty. I don't suppose those were choice parts that the way-past-her-prime Bai felt an entitlement to, by any chance? My own feeling is that submerged deep in the human id is an atavistic instinct to attack the member of the herd who's perceived as being vulnerable and wounded. Lately, in Taiwan entertainment circles, the instinct hasn't been nearly as submerged as it ought to be.

Lonely Philologist

2005-05-21T14:28:00.000+08:00

For S.H. Chang, a Yiddish philologist at Wenzao Ursuline College of Languages in Kaohsiung, southern Taiwan, "doing what nobody has done" and "doing what others would rather not" are her lifelong mottoes. Chang, known as one of the very few Yiddish philologists in all of the world's Chinese communities, said in an interview with CNA yesterday that being a lonely student of Jewish languages, particularly Yiddish - "the language of exiles" - is no hardship at all so long as "you are keen to learn."

Good for her. People like that reassure me there's hope for civilization. Given the opportunity to have dinner with S.H. Chang or Jackie Chan I wouldn't even need a minute to think it over.

What Did You Say Your Name Was?

2005-05-21T14:10:00.000+08:00

"Popular movie star Jackie Chan has decided to stay away from Taiwan for four years to avoid protests over remarks he made calling the island's presidential election in 2004 a big joke, Taiwan media reported yesterday".

Jackie Chan says he's staying away because he wants to avoid a scene at the airport, but the four year time frame is a dead give-away. After all, if people are going to throw eggs at him three years from now they're probably going to throw eggs in five years. He's staying away to protest his side losing the election, which is why he's staying away for four years. Like most people who regarded the election as a "joke", the last year has not been kind to Jackie. The allegation made was that the attempted assassination was an inside job engineered by the DPP to garner a sympathy vote. International forensics experts since have determined that, far from being a faked injury, the president's wound was caused by a shot fired from outside the vehicle. Moreover, a shot ricocheted at a completely unpredictable angle before hitting the president. The likely shooter, who seems to have commited suicide, was an ardent pan-blue supporter. More and more, it looks like people like Jackie Chan who are a joke.

Taiwanese should tell Chan: "Please, don't stop at depriving us of the Celestial Presence for only four years. Could we work a deal for ten? What we are putting together here is the first democracy with a Chinese cultural base in the history of the world. This is not of colossal importance because of the number of people involved - necessarily, it involves a rather small minority among Chinese people in the world. It certainly doesn't require the endorsement of prominent Chinese actors. What is happening here is important because of the power of the idea, not the power of, or the number of, the people doing it. You say it's a joke, but you understand that it's true on some level. Otherwise, why would the leaders of 1.3 billion people be so exercised over the democracy project of 23 million Taiwanese. The idea is powerful because it self evidently works in bringing happiness and prosperity to people. And we don't need you to make it happen."

Welcome Back, John

2005-05-18T09:05:00.000+08:00

Yes, I know, I disappeared for a week. I've been fighting an unsuccessful battle with a singularly diabolical flu bug that's taken over my life. I'm still not all the way back, but I'm getting there.

Is Wang Chien Ming doing great, or what? The way he pitches reminds me most of Greg Maddux: Not blowing anybody away with speed - keep it low, in and out painting the corners, giving up some hits because he's throwing strikes, but not walks or homers. For him to be pitching as well as he has in New York, with that pressure, is pretty impressive.

During my long days in bed, I had a chance to do some reading and thinking. I break my fast with a longish essay below.

Nation of Rebels I

2005-05-18T08:38:00.000+08:00

The classic counterculture critique of consumer society posits not only that the mass of people must be socialized to be cogs in a machine for the production of goods, but also as consumers for the purchase of those goods. This interpretation has largely dictated the countercultural response to the mass market even as the counterculture has risen to ascendancy in the culture as a whole. From Beats to Hippies, Punk to Grunge, the answer to this mass consumer conformist society has been non-conformism in style, and in the purchasing of goods. Departing from the herd and making a wild, non-mainstream gesture not only serves to fully realize oneself, we're told, it also serves as a protest against the machine that, repeated often enough, threatens to rock the machine (and the machine people) to its foundation.

Two Canadian professors, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, have written a book, "Nation of Rebels", that offers a tightly reasoned and well-researched argument that explains why after forty years of cultural success, the counterculture has failed to show the slightest evidence of undermining mass consumer culture. In fact, the values of the counterculture, they argue, have abetted the growth of the consumer culture, which would explain why the last few decades have simultaneously witnessed the explosion of counterculture values and the mass marketplace.

"The critique of mass society has been one of the most powerful forces driving consumerism for the past forty years.... It is rebellion, not conformity, that has for decades been the driving force of the marketplace."

The authors point out that studies have indeed shown there to be a correlation between wealth and happiness. People in rich countries are happier, in general, than people in poor countries. But this has only been found to be true up to a certain level of development, after which there is a leveling off. "The rule of thumb among economists who study the subject is that once GDP reaches about U.S. $10,000 per capita, further economic growth generates no gains in average happiness." Up to this point of development, gains in wealth generally are put toward addressing deficiencies in basics such as food, hygiene, shelter and clothing. After that, something else is going on:

"We constantly hear about how, as a society, we can no longer 'afford' health care or public education. But if we can't afford them now, how could we afford them thirty years ago, when the country produced only half as much wealth? Where did all the money go? The answer to this question is, in fact, quite straightforward: the money is being spent on private consumption goods. Yet, if this pattern of expenditure is not making us happier, why are we doing it?"

Nation of Rebels II

2005-05-18T08:31:00.000+08:00

When people first begin to be able to take care of essential needs, they do indeed behave like conformist consumers. This is because cookie-cutter goods are the cheapest. Levitt houses built after the Second World War represented the first houses most of their owners had ever had a dream of purchasing. They may have been little boxes made of ticky-tacky, as the song goes, but they were affordable. The first mass-produced cars had no accessories either. But far from being conformist consumers, people who live in societies, like America, that are well past the subsistence stage of development, buy things that will confer distinction upon them. "Most people spend money not on things that help them fit in, but on things that allow them to stand out from the crowd. They spend their money on things that offer distinction. People buy what makes them feel superior."

About twenty years ago, I went through a phase of reading in the field of economics, a phase never likely to be repeated in this lifetime. The name Thorstein Veblin sticks in my mind not only because he was affiliated with the University of Chicago. Veblin became something of a hero to me upon my reading that, a bachelor, he would collect his dirty dishes in the bathtub until he had an enormous pile, then hose them all down in a single high energy session, in keeping with the theory of economies of scale. But that is not why he is a hero to the authors. There are other reasons to venerate him, it seems.

"First, it is worth noting that in developing countries, economic growth does an awful lot to promote overall happiness. It is only once a society has become quite wealthy that growth no longer delivers increased happiness. Second, there is still a fairly strong correlation between relative wealth and happiness, even in very rich societies.... In Veblen's view, the fundamental problem with the consumer society is not that our needs are artificial, but that the goods produced are valued less for their intrinsic properties than for their role as markers of relative success.... The problem is that while an increase in 'material' goods can generate increased happiness for everyone, status is an intrinsically zero-sum game. In order for one person to win, someone else must lose." After a certain point, that is, having stuff that your grandfather couldn't imagine having does not make you happier. Only having stuff your contemporaries don't have does the trick.

Nation of Rebels III

2005-05-18T07:52:00.000+08:00

At this point, the authors introduce the idea of "positional goods." The house you buy in a fashionable downtown neighborhood may cost you $400,000 whereas the same house out in the country sells for $50,000. Most of what you pay for, then, is not for the materials that go into making the house, but the advantages –the convenience, and prestige –of living downtown. But not everybody can live downtown. "Living downtown" is a prestige position that by definition is only available to some. Ideas like "coolness" and "good taste" are also positional goods. If you get in on the ground floor of a phenomenon like microbrewed beers, you are part of a small, select circle of coolness. But as more and more people want to gain membership to that elite club, the cachet of being in the club gets diluted. Suddenly microbrews are in every grocery store and, while the brew may still taste good, the social distinction is largely lost and it becomes necessary to find a new source of distinction. This sense of being part of a select elite of cool is largely what the business of advertising is selling you on. The counterculture taught you that by wanting to be distinctive –a radical, cutting-edge individualist–you were undermining the system that wanted you to be a faceless cog. In fact, it is largely this restless need to be distinctive that feeds the monster.

An interesting example adduced by Heath and Potter is men's shirts. The archetypal pre- counterculture shirt was the standard white oxford button -down worn by armies of 1950's businessmen - a virtual uniform of conformity. Many men in the 50's only owned two shirts that they wore for the whole week, which was why they wore undershirts. By the 70's, nobody could wear the same shirt two days in a row without being outed. Everybody had to express that they were liberated from being a cog by wearing shirts with colorful prints. But those shirts cost more, and the more distinctive they are the more they cost. And you'd better have a full set in your closet for at least a week to avoid being looked down on. The effect of the sixties has not been to undermine the consumer society with an attack of distinctiveness and individuality. Precisely the opposite has happened.

This is why so many of the spin-offs from the counterculture revolution are on the high end of the price/ quality spectrum. Organic food may be especially good for you, and it certainly makes you feel special when you buy it, but it costs more than the mass produced stuff in the rest of the market. Fresh baked bread tastes better and has more crunchy cred than the mass produced stuff, but it will cost you. Here's a description of the coffee revolution brought about by the revolution, from "The Devil's Cup", by Stewart Lee Allen: "It is probably best understood as part of the 60's rebellion against overprocessed food. Think whole wheat bread equals whole bean coffee. So it's no surprise that the specialty coffee movement was born in the counterculture capital of Berkeley, California, when a gentleman named Alfred Peet opened Peet's Tea and Coffee. They specialized in fresh dark roast coffee and were so successful that his partners soon opened their own places, like Boston's Coffee Connection, Florida's Barney's, and, of course, Seattle's Starbuck's.” Tastes better than my mother's Maxwell House? Yes. More expensive, too. And once you get used to it, it's very difficult to go back. What it's not is a blow to consumer culture.

Nation of Rebels IV

2005-05-18T07:39:00.000+08:00

How to relate all of this to my own life, and my decision to live in Taiwan? First, let's acknowledge, this is not a book about "them". A blue- state, tail-end-of-the-babyboom, counterculture-influenced consumer would peg me pretty well. I see plenty of myself in the behavior diagnosed in this book –from an original intention to live a simple, non-materialist lifestyle to an adult life in which, shall we say, money management is not exactly a strong point. A positive spin on this is that I have tastes that are more sophisticated than my parents.“Indian food!,”my mother marvels."You didn't learn about that in my home!" An invidious take would point out that, though I earn less than my parents, my consumption habits –whether in clothes, food, travel, music, whatever –reflect a disinclination to settle for the weekend by the lake when I could be trekking in Nepal. To my amazement, this turns out to be rather more expensive.

Another interesting angle from which to reflect on this book is the blue state/ red state divide. It's a source of deep satisfaction and vindication for blue –staters to point out that the blues on aggregate earn more than the reds. Moreover,while the blues contribute more in taxes, the reds receive more from the federal government. The flip side of this coin is that, consistent with the thesis of "Nation of Rebels", the children of the counterculture are more, not less, implicated in the cycle of earn and spend. I've often reflected that, if I were to return to the states, I would prefer to live in the south or west, albeit within driving distance of a blue oasis like Boulder or Austin. "Nation" clarifies for me that this is not illogical –it really is the case that the "positional goods" race to the bottom is farther along in blue states, and this is because of, not in spite of, the 60's "movement" legacy.

And moving to Taiwan? It's surely no coincidence that I've chosen to live in a country with low, red-state-like tax rates, but which still manages to adequately subsidize fundamental "social contract" sectors like health care and public education. Taiwan's GDP ($25,000 per capita) is exactly at the mid-point between the U.S.($40,000 per capita) and the figure cited as the transition from a subsistence to a "positional goods" economy –not a bad place to be. Of course, the very decision to live as a foreigner in a (mostly) ethnically monochrome place like Taiwan is symptomatic of the need to be "distinctive" the authors diagnose. When I spent my first six months here thirteen years ago, a running joke was "Get out of my Asian experience, whitey!" upon seeing a foreign face once a week or so. Of course, we also said that what we loved about Taiwan was that it didn't have the cloying "self-consciousness" of America. We wanted to be distinctive, that is, but we didn't want to live in a society where everybody else wanted to be distinctive. At some level of self-awareness, we knew where that ended up.

Chen Planning A Move?

2005-05-10T03:45:00.000+08:00

"Within the DPP, I don't think there's any more room to go," said Hsiao Bi-khim, a Democratic Progressive legislator from Taipei. "The party at large is not willing to compromise as President Chen is personally. He wants to make a legacy, but he is operating under very, very constrained and difficult circumstances." (I'm pretty sure the Post reporter got it wrong - she's from Tainan. JD)

Analysts and party leaders say Chen's shift reflects his calculation that independence is a lost cause. Taiwanese increasingly eschew the idea of confrontation with China, and the Bush administration has chastised Chen for provoking the Beijing government, raising doubts about whether the United States would come to the island's aid in a war. That leaves Chen with only one way of securing a significant place in history: reaching out to China.

Very interesting things are going on these days, but it's not at all easy to know what to make of it all. Until very recently, I didn't put much credence in the Chen as Nixon goes to China idea. It seemed to me China put on a big public relations show without much substance, so Chen would make an empty counter - gesture of magninimity. This article, though, makes it seem quite credible that Chen is about to do something big, and substantive. I also suspected the friction between Chen and Lee might be a bit of a show, but it begins to appear there is a genuine rift between the two. The idea that Chen would speak so openly about his resentments toward Lee dovetails with the theory that he is planning a major demarche that would alienate Lee anyway. Talks? On what terms? Probably some kind of semantical formulation that would allow each side to give its own interpretation. It's hard to believe Chen would budge on the issue of Taiwan's sovereignty.

Missing Link

2005-05-10T01:44:00.000+08:00

Here is the link to the story I was responding to below, which I forgot to include.

Long Gone Green I

2005-05-09T20:34:00.000+08:00

One thing that defines adolescent thought is the double-hitch pattern of, first, an epiphany in which it is revealed that the world is not as pure as one originally thought; followed by, two, unbridled indignation that this should be so and a radical, no compromises plan of action to restore the world to its proper, pure state. An opinion column in Saturday's Taipei Times by Michelle Wang exemplifies the limitations of this kind of thinking. She's identified as the deputy secretary-general of the far green Northern Taiwan Society, but if she's a day over sixteen, we're looking at a serious case of arrested development.

Chapter XIII: In Which Ms. Wong Discovers the Limitations of Freedom.

“We do enjoy freedom of communication, speech, publication, traveling and relocation, but we do not have the freedom to choose what we really want. Although we can cast our ballots to pick our national leader, legislators, and councilors, we cannot choose to write a Constitution of our own, decide the future of the nation through referendums or change the national title…..I really doubt if we have 100% freedom.”

Okay. Fair enough. Taiwan is a small country trying to carve out a place in the world in the face of an expansionist, authoritarian China, so its freedom to act is circumscribed by that reality. Right? Well, not exactly. It seems there is another culprit denying Taiwan "100% freedom". You guessed it:“Although the U.S. champions the causes of democracy, freedom and human rights, Washington has never given up its desire to direct Taiwan's future. Their logic is that the fate of Taiwan must be decided by the U.S. and that Taiwan has to follow Washington, D.C. In other words, the extent of freedom that the Taiwanese people are allowed to enjoy must be dictated by the U.S.”

Is it the policy of the Taipei Times to have fifteen year olds write op-ed columns? Let's be clear: if the U.S. did not provide a counterweight to China, Taiwan would today be a part of the PRC. Game over. No more Taiwan independence/democracy movement. Because certain actions taken by pro-independence advocates could drag the U.S. into a catastrophic war with China, the U.S. gets a significant say in whether those actions are taken. The U.S. does not "dictate" that this is so. It only gets a say because Taiwanese voters, wisely, take the U.S. position into account.
Prior to the legislative elections, A-bian was pushing policies that the U.S. felt were crossing some red lines clearly drawn by the Chinese, and the U.S. expressed its disapproval. This, then, became part of the mix in the pre-election debate. This is what the Taipei Times has been referring to recently in editorials as "the State Department's last-minute intervention in last December's elections." Freedom does not really mean what tenth-graders think it means. It does not mean "I can do what I want without consequences, or taking the position of others into account." Freedom means "I make my choices in a complicated, fallen world, and take responsibility for those choices." Taiwan has the freedom to isolate itself internationally. Some of the polities Ms. Wang most admires –Cuba; the Palestinian Authority – have taken stances that were ideologically or emotionally satisfying "pure", and brought the house down on their heads. Ms. Wang sees them as positive models, but Taiwan voters don't.

Far Gone Green II

2005-05-09T19:49:00.000+08:00

Chapter XIV, in which Ms. Wang eats the apple, the scales fall from her eyes, and she discovers that pursuing their national interest is often a large component of a nation's foreign policy.

“We are all aware that for Washington, its attempt to protect Taiwan is driven not by the country's achievements in democratization and freedom but by the strategic values that Taiwan represents in the Asia-Pacific, by the interests it enjoys and the leading role it plays in the region.....In the eyes of politicians in Washington, freedom, democracy and human rights are just beautiful-sounding words.”

I am always amazed at the idea that, because a nation can be shown to be pursuing its interests, it therefore follows that it necessarily couldn't have a "values" component in its foreign policy. Why couldn't it include a balancing of both? The longest- running show in Foggy Bottom is the struggle for pre-eminence between the advocates of realpolitik –seeing nations as pieces on a chessboard– and those who would define American interests as more in line with supporting democracies wherever possible. Has it escaped Ms. Wang's notice that the high-priest of realpolitik, Henry Kissinger, is a full-time, pleated skirts and pom-poms cheerleader for the regime in Beijing? (Sorry for the image). Neo-cons like John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz are the most stalwart defenders of Taiwan, but they are also the most despised by the kind of "national liberation" leftists Ms. Wang most identifies with. These (neo-cons) are the people who are tough on the dictatorship in Cuba; who support democratic, small and resource-poor Israel; who (controversially) saw it as in America's interests to expend blood and treasure to try to establish Iraq as a democratic country. Is there a nation in the world that does not pursue its interests? Taiwan should hold out in an isolationist stance until it finds one? This is what Andrew Sullivan has called, referring to the post - 9/11 left, "the combination of bitterness and not thinking."

Far Gone Green III

2005-05-09T19:35:00.000+08:00

Chapter XV, in which Ms. Wang realizes that the U.S. is omnipotent and has limitless resources, but perversely declines to use these powers to build good and vanquish evil.

“Dictator Chiang Kai-shek's pro-Washington policy made it deliberately lenient about his atrocities curing the White Terror period.”That's not all: “Why do you (America) call for a war on terror but at the same time allow China, the world's greatest terrorist, to target 720 missiles at Taiwan and use oppressive terrorist tactics against political dissidents and Falun Gong practitioners?” But that's not all:“The strategy of the U.S. has always been two-faced. On the one hand, the U.S. supports regimes (even authoritarian ones) which are obedient to it, while on the other, it raises the banner of righteousness in seeking to obliterate hostile forces that are seeking national liberation.”

America does not have a“two-faced strategy". It has a foreign policy balanced between two poles stressing, respectively, realpolitik and promotion of democracy. "Allow China?" It's hard to see how the U.S. could get China to change these two policies quickly except through war. The U.S. doesn't want a war with China. Martial law era Taiwan? Iraq demonstrates just what a colossal expenditure of money,lives and diplomatic capital is involved in invading a state gone bad and trying to create a democratic culture almost from scratch. What the U.S. did do was make several overtures over the years to General Sun Li-ren about the possibilities for a coup. The time was never right, because Chiang's dictatorship was, in fact, quite efficient. Ultimately, Sun was purged for his contacts with the Americans. What was plausible in the way of change at the time was explored by the Americans and found not to be possible.

The Cold War involved a tilt toward the "pragmatic" in U.S. policy, but ultimately the "containment" strategy did manage to free the occupied peoples of Eastern Europe without a major, nuclear world war. Allying with regimes like Franco's Spain, Pinochet's Chile and Chiang's Taiwan represented a moral compromise, but in fact those regimes have subsequently been able to evolve into prosperous, democratic countries, while Russia, Cuba and Vietnam have not. What's striking about Ms. Wang's vision of how the U.S. should act is how sanguinary it is: War with China? Bring it on! Next week, no doubt, she'll be flying to Paris to wave a Palestinian flag and participate in a Peace March.

Far Gone Green IV

2005-05-09T16:15:00.000+08:00

Chapter XVI, in which Ms. Wang discovers that small nations and large nations do not have parity; advocates extreme methods to rectify situation.

“Small nations and large nations do not have parity, and large nations will never pay attention to the goodwill or pleas of small nations….. The Palestinian struggle for statehood and Cuba's revolutionary movement may all have adopted extreme methods, but if this had not been done, would the U.S. have recognized their existence? Would they hear their voice demanding freedom? I really doubt it.”

So what, exactly, are we advocating here? Suicide bombings? A Munich-style terrorist attack at the Olympics? Have these tactics served the Palestinians well? Has it escaped Michelle's notice that China is cozying up to Venezuela and Cuba? China, at present, is not able to refine the oil pumped from Venezuela, but the governments of both countries are aching to rectify that situation. Has it escaped her notice that Venezuela's close ally, Cuba, is also being courted by China? (Raul Castro visited China in April to firm things up). They are allied with each other because they stand on the opposite side of a gaping values divide from the U.S. and Taiwan. Anti-American Europeans of the sort who vociferously criticized the Iraq War, celebrate the Palestinians and turn a tolerant eye toward Cuba –they're on the side of Taiwan's“national liberation movement,”right? Or was that Jacques Chirac leading the charge to sell arms to China?

Of course, this is an opinion column and doesn't represent the position of the Taipei Times, but it is fair to say that this column could not possibly have been printed in either of the other two English language papers. T-Times editorials vacillate between a (usually) pragmatic, A-bian type of Greenishness and the kind of moonbat anti-Americanism found in this column. It was the latter strand that had the Times editorial board dancing on the rooftops two days after the 9-11 attacks in their“Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind”editorial. There's a part of them that longs for the day when they can join in rallies in Rome and London:“Free the Palestinians! Support Taiwan independence and democracy! Yeah, Castro! Go, Chavez!”It's not going to happen. Those people are a lot more interested in anti- Americanism than they are in promoting democracy. Taiwanese Greens infatuated with this kind of Western bien-pensant thinking are letting themselves in for an endless round of disillusionments. Fact is, Taiwanese don't have the luxury of deluding themselves about which nation in the world it is that stands up for small, democratic nations in nasty neighborhoods.

China Fever III

2005-05-06T08:59:00.000+08:00

"'Chairman Lien should not be too selfish,' said Central Standing Committee member Hou Tsai-feng.
'The KMT cultivated him for several decades. The KMT needs him to be responsible and not think of his own personal considerations.
'The KMT needs you,' she said. "

Some other interesting things are happening, adding to the mix. Lien Chan is allowing himself to be beseeched to continue in the role of KMT Chairman. It seems obvious to me that if he intended to retire gracefully and also planned to make a "personal" trip to China, he would have waitied until August, stepped down, and then made his trip. At what point does Ma Ying-jeou lose patience with this act from Lien? Ma is described as standing by expressionless as Lien was implored to stay on. The China Post article says“Ma,who was besieged by reporters after he left the meeting, said: 'I respect everyone's opinions,' before escaping down a fire exit.” I couldn't help but notice that it was Ma who escorted Soong to the airport for his trip. A potential alliance, or am I thinking too much?

On another front, as if on cue to remind Taiwanese of the difference between sweet words and substance, Taiwanese doctors were barred from participating in the Annual World Health Assembly despite the fact they had been promised seats by the organizers and despite a Chinese commitment to "help" Taiwan join. Of course, the only help Taiwan needs is for China to stop umremittingly opposing Taiwanese entrance to international organizations. "Though Chinese leaders recently claimed that they are willing to help Taiwan enter the international health body, 'On the eve of the Annual World Health Assembly, the question of whether or not they were sincere seems clear at this point,' said Peter Chang, of Taiwan's Department of Health.

Pan - Greens have been having a lot of fun parodying the reception Lien received at a mainland elementary school: (爺爺爺爺你回來了你終於回來了!) "Grandpa! Grandpa! You've come back! You've finally come back!" But the difficult fact is that the juxtaposition of Lien being greeting so emotionally in China, juxtaposed with Chen Shui-bian being feted in the Marshall Islands and Fiji, didn't work to the DPP's favor at all. At a DPP rally, much was made of the fact that Lien's name - Chan (戰) - means war: "Oppose War and Protect Taiwan!" Lien says he was given the name in the context of the Japanese invasion of China, to demonstrate his family's defiance of the invaders. At the same rally, VP Lu offered that Lien "has become the spokesman in Taiwan for the Chinese Communist Party." Ouch!

China Fever II

2005-05-06T05:35:00.000+08:00

Each of the three“goodwill gestures”by the CCP is likely to run up on the rocks of the mutually contradictory definitions of what this thing here in Taiwan is. In the case of the gift of the pandas, if the gift is a domestic transfer (China's position) it should be no problem, but if it is an international transfer (as Taiwan maintains) it would contravene quite a few existing laws concerning the international transfer of rare and endangered animals. Taiwan is quite concerned about the increased scope for espionage if Chinese were allowed to travel here in large numbers, and the measure might be blocked on those grounds alone. But Taiwan maintains that both the tourism issue and the lowering of tariffs for selected fruits should be dealt with (internationally, essentially) in the WTO. China, of course, wants them handled “domestically.”

But while China Fever is unlikely to lead to any great breakthroughs with China, it is causing earthquakes in the domestic politics of Taiwan. Seeing Lien descending the steps onto the tarmac and being greeted so fulsomely puts one in mind of Anwar Sadat's breakthrough trip to Israel. But,unlike that trip, there's no meat here. The KMT is able to reap the harvest of exciting, historic-feeling imagery, but because they are not in power, they enjoy this imagery with none of the responsibility to deliver something substantive. The truth is, Taiwan Consciousness (台灣認同) is still very much a work in progress. People who have not clarified who they are are not deeply offended by Lien’s putting the welfare of his party before the welfare of Taiwan. A TVBS poll indicated that about 60% of the people interviewed did not feel Lien sold out Taiwan while in China.

A Taipei Times editorial tries to make the case that the unfavorable polls for the DPP are the result of a media still dominated by the KMT:“When has an opinion poll by a Taiwan news outlet ever been accurate? Which poll has not had its results predetermined by political concerns?” Yet, the same paper's Jewel Huang, in her news story, makes the dismal situation clear:“According to the latest poll by the DPP, voter support for the party has slumped by 7 points to about 33%. Support for the KMT, meanwhile, reached about 34%, and increase of 4 points.”The truth is, for the moment, the DPP is genuinely at a bit of a loss about how to deal with all this. They're caught in a pincer movement: legislators from the pro-independence wing are insisting on a meeting with Chen and calling him to account for swinging from his pre-legislative election stance for Name Rectification and Constitutional Reform to his present accomodationalist stance. Meanwhile, while refusing to meet Chen, the CCP is encouraging middle and lower-level members of the DPP to make their own trips to the mainland. It has also not gone unnoted that the lowering of tariffs on agricultural products is a bouquet thrown to farmers in the DPP heartland in the south.

China Fever

2005-05-06T04:28:00.000+08:00

“China Fever”(中國熱) has descended on Taiwan, all agree, and my guess is it will have about the same shelf–life as those egg tarts that absolutely everybody had to eat a couple of years ago. What is clear is that Lien and the KMT have made a brilliant tactical move in going to China, but it's largely a triumph in the limited but not to be dismissed area of public relations. It's unlikely there will be much follow-up, because there has been no break-through on the central issue: The CCP insists that the DPP must, as a precondition for talks, renounce the plank in its constitution that calls for independence; Chen, after meeting with James Soong, agreed that he would not declare independence during his remaining term of office in return for the Chinese not using force to take the island. Not enough, China said. China insists that any talks be held under the“one-China”principle; Chen, after his talk with Soong, agreed not to change the present name of the sovereignty – The Republic of China – during this term of office. It was a largely semantical concession, but“Name Rectification”had been very important to the DPP prior to the disappointing Legislative elections. It was also a semantical concession that could be seized to give face to China on the “one – China” issue. Still not enough, said Beijing. Soong is hinting at the possibility of some sort of reinterpretation of terms that could be negotiated during his trip which began yesterday. Mostly, I think it's unlikely to work out because the differences between the two parties (DPP and CCP) are cardinal differences that are not negotiable. Maybe I'm wrong, and a face-saving verbal formulation will be found that would allow talks to start, but that opportunity hasn't been grasped in recent months. Why would it be now?

International Incident

2005-05-05T14:34:00.000+08:00

There's been a bit of international tension in my neighborhood recently, and I am ashamed to report that my own behavior has contributed substantially to the situation. You see, time management and organization have never been particular strong points of mine, and my temper is not always what it ought to be, either. As it happens, a couple of weeks ago, there I was again, sweating like Carlton Heston, late for a class, and trying to load a tape recorder and a large bag of books onto my scooter. Every time I thought I had it all set, the electric cord on the recorder would pop out from the little pocket in the bag where I'd secured it and trail along the ground. This is how it came about that I was to be found cursing profusely with balled fists - I swear I was cursing the cord, and quite clearly addressing myself to it and entirely oblivious to passersby. A very old man was passing by on his bike at that moment, of the sort known to have animated discussions with themselves, and hearing me cursing, started cursing me right back. Now, I know it was the wrong call, and I'm not a bit proud of myself, but I was, in fact, a bit deranged at that moment myself. So I turned and replied with a volley of the most imaginative and colorful invective I could think of. Well, he may have been eighty-five, but there was no quit in this old coot. He didn't exactly stop his bike to curse me back, but since he was going about two miles an hour, he had plenty of time to give me holy bloody hell as he was going by. I think we both felt better at the end of the exchange.

Problem is, I hadn't recognized him as a neighborhood regular (all the old people love me - they do!), but I am now aware that he comes down this street on a rather regular basis. I am now resigned to my fate - every couple of days, he sees me , and I get dressed down thoroughly. I've quite regained my composure, and I just smile and nod to him, but he is not to be appeased. I'm not even sure exactly what language I'm being cursed in, to tell the truth. It may be that he is a mainlander calling me to account for historical injustices perpetrated by my people. (反對八國聯軍殖民主義!) "Resist Eight Nation Alliance Colonialism! Up yours, tape recorder boy!)

I would just like to say publicly to this venerable and terribly misunderstood old gentleman, if he should happen to be a reader of this blog, that I acknowledge my error, and that I have acted in a gravely insulting and inappropriate fashion. As to the unpleasantness regarding the burning and sacking of the Imperial Summer Palace some one hundred and fifty years ago, which I have no doubt you witnessed personally, I can only say on behalf of my nation that what we did was wrong, and it was bad - bad, bad, very bad. How would we like it if you came along and burned down Camp David? We'd be angry, right? Probably cussin' and fightin' angry, right into our spry and vinegary golden years. Let me therefore say, on behalf of the entire abjectly apologetic North American continent, that we will never do it again, and we ask, and will ask forever after, for your forgiveness.

Great Gaming the Coming Years

2005-05-04T03:02:00.000+08:00

But to get China looking north to Asia for oil supplies, perhaps we should try to encourage oil pipelines throughPakistan to Iran and through Central Asia to the Caspian Sea region. If China gets oil through this route, paying for a navy with no task other than taking Taiwan may not make as much sense as it did when the navy was needed for oil supply security too. This could suck China into Asia and perhaps make the Europeans nervous enough about the Chinese coming up a new silk road that Europe will feel they need America again as an ally.

The Dignified Rant has an excellent post advocating the commencement of a "Great Game" approach to China. Chinese nationalists, of course, have long accused America of implementing a containment strategy, but, as Brian makes clear,the measures to date have been more defensive than proactive in nature. The centrality of the oil resource is a thread running through all of these considerations. It seems perfectly mad that China would be building a blue-water navy thinking that they would be able to secure the entire oil route from the Middle East, but it appears that is precisely what is going on. Needless to say, the best way to keep that line secure would be to commit to being a good citizen in the international order that is already in place to secure those supplies to countries like Japan and Korea. Only if they were planning attacks on their neighbors would that not be an adequate strategy.

Rambling Reflections

2005-05-03T23:01:00.000+08:00

"'He was so poised out there, especially here at the stadium,' Rodriguez said. 'It was a nice lift, and hopefully it can bring some energy here for a while.'
Torre said it was the best start by a rookie for the Yankees since he took over as manager in 1996."

Tainan native Wang Jian Ming turned in a quality start, as the whole world knows by now. This is exciting stuff for people who love both Taiwan and baseball (which covers a lot of people, let me tell you). My fourth grade student, Chris Lin, came in with a large poster of Wang from The Apple Daily. As soon as I saw it, I wanted one. My first impulse, needless to say, was to push him to the floor and take his, 'cause I'm bigger than him, but the latest pedagogical studies frown on that teaching methodology and I always try to stay up to date. So after class I went to seven- eleven (or "seven", as it's known here, for the same general reason that the eustachian tube is referred to as the e-tube by Taiwan ENTs). Strange to say, it turns out you can't get Apple Daily at convenience stores after about two or three in the afternoon. The clerks said it's that way every day. All the other papers are there on the shelves and have remainders at the end of the day, but with Apple, if you don't get it in the morning, you ain't getting it, brutha. I don't know anything about it, but they obviously have a completely different marketing strategy from the other papers. I'm told all the other papers are cheaper to have delivered to your house than to buy in the store, but Apple is cheaper in the store. It's this thick doorstop of a paper, filled with an enormous quantity of some of the best fiction being written on the island, and at ten dollars, it's two thirds the price of the English-language papers. They know how to sell papers, though.

Digressing... The above-mentioned Chris is one of two students in a "group class" I teach six hours a week. We have named the class "The Flying Donkeys." I have decided, after protracted and anguished deliberation, to post the Flying Donkeys Class Song. The lyrics were a collaboration between myself and Chris Lin. The melody is something dredged from deep in my sub-conscious - maybe the Carolina Fight Song - I'm not sure. It goes something like this:

Flying Donkeys you are so good
Crazy but brave
Go Go Go Go
On your journey
Not one is a slave

huzza! huzza! huzza! huzza! huzza!

Onward and upward
Long-eared heroes
Into the clouds of white
Flying Donkeys speak good English
And they never bite!
(repeat first verse)

There it is. Sung every day, at the top of the class, at my students' insistence. They will go far.

The Baby Name Wizard

2005-05-01T16:17:00.000+08:00

"'Lillie' noted that in practice, the long-and-lacy often turns into the short-and-sassy: 'Melissa gets called Mel, Jessica becomes Jess, Samantha is Sam and Alexandra is Alex. Often these stick enough to become the person's day-to-day name.' 'Melissa' agreed with that point, but added 'I also see a bit of a trend towards using the full versions of names.'
Nicknames can definitely turn a name's style inside out -- there's a world of difference between Gertrude and Trudy. And sure enough, many parents today are rejecting traditional nicknames. (See 'The new formality.') But some parents are taking advantage of the style contrast to let them have it both ways. Alexandra/Alex is sumptuous and boyish. You get two names in one, which part of the name's soaring appeal."

Robert Johanson, East Rift Valley Potentate, and Grand Poobah of Hualien, recommends this site, The Baby Name Wizard. Names gaining rapidly in popularity, apparently, include Aidan, Caleb, Griffin, Mackenzie and Nadia. Names that have seen better days: Betty, Deborah, Pearl and Bill. The creator, Laura Wattenberg, has graphed hundreds of names, charting their relative fortunes over the decades. There's also a cool blog, quoted above.

Gate of Heavenly Peace I

2005-05-01T15:37:00.000+08:00

"My students keep asking me, 'What should we do next? What can we accomplish?' I feel so sad, because how can I tell them that what we are actually hoping for is bloodshed, the moment when the government is ready to butcher the people brazenly? Only when the Square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes. Only then will they really be united. But how can I explain any of this to my fellow students?"
Chai Ling, Tian an men student leader, 1989

Ten years late (always the slow adopter!) I finally had an opportunity to see the Tian an men massacre documentary by Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon,“The Gate of Heavenly Peace.” Strange to say, watching the footage of the student leaders evoked feelings similar to when I watched the 1965 Dylan documentary “Don't Look Back.” In that case, I found myself cringing at the posing of 25 year old Joan and Bob, identifying instead with Dylan's indulgent and canny manager Albert Grossman. “Heavenly Peace”evoked similar feelings, except with the fortunes of 1.2 billion people hanging in the balance. What the movie (cross-referenced with Ian Buruma's portraits in “Bad Elements") clearly documents is that these were callow kids in way over their heads. Their age is the chief mitigating factor in a case where they did a lot more damage than good.

The above quotation from self-appointed commander-in-chief Chai Ling is the most incriminating. In a pattern familiar from the French Revolution and countless others, the moderates who wanted to disburse after having achieved a few finite but substantive goals, were always at a disadvantage relative to the radicals with a bloodbath/ uprising/ regime change agenda. Here is Chai Ling, in an interview, by turns going utterly to pieces and fantasizing about being commander-in-chief of a rebellion. Here's Wu'er Kaixi, meeting China's leaders in the midst of a hunger strike, sitting with a sullen adolescent slouch as Li Peng appears far more serious and reasonable. Wu'er, in pajamas, living out a countercultural fantasy, shakes his finger in Li's face and tells him “You just don't get it, do you?” The meeting couldn't have gone better for Li. You can see him turn to the other leaders, as if to say, “You can see how it is. What else can we do?” At one point, several of China's most respected writers and thinkers come to the square to implore the students to take their gains and go home. Wu'er dismisses them: What have they ever done, these intellectuals? We've started a revolution; led a million people in singing the Internationale in Tian an men!.

Gate of Heavenly Peace II

2005-05-01T15:29:00.000+08:00

Of course what they had“done”was represented by an accumulation of learning and experience of living, which was precisely what the students so manifestly lacked. Watching the documentary, I kept thinking that the students were struggling with precisely the kinds of issues debated in the Federalist Papers, issues that need to be thought through after a commitment to democracy is made. The movie effectively makes the point that, having created a democracy movement, the students quickly fell into patterns of behavior that reflected the same mistakes made by previous Chinese would-be rulers. It would be surprising if they hadn't. It's not as if they had access to the kinds of information that would have better equipped them for what they were trying to do. The middle-aged intellectuals were able to warn them about the nature of the Chinese state, but still would have been limited in advising them on how to create real democratic structures within their movement.

That's why Taiwan's democracy is so important, and so dangerous for the authoritarians. Taiwan is providing a living civics lesson to a generation of Taiwanese, and potentially, to Chinese as well. Taiwan demonstrates that there is nothing in Chinese culture that is incompatible with democracy – democracy needs to be learned, and adapted to the culture, is all. Democratic countries have only emerged in the last two hundred plus years. It has been an unprecedented, and new, idea everywhere it has been tried, whether in the American colonies, India or Japan. The argument is made that Chinese is a culture that values the interests of the group over the individual, and therefore democracy is inappropriate for Chinese. Japan and Korea, also Asian cultures that emphasize consensus, have already provided eloquent rebuttals to this idea – but for Chinese authoritarians, the example of Taiwan is especially threatening. Chinese authoritarian doctrine is a closed system , and Taiwan breaks the loop: Taiwan is culturally Chinese, therefore it belongs to China; democracy and Chinese culture are congenitally incompatible; therefore, Taiwan cannot be a democracy, and if it is, it must be made to cease being so, by force if necessary. What Taiwan promises is that the next time the Communist leadership has to sit down with Chinese democracy advocates, it won't be a kid posing for an MTV video, but someone like Chen Shui Bian or Hsieh Chang Ting- serious, smart people, sitting up in their chairs and wearing suits - people who have done democracy. That's a long way from 1989.

Tiger Leaping Gorge

2005-04-29T05:37:00.000+08:00

"Originally I had planned to trek in Tiger Leaping Gorge, a spectacular two-mile-deep canyon with an old miners' trail clinging to one of its nearly vertical slopes. The trail was temporarily closed last August when a trekker was swept away in a landslide. So I drove to a different entrance and walked to the rapids on a paved road that the government had recently built. I was far from alone. Crowds of urban Chinese, many dressed in business suits, walked alongside me. They were among the tens of thousands of visitors, mainly Chinese, coming to see the gorge. Like me, they were keenly aware that the view may disappear in the relatively near future."

A N.Y. Times piece on Tiger Leaping Gorge (or "Tiger Teaping Gorger", as I remember the entrance sign announcing) today. I spent three incredible days hiking through the gorge, with a guy from Utah and an intrepid Finnish girl. The article mentions that the "high" trail was closed, due to fatalities in landslides. Actually, when I did the hike, the talk was of a pair of Israeli hikers who had fallen not long before. This is not a story about my bravery, however - I managed to be simultaneously exhilarated and terrified for most of three days. Mostly, it was a head game: the trail at most points was perfectly adequate for safe hiking, but to to lift your eyes and take in the scale of the place, and realize how tiny this wrinkle in the wall of rock was in the midst of it all, was to induce vertigo. Worse, there were three or four spots along the way when the trail did, in fact, get seriously narrow, and a trip on some shoelaces would have been very bad. We all agreed that we wouldn't trade the experience for anything, and we all agreed that we wouldn't be rushing back to do the hike again any time soon. Oh, the view may be disappearing soon on account of a dam being built.

Taiwan Players in MLB

2005-04-29T05:10:00.000+08:00

"Speaking in Mandarin through a translator, Wang still appeared to be excited about replacing injured right-hander Jaret Wright in the Yankees' rotation. The 25-year-old right-hander from Taiwan, the top pitching prospect in New York's thin minor league system, had only been to Yankee Stadium twice before, visits while playing for the Yankees' Staten Island farm team."

Taiwan's Wang Chien Ming has been called up by the New York Yankees, and is expected to start later this week. Talk about pressure: the Yanks are reeling, and Wright is hurt, so Wang gets the call in a crisis situation. Scouting reports don't rave about him, calling him the best pitcher in a weak Yankees farm system.

Hualien's Tsao Chin Hui is generally considered to have more upside potential, with a blazing fastball. The knock on him is that he's easily injured. This year represents a crucial opportunity for him, with the Colorado Rockies giving him a chance at the closer role. So far, he hasn't blown any saves, but hasn't looked especially impressive, either. But it's early!

Taiwan Rep Denied Access

2005-04-28T03:26:00.000+08:00

"A Taipei representative in Hong Kong was barred from meeting Lien Chan, chairman of the Kuomintang, at the former British crown colony yesterday, a Mainland Affairs Council spokesman said.
Yu Ying-lung told the press the MAC regretted that Pao Cheng-kang, manager of the China Travel Agency in Hong Kong, was prevented from meeting Lien during a brief stopover on his way to Nanjing. Chinese officials, including the head of the Taiwan office in Hong Kong, were on hand to welcome Lien at the airport when he arrived from Taipei at 1200 p.m.
'We regret that Pao has been barred and cannot understand why,' Yu said."

This brief article in The China Post (I didn't see it in the other two papers, although it seems pretty important) sums up everything that is wrong with Lien Chan's trip. The Taiwan representative in Hong Kong is not permitted to meet Lien at the airport because China does not recognize or validate the democratic process that he has participated in. This dovetails with Lien's own denial of the validity of the same democratic election and the subsequent judicial confirmation of the validity of the election. Denying his own government is a condition of this trip, which is why it should never have happened.

VP Lu Xiu Lian made essentially the same point the other day: "I saw an extremely suspect phenomenon (at the airport). The pan-Green (pro-independence) camp, who do not like waving the national flag are waving it and the KMT chairman and vice chairman say they are not allowed to bring their own flag back to their home towns." The flag, of course, is suspect in the eyes of Greens because it symbolizes the fusion of party and state in the martial law era. The flag is an anachronism in the multi-state democracy Taiwan has become, but the issue is too loaded to take on the project of changing it. The KMT, which has made a cult of the flag, Sun Yat-Sen and the similarly outdated constitution, now acquiesces in being told that they can't carry the flag? It calls into question if there's anything left that the KMT believes in at all.

Correction

2005-04-27T12:43:00.000+08:00

The sixty year old man I referred to being shown on the news being beaten was this man, who turns out to have been a TSU supporter. I feel a lot less conflicted now. The Taiwan News' top article states that the pan-Greens did initiate things by throwing eggs, but the Blues appeared to have an organized phalanx of gangsters who marauded at will, while the police watched: "At around 10:42 a.m., a few hooligans attacked an old pan-Green supporter in his sixties with a Nunchaku, the martial arts weapon.....others were also attacked by the group of thugs, and in all, nine people were hospitalized after the demonstration ended." Much less conflicted.

Wu Bai Married!

2005-04-27T06:13:00.000+08:00

Unless I'm translating this all wrong, it looks like rocker Wu Bai got married secretly at the end of last year. I've always liked Wu Bai. I also respect the fact that he doesn't feed the Taiwan media monster with tidbits about his personal life. The article says he and his manager/girlfriend of ten years did the paperwork secretly in Hong Kong, and even his friends and family didn't know. Good for him!

Lien In China

2005-04-27T03:59:00.000+08:00

"For Beijing, Lien's visit was an opportunity to show a friendly face and perhaps soften the anger created by its passage last month of an anti-secession bill that codified into law a longstanding threat to use force if necessary to prevent Taiwan from gaining formal independence. In that light, China's controlled media treated the visit as a major event, broadcasting the arrival live and splashing news of his plans on the front pages of the government-controlled press."

I just got done watching the TV reports of the riots (no other word) at the airport on Lien Chan's departure. The footage evoked a rather confused cocktail of emotions. I have a visceral dislike of mobs, and the sight of a middle aged (KMT) man prone on the ground being being kicked senseless by feral TSU demonstrators was repellent. The rest of what I just saw on TV was hardly more edifying. Then came the sight of Lien getting the red carpet treatment in Nanjing, worthy of a head of state, and I sure wanted to kick something.

Lee Teng Hui yesterday attacked not only the pan-Blues, but the DPP, calling them "liars" for their cautious stance on the Lien trip. Lee's criticisms of Chen often ring hollow, given that Lee himself held the position of President and tacked a far more moderate course than he has in retirement. Fact is, Taiwan is a small country, and for the forseeable future there is going to be a gap between what a Taiwanese President desires in his heart and what is doable on the ground. I don't believe the disagreement between the two is choreographed, but I think between Chen's statesmanlike caution and Lee's fury they just about get it right.

To understand why Lien's trip is so devious, it's important to keep in mind that he has never recognized the legitimacy of the 2004 election that he lost to Chen. Even in their eleven minute phone conversation between the men prior to the trip, Lien was careful not to refer to Chen by the title "President." This has continued even after the court system has delivered a verdict that Lien's claim that the pre-election assasination attempt was staged was without merit. Democracy is not just about holding elections. It is about respecting the results of the elections, respecting rule of law, and respecting the adjudication of the courts on disputes. The High Holy Day of democracies isn't necessarily when the people go to vote, but when the loser in the election validates the process by conceding. Lien's trip takes place in the context of his rejection of this basic democratic requirement. He is being treated as the leader of a local territory paying tribute to the central government; he is acknowledging Hu Jintao's legitimacy as President of China, even while he has withheld that acknowledgement from the elected President of Taiwan. It is perfectly insidious.

One thing that came across clearly in the TV reports was just how much "face" Lien is being given by the Chinese. It seems to me that this is not only about Lien's vanity, but an essential career move for him to stave off irrelevance. The time has clearly come for him to step aside and make way for the new generation in his party - Ma Ying Jeou and Wang Jin Ping. He's had two opportunities and lost twice. This is his last chance at making history, of moving on the big stage that he sees as his entitlement. This photo particularly struck me. If history teaches us anything, it is that the very worst possible way to try to bring about peace is to enter into negotiations with an adversary that is threatening you carrying a large sign reading "PEACE." Chen is correct to wait until Lien does the deed. But Lee's people are right, as well.

Ghost Story

2005-04-25T03:22:00.000+08:00

I have to admit, in all fragrant honesty, that there are times around here when I have a strong suspicion that I'm living in a foreign culture. The superstition of Taiwanese is not something that recent arrivals here are very much privy to. Taiwanese are perfectly aware that such things are considered strange by Westerners, and so they are disinclined to share that part of their lives with foreigners until they've known them for years. But many people here have beliefs that are quite alien to our own. I thought of this today when I bumped into a Chinese teacher from the school I worked at for years until recently. Her story is eye-opening:

This woman told me her husband had been acting strangely lately, being hyper-critical of her and short - tempered around the house. He's been marginally employed for some time, and some business deals he's had haven't worked out well. She suspected she knew why, because she had been experiencing some strange things herself and she suspected they were being haunted. Before her husband had married her, as it turns out, her husband had been engaged to a woman who had gotten cancer during the engagement and died. When my friend had gotten married, it was with a stipulation from the groom: on the day that they got married, there would be two wedding ceremonies, the first to the deceased woman, making her the "first wife" (大太太)and only after that could the man marry his living fiancee, who would be considered the "second wife" (小太太). Moreover, the couple was told by a priest in a temple that they could not sleep with each other for three days after the wedding, because for those three days the man should be "sleeping" with the first wife, which was her prerogative.

Recently, with things not going smoothly in their household, they went to the priest for a consultation. They were told they were being haunted by the first wife. The (living) woman had faithfully, on a daily basis over the years, prayed to and worshipped the ancestral tablet of the "first wife", but in fact, they had not really observed the three day no sex rule. This, they were told, was the source of their problems. But that's not the full extent of their difficulties. The first wife, when she had been dating the husband, had gotten pregnant and had an abortion. The priest also said that my friend's youngest son (they have three children), two years old, has a ghost who is following him around everywhere he goes - apparently the aborted child. They have not yet been told how they can resolve these difficulties.

I do find stories like this fascinating. We Americans definitely are entirely too dismissive of the idea that luck, or fortune, plays a huge role in who lives a good, full, prosperous life and who doesn't. The old puritan idea that material success confirms one as a good person, and among the "elect" to go to heaven always struck me as ridiculous on the face of it. "We make our own luck" is pretty much the American credo, and mostly I think it makes people feel good because it makes them feel in control. But Taiwanese seem to go to the other extreme. Many people here believe in a world of spirits that simply control their lives and make the efforts of mortals all but irrelevant. Anyway, I hope my friend can resolve her problems.

World's Funniest Joke

2005-04-23T17:32:00.000+08:00

A study group calling itself Laugh Lab tested over 40,000 jokes, and about 2 million people participated in the voting, and the results of the poll were that the following is the funniest joke in the world:

"A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn't seem to be breathing, his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps to the operator: "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The operator, in a calm soothing voice says: "Just take it easy. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, then a shot is heard. The guy's voice comes back on the line. He says: "OK, now what?'"

Tough to follow an introduction like that, but it is pretty funny.

The Church and the Radicals II

2005-04-23T17:00:00.000+08:00

The Catholic Church seems in danger of falling into the same trap the radical Left has been in for more than a generation now. There's no sense in talking about how to make things better with an incremental, policy by policy ameliorative agenda. Those things only make "The System" work better, and it is "The System" that is the problem. "Abbie Hoffman contemptuously dismissed 'political revolution' on the grounds that politics merely 'breeds organizers.'" So working for a more equitable health care system, progressive taxation, an excellent public education sector, or social and economic justice were all dismissed as mere band-aids on a corrupt system not worth saving.

Substitute "The Modern World" for "The System" and you see a very similar way of thinking among Vatican elites. They become less and less capable of participating in any kind of rational discussion about how to deal with problems like the population explosion, AIDS, or the dilemmas posed by advances in medical technology. Their contempt for the entire post-Enlightenment world is such that one suspects they don't mind it a bit if these problems continue to rage -"Burn, Baby Burn!"- because it only hastens the day when the world sees the error of its ways and comes back to them. The same applies to geopolitics. Why would the difficult, grueling project of transforming an Iraqi society that had suffered under fascism into a democratic state be worth it if Liberal democratic states and fascist states were not fundamentally different in kind? If the two were essentially morally equivalent, the war would, indeed, be indefensible, wouldn't it?

The Chuch and the Radicals I

2005-04-23T15:19:00.000+08:00

Andrew Sullivan cites this quotation of Cardinal Ratzinger's:

In this regard, the consumerism and relativism of the West can be just as dangerous as the totalitarianism of the East: It's just as easy to forget about God while dancing to an iPod as while marching in a Hitler Youth rally. There's a difference, to be sure, but hardly anyone would contest the observation that in elite Western society, as in totalitarian Germany, the moral vocabulary has been purged of the idea of sin. And if there's no sense of sin, then there's no need for a Redeemer, or for the Church.

Andrew responds, "A free society where people can listen to iPods and freely debate their own ideas of truth and the good life is all but indistinguishable from a Nuremberg rally?"

Defenders of Benedict maintain that the experience of living under the Nazis was of relatively less consequence for the development of his ideas than his negative reaction to the 1968 Paris student uprising, which led to his turn to theological conservatism. In fact, among the countercultural Left, one of the most commonly repeated ideas was the conflation of Western, Liberal consumer society with Nazi Germany. In "Nation of Rebels" Heath and Potter document the frequency of the idea in the writings of Marcuse and Reich, among others. Theodore Roszak is quoted as criticizing Playboy magazine because it promoted conspicuous consumption - it had become "an indispensible form of social control under the technocracy. Under the Nazis, however, youth camps and party courtesans were used for the same integrative purpose- as were the concentration camps, where the kinkier members of the elite were rewarded by being allowed free exercise of their tastes." The authors point out: "Note the extraordinary equivalency here: in Roszak's view, a pool party at Hugh Hefner's mansion and the "joy division" at Ravensbruck are just variations on the same system of repressive control."

Lee Teng Hui I

2005-04-23T14:37:00.000+08:00

Yesterday's paper witnessed an entirely predictable eruption of Mount Lee Tung Hui over the issue of the pending mainland trips of Lien Chan and James Soong Chyu Yu.

What to make of Lee Tung Hui, eighty two years old,Taiwan's first democratically elected President, redoubtable Old Lion of the Taiwanese Identity Movement, with the constitution (and sense of mission) of an Old Testament Prophet. It's questionable that there is anybody who could claim to have done as much to establish democracy on the island as Lee; yet,there is also no one as hated, as vilified, on the mainland and among pan-Blues, as Lee. One can only sigh on seeing yet another Chiang Kai-Shek biography hit the stores when there is such a crying need for a full-length treatment of the man who,if Taiwan does indeed pull off independence, will go down as the Taiwanese (國父) Father of the Country (not Sun Yat-Sen).

This excellent Answers.com profile gets to the nub of the accusation against Lee:“Traitor!” The thread of betrayal runs right through the decades. Lee was a member of the Taiwan Communist Party at the time of the (1947) 2-28 massacre by the KMT of a good part of the Taiwanese intelligentsia. As a Party member, Lee would have been right at ground zero for elimination. He was at an age when he would have still been figuring out who he was and what he believed and which organization represented what he believed. There is nothing in his subsequent biography that suggests that the Communist Party was anything but a youthful aborted beginning. Still, the question lingers: did he survive, and make his bones with the KMT, by selling out his comrades? There's a story to be told here, but there's no telling when, or if, it will ever come out.

Lee Teng Hui II

2005-04-23T14:33:00.000+08:00

The central“betrayal, of course, was of the KMT itself. To have witnessed the ferocity of the anti-Lee demonstrations after the 2000 election was to get a sense of just how deep the anger and sense of betrayal was among the Old Guard mainlander faction in the party. What we have subsequently discovered –what Lee has let us see–is that he was precisely what the protesters maintained he was: a pro- independence mole in the very heart of the party, believing in goals that were anathema to the majority of party members. In yet another betrayal, their candidate, Soong, who stood up for Lee in the succession crisis following the death of Chiang Ching-Guo, appears to have had his presidential ambitions foiled forever by the machinations of Lee.

Lee maintained authoritarian rule within the party. He allowed Black Money corruption to flourish in order to ensure the party's success at the polls. And, along the way, he ushered in the first ever genuine democracy with a Han Chinese cultural base. With the patience (and simmering fury) of the Count of Monte Cristo, he concealed his true beliefs and agenda for three decades, as he was advanced as an ineffectual and safe, token native Taiwanese. The mainland Old Guard never knew what hit them.