Get your own Free Home PageWilliam J. Clinton is an expensive president. His thousand person-plus, 100-ton-plus entourage for his China trip is so out-of-the ball park, even the New York Times got sniffy about it.
It's all on our dime, too. That's too much money for the pleasure of having Clinton out of the country. After all, he's not doing anything but having a couple of inconsequential meetings and staging a bunch of photo ops.
The idea of Clinton pressuring the Chinese government to do anything is a joke. Once he gets past White House interns and ambitious gals looking for connections, Clinton is a feather when it comes to pressure, no matter what spin American journalists put on his mild remarks.
The Chinese have scored a propaganda home run; the American people have gotten nothing; and Clinton has already got all he's going to get, which apparently was a lot of cash for his campaign coffers.
In a safe world, Clinton's trip to China would be merely amusing. But the world is never safe, and neither are the humans who live in it. Bad or corrupt politics and inept diplomacy just create the next war. Anyone who in any way contributes to starting a war is guilty of a crime against humanity.
And China is a good candidate for starting the next war. It remains a communist dictatorship, the last of mass murderers in power. Its economy -- despite its propaganda -- is not doing much for the Chinese people. It has an enormous population. Sooner or later, it will try to expand its territory. So today it is pursuing what it needs to become a military power -- foreign capital and technology.
We made a big mistake when we put a cheap grifter into the White House. He's doing nothing but giving the Chinese government what apparently it paid for -- a propaganda show, technology and capital.
From the Chinese government's point of view, Clinton is a propaganda prop. It is using him to paint a false picture of a ``new China'' with a vibrant economy. It is using him to tell Chinese and Tibetan patriots that they can expect no real help from the United States.
That's the why of the Tiananmen Square ceremony: to put the American president on the blood-stained stones, smiling and shaking hands with the men who spilled others' blood. It amounted to a glob of spit on the graves of the martyrs to Chinese freedom. No decent American would have agreed to it.
I don't think that most Americans have come to grips with how corrupt the federal government has become. It's corrupt in the money and moral sense. It is also corrupt in the sense that there are hardly any public officials left who wouldn't sell out the American people for a buck and a vote. And they'd do it in a New York minute.
Some Americans are so ignorant of government they suppose that politicians who vote to give them money are good people. It does not occur to them that it doesn't cost the politicians a dime to buy some fool's vote with somebody else's money.
As far as anyone looking out for the American people, the people don't have a government in Washington. The trans-national corporations have one. The foreign lobbyists have one. The rich have one. But the American people are left out in the cold.
If there were no such thing as consequences and payback, we could all try to live well and not worry about it. But there are always consequences, and the consequences of bad national government are likely to be poverty, loss of liberty and wars we lose instead of win.
That may seem like a leap from a cheap politician's photo-op trip, but the present is always where the future is planted. The crop Clinton is planting will yield a bitter harvest. To his disgrace, he stood on the wrong side of history in China. Empty rhetoric won't get the job done.
I'm beginning to believe in circles. Two centuries ago, American independence was sought and fought for. For decades, it was genuinely celebrated. Then it became more or less just another holiday. And now, on the eve of a new millennium, independence is once again a living political issue.
Oh, yes, folks, there are people who think the nation-state is a dead relic and should, for all practical purposes, be abolished in favor of some form of world government. They work to achieve that.
As you ate hot dogs, folks in Europe were meeting to decide whether or not to establish a permanent international criminal court. The World Trade Organization, which Congress foolishly voted to accept, chips away at American independence. Membership in the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization chips away at American independence.
Perhaps it would be a good idea to review the issue of independence so Americans can decide if they wish to remain Americans or become citizens of some supranational organization.
Independence means that the United States and its people answer to no laws other than those enacted by themselves. That means, of course, that we should withdraw from the WTO and vote against and disavow the international criminal court. An independent America would never allow one of its citizens to be tried by an international court. An independent America would never allow an international bureaucracy to dictate what its trade, environmental or sanitation laws should be.
Independence means that the United States goes to war only in defense of the United States and only, as our Constitution dictates, upon a declaration of war by Congress.
Instead, Americans are posted in more than 100 foreign countries on missions for the United Nations. When a young American soldier, Michael New, declined to wear a U.N. uniform and serve under a foreign officer, he was court-martialed. To its shame, Congress did not rise up in his defense, though some individuals did. More than 100,000 Americans have died in combat in undeclared wars since 1945.
Independence means that the United States foreign policy is determined only by United States interests. Today, the second-most-powerful lobby in Washington is that of a foreign country, Israel, and it succeeds often in persuading the government to act not in American interests but in the interests of Israel.
It is wrong, for example, for the United States to risk its relationship with Russia over the issue of Russian investment in Iran simply because Israel chooses not to make peace with its neighbors and therefore fears them.
George Washington, in his Farewell Address, spelled out what's wrong with foreign influence: 1. it creates an illusion of common interests in which there is none; 2. it involves the United States in the favored foreign nation's quarrels and wars; 3. it leads to granting favors to the favored foreign nation that result in ill will in other nations denied the favors; 4. it encourages those acting on behalf of the foreign nation to mislead public opinion and to tamper with domestic factions; and 5. it allows the foreign agents to smear those loyal Americans who resist it.
Of course, Americans no longer interested in independence will have little interest in the father of that independence.
On the other hand, those who appreciate and love America will never surrender its independence peacefully nor will they view as other than enemies those who advocate its loss.
Sometimes, like Col. Travis at the Alamo, you just have to draw a line in the sand. Lines, of course, are too thin for compromise.
The tobacco issue is a good example of how unfree America is becoming and how unthinking many journalists already are.
It seems not to occur to anyone that whether teenagers smoke is a matter for teenagers and their parents to decide, not a matter for the government to decide.
Yet politicians in Washington tried to rationalize a half-trillion-dollar rip-off of the tobacco industry and its customers on the grounds of preventing teenagers from smoking.
Some journalists picked up this theme and announced that anyone who voted against the bill was condemning teenagers to smoking cigarettes. They roundly condemned the tobacco industry for buying ads and telling people what neither the journalists nor the politicians would tell them -- the truth.
These journalists only reveal their socialist mind-set and lack of logic. The government once prohibited drinking booze. People drank booze anyway. The government prohibits possession and sale of drugs it has declared to be illegal. People possess and sell tons of the drugs anyway. The government prohibits people from entering the country without a visa. People by the tens of thousands enter it without a visa.
If the government prohibits smoking tobacco, people will smoke it illegally. (It has been illegal for many years in many states for children to buy tobacco products, but they do anyway, just as some of them buy booze and dope.) If the government raises the price to $5 a pack (that now-defeated tobacco bill would have done that), then a black market will arise to supply cheaper smokes.
Intelligent people not afflicted with the disabilities of socialists -- ignorance of history and human nature, naive faith in government and an insatiable lust for the power to run other people's lives -- know all of this. Laws do not change human behavior. Laws can condone behavior and condemn behavior, but they can't change behavior.
The tobacco ``problem'' is real simple once you get greed, busybodiness and political demagoguery out of the way. If you don't want to smoke, don't smoke. Try to persuade your children not to smoke. Otherwise, mind your own business. Teenage smoking is a minor problem. It amounts to barely 2 percent of the market. And smoking is no longer fashionable.
If people had any sense, they would be frightened by how the tobacco industry has been treated. It has been treated the same way Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler treated people. The laws were changed to strip them of their normal defenses in lawsuits. Unproven allegations were declared to be facts. Companies engaged in a legal business were publicly condemned for engaging in a legal business and for following normal practices.
And if that's not Orwellian enough for you, please note that all this time the government has continued to declare that making and selling cigarettes is a legal business while tobacco-company executives have been treated as if they were monstrous criminals.
When government punishes people for obeying the law, it's time to be worried. What the government has done to the tobacco industry, it can do to any industry -- and to individuals. It is not the rule of law. It is the arbitrary, the law-means-what-I-say-it-means-at-any-given-moment rule characteristic of totalitarian governments.
But perhaps that's what Americans want -- the liberal-socialists anyway. They don't seem to value freedom or personal responsibility. They seem to think the sun can't rise without the government's permission and assistance. They have contempt for the rule of law. They act more like a mob than free Americans. They deserve a whiff of tobacco smoke, if not of the grape.
Paddling through the stream of public discourse, polluted as it is by lies, half-truths, statistical nonsense, cliches, sophistries and demagoguery, makes a person thirsty for authenticity.
Maybe that's why I was first attracted to a new book, Neptunus Rex: Naval Stories of the Normandy Invasion (Presidio Press). It is a collection of testimonials of Navy enlisted men and officers who participated in the invasion of Normandy.
(Quick note for the victims of public education: The Normandy Invasion occurred on June 6, 1944, in a war called World War II. About 5,000 ships and other craft loaded with 200,000 troops crossed the English Channel to invade German-occupied France. On account of nuclear weapons making concentration of forces unhealthy, no one alive today will ever see its likes again.)
The individual accounts are separated by drawings and excerpts from letters from the artist, Lt. (j.g.) Tracy Sugarman, an amphibious officer during the invasion who was on Utah Beach from June until it was secured in November. Sugarman is an eloquent man. The letters were to his wife.
``This spring of '44 will be engraved on my mind. What a strange and terrible time this is. Someday our kids will read about the spring of '44 and it will be dusty and meaningless to them. Yet how very vivid and momentous to live through it. To see the weight, to sense the power, to speculate on where, when, how -- to be a tiny insignificant part of it all and yet to have so much at stake in the game. You've placed your bet and somebody else is rolling the dice.''
Some of the men who tell their stories are better at words than others. Some write as well as any professional. But they all deal in facts, in truth, in the reality they themselves experienced in the midst of one of the world's mightiest battles.
One of the men who spent weeks on the beach in heavy combat ended his account by writing, ``When I realized that I was going to survive this thing, I had a feeling that was new to me. I was depressed and sad. I wondered how men could do these things to other men. I wondered why I was alive and not buried with all those other men on the beach. I crawled into some thick bushes in front of a house and stayed there all day. My buddy wondered what had happened to me that day. I told him that I just went for a long walk.''
Telling his wife about the immensity of the sea, Sugarman wrote, ``There are those long twilights here now. The sky is billions of miles away and you feel very much alone. The water stretches away forever. The ships sit alone in the water, each in its own pool of aloneness. It's big and empty and very quiet. The emptiness comes off the water and crawls right into you.''
These personal accounts are the best way to get a sense of what it was like. And they have other uses. The next time you feel sorry for yourself, you can read the account of a young man who is blinded by shrapnel shredding the back of his head. He lies on the beach all night, listening to tanks, artillery, machine gun fire. Four of the other wounded men bleed to death.
The next morning a passing soldier gives the young man a sip of water and tells him it will be late afternoon before he can get any medical help. So he lies there still, helpless, in pain and blind, surrounded by threatening noises.
``What rotten times these are -- unfair, blundering, wasteful,'' Sugarman wrote his wife. ``And yet you believe in the ultimate right of our struggle, the fundamental justness of the sacrifices. So you file away your desires and do your job. How ardently I wish to do that job -- and end it. I reserve the right to bitch at what is, and work for, pray for, and believe in what ought and will be.''
Got a message from a teacher that I would like to share with you. It's real, but I've protected her identity. It refers to a column on the failure of public-school reform.
`` ... just wanted to congratulate you for having the courage to say what we, as public educators, all know but know better than to say outside our circles. You were right on the money with everything you said. I'm a third-grade teacher ... and know all too well about lack of discipline, academic tests and differences in intelligence. This past year I had only one child with an IQ above 100. The rest were in the 90s all the way to the 50s. I'm not kidding. Try being held accountable for the fact that a child with an IQ of 70 is expected to pass an academic test. Ha. Public education reform? Yeah, right.''
There's a funny thing about the egalitarians who run the educational bureaucracy, dominate politics and often pontificate in the news media. They love to talk about diversity, but they use the word only as a code word for race and sex quotas, affirmative action, busing, reasons not to control immigration, etc. The genuine diversity that exists as a result of nature they refuse to recognize.
They don't wish to recognize nature's true diversity because to do so wrecks their political and ideological beliefs. The basic premise of socialism, communism and American liberalism is that all people are the same and that differences in outcome are the fault of outside factors such as the political or economic system, poverty or racism. Change these outside factors and the measurable results will be equal.
No they won't. It's simply a false premise. All of God's children have souls and deserve respect and dignity. But all of God's children most definitely do not have the same IQs, the same talents and aptitudes, the same energy levels, the same drives, the same ambitions, the same dreams, the same support systems at home. And nothing will ever change that.
You would think that American liberals would have learned something from the Soviet Union. You have to give the Soviets credit. For 70 years they used the immense power of the state with total ruthlessness to prove the basic premises of socialism. And they failed. The ``new communist man'' the theory predicted never appeared. After 70 years, Russians were the same people they had been under the czars. There were just fewer of them than there should have been.
A good society is one in which there is a place for everyone. People are judged on the basis of their character, not on their test scores or job or income. The foreign notion of inferior and superior based on academic tests or income is treated as poisonous and discarded.
Re-creating a good society should be our goal, not jamming everyone into an institutional hopper and expecting everyone to conform to some ideological ideal. A public-school system that recognized real diversity and attempted to help each child on the basis of his or her true abilities could help create that good society. If there were classroom discipline. If classroom size in the elementary grades were reduced to fewer than 20. If children are not held to be failures if they cannot match some predetermined, uniform test score regardless of their abilities and talents.
But public education is a political institution. Like all our political institutions at the moment, it is screwed up by the bad character of the people who run it. It is run by politicians, both elected and appointed. The people in the system who know what's really wrong and how to fix it -- the classroom teachers -- are entirely out of the loop.
Years ago, when I was a green, 20-year-old reporter, a Turkish colonel gave me a good lesson in foreign policy. He was on one of those State Department tours, and I had been sent to interview him. ``Do you think Turkey and the United States will remain friends?'' I asked.
He stared at me with all the warmth of a rattlesnake and said, ``Turkey and the United States are not friends. We just happen to have the same enemy.''
George Washington said the same thing in different words when he warned that no nation could be trusted beyond its self-interest. That's a good thing to keep in mind when you read all this gushy nonsense about China that is being written by journalists, corporate shills and academic leftists.
China is not our friend. We just at the moment happen to have what the ruling power in each country wants. The Chinese want capital and technology, and the American transnational corporations want cheap labor with which to make their consumer junk.
The late Joe Ka, a friend who made excellent egg rolls and also had a doctorate in history and literature, told me once that Americans should remember that Chinese leaders are used to thinking 50 to 100 years ahead. American politicians are used to thinking no further than the next election.
It was embarrassing to watch President Clinton attend services in a state-controlled church and visit a state-controlled village where state-controlled leaders are chosen in state-controlled elections and then prattle on about the winds of democracy. All around him, dissidents were being arrested, and true Christians were meeting secretly in private homes to avoid arrest and persecution.
I have no idea how current Chinese leaders view the future or what their plans are. We do know, from the public military journals that have been translated, that their military officers write about tactics and strategy for defeating the United States. We do know they are making an effort to beef up their military power, both conventional and nuclear. That at least indicates to any sensible person that they view us as a future opponent in war.
There is no reason the Chinese should like Americans. We were as colonialist in our own way as the British. We've never looked upon China as anything but a market -- still don't. Back in the 1940s, when the Nationalists starting losing the civil war, we bailed out on them and left the country to the communists who killed, some scholars estimate, 60 million people, not counting Tibetans and Americans in Korea.
And now Clinton is playing pals with the Communists. You might as well buy a rattlesnake as a pet for your baby as think you can be friends with a communist. If they are overthrown one day, the people they oppressed will not think highly of us for supporting their oppressors. Nationalistic Chinese who are not communists will be just as hostile to the idea of America hegemony in the region.
Some Americans seem shocked by the idea that other people might not like us. Others take a trip to China, have a pleasant time and come back saying, ``Oh, the Chinese are nice people. Not to worry.'' Of course the Chinese are nice people. So are we. So are Germans, Japanese, Italians and Iraqis, but we've all gone to war. Nice people in countries don't decide war or peace. Governments make that decision. Between elections, we Americans have virtually no control over our government, and the Chinese people have even less control over theirs.
There is no such thing as friendship between governments. As the Turk said, sometimes different governments have the same enemy. Sometimes they don't.
The funny thing about disasters is that, when they come, they remind us how we ought to act all the time.
The wildfires were spectacular. They consumed a half-million acres. But more impressive was the way people responded to the threat. Firefighters came from throughout the country. They performed heroically. People -- and not just people but businesses, churches and private institutions -- exploded with gratitude. Law-enforcement and local-government officials stepped up and performed like champs. Even those two categories at the bottom of everybody's list -- politicians and the news media -- behaved well.
So, ironically, as the fires destroyed forests, businesses and homes, they also created a strongly bonded community. You see this phenomenon all the time whenever and wherever disaster strikes.
The trick is to understand it. My guess is that, faced with a common danger, we shed our petty, selfish concerns. All of a sudden there is something more important to occupy our attention than what's on television, the traffic jam or the ache in our left toe.
At the same time, the threat kind of automatically arranges our priorities: life, family, neighbors. We forget the other categories such as Democrat, Republican, conservative, liberal, race or whatever. All of a sudden we are just human beings trying to survive. Staring the power and cruel indifference of nature in the face, we don't feel so cocky. Having company and help start looking like good ideas.
And then there are all of those examples of just how great human beings can be. There are those firefighters enduring the heat and exhaustion and risking their lives without complaint to save someone else's life and property. There are those local government officials who are also working hard and smart. And then there are all of those generous people -- of all types and classes -- who opened their doors, their hearts and their wallets for the common good.
Kind of makes you wonder why we were cranky before or suspicious or cynical. When it counted most, they all came through -- people, officials, firefighters, cops, even politicians and news media.
So why can't we keep this good feeling of community and cooperation alive? Perhaps we ought to hire somebody to shoot at us once a month just so our priorities won't get out of whack again.
A better idea is just to remember. The next time we start to say something cynical about politicians, let's remember that, when it mattered, the government worked. All of the politicians couldn't have been all bad or things wouldn't have worked so well.
And the next time we find ourselves in disagreement with someone, let's remember that, differences aside, nearly all people have that capacity for goodness inside them.
Cynicism is soul-poison. Oscar Wilde said that a cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. George Meredith called it intellectual dandyism. Cynicism always has struck me as a form of cowardice because it takes a great deal more courage to believe and to love than to mock and despise.
Like wildfires, cynicism is something we can do without.
I read somewhere a long time ago that the secret of happiness is to be involved in something outside one's self. My own observations back that up. Truly, I have never known a self-centered person who wasn't miserable. And, of course, what we see in the disaster situations is just the opposite -- people acting unselfishly.
So, if we dump cynicism, if we keep faith in our fellow man and get rid of selfishness, we won't need a natural disaster to make us act like a community of decent human beings.
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