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 hroughout
this ghastly Gary Condit thing, Republicans have been chiding Democrats
for circling the wagons, and Democrats have been saying, “You’d
do the same thing, if it were a Republican.” (Frankly, the Republican
congressmen have been silent as well.)
I would like
to take issue with this: If this were a Republican, I believe that
Republicans (me, for example) would be all over Condit, demanding
that he cooperate with the police, hounding him out of Congress,
as (at least) a reprobate and a liar. I think we would be extra-tough
on our own.
Which brings
me back to the Lewinsky affair (which is far too light a term to
describe it). Worse than Bill Clinton’s individual behavior was
the behavior of the Democratic party, in which there was barely
a peep of complaint or disapproval about Clinton. Many Democrats
— pundits and others — charged, “Well, you’d be the same
way if this were a president of your own.”
Actually,
no. I always responded, “If this were a Republican president, we’d
be screaming for him to depart the White House, to resign
and allow honor to return to the office, because, for one thing,
he would be staining our party, just as Nixon had.” Bob Livingston
didn’t last two seconds as Speaker-designate. Newt Gingrich, in
my view, would have been out on his ear two seconds after it was
discovered that he had dumped his wife to take up with a staffer.
I don’t think Republicans generally would have stood for it.
Many people
would view the above as hopelessly, blindly partisan. But I believe
it’s true: Republicans would have treated a Clinton or a Condit
of their own party far differently than the Democrats have. I can
speak for one Republican (for, as I once heard Bill Buckley say,
I’m the world’s foremost authority on my own opinion): I would have
been baying for a Republican Clinton or Condit to leave —
much faster than I would a Democrat.
You may
recall that, when President Clinton made his finger-wagging denial,
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) was in the room. And when Clinton
semi-confessed his lie, seven months later, Feinstein allowed as
how her faith in him had been “badly shattered.” (I loved that line:
“badly shattered.” Something is shattered or it’s not, right? When
I discussed this with my friend Mike Potemra, back then, he remembered
a line from Mr. T in one of the Rocky movies: “I’m gonna
crucify ’im — real bad!”)
Well, Feinstein
was one of those California Democrats who were assured by their
fellow California Democrat, Gary Condit, that he had not had an
affair with the missing Chandra Levy — that he had not used
this intern for sex. And when Condit had to fess up, Feinstein let
it be known that she’d never forgive the man.
I couldn’t
help thinking, in my spiteful, Clinton-hating, grudge-nursing way,
that she wasn’t as clear on a president who similarly had lied to
her, and everyone else.
Among
the very best — the most admirable, the bravest, the greatest
— people I have ever met have been Chinese democracy activists.
Learning of their efforts, and the risks they take, one all of a
sudden feels very small.
Anyway, I
was talking with a few such people recently, one of whom is Jian-li
Yang, a research fellow at the Kennedy School and head of the Foundation
for China in the 21st Century. Where to begin about him? He was
a Tiananmen Square leader. He had already been in the U.S. studying
at Berkeley, but he flew home when the protests began, to join and
lead them — at tremendous personal risk. He is now in the top
tier of the PRC’s black list, along with about 50 others. Mr. Yang
has earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Berkeley and a Ph.D. in political
economy from Harvard. In addition to being brilliant and brave,
he is marvelously kind.
The foundation
he leads is staging a conference next month on interethnic conflict
in China. The group can be phoned at (617) 735-9166 or e-mailed
at china21century@yahoo.com.
Talking to
Jian-li, I asked him what book best described the Chinese situation,
as far as intellectuals were concerned. And his answer I found touching:
He said, “Milosz’s Captive Mind.” This is, indeed, one of
the great explanatory books of our time, and it reaches across every
boundary and every age, really.
Another
great scholar and activist is Youqin Wang, a lecturer in Chinese
at the University of Chicago. Her main work — to which she
devotes all her “spare” time — is the memorializing of the
victims of the Cultural Revolution. Her website, a powerful, appalling,
and necessary thing, is located at www.chinese-memorial.org.
I interviewed
her recently, and one of the questions I asked was, “Do the Chinese
want to remember, document, and memorialize the Cultural
Revolution?” She gave me a brief and acceptable answer, and that
was that.
But she e-mailed
back the next day to say she wanted to give a different answer,
which I now relate. In the introduction to her website (only the
Chinese version, not the English), she tells a story she learned
from a teacher who had been sent to a labor-reform camp. His job
was to tend the cattle and chickens, and one day they killed a cow,
which had gotten too old to work. They killed it near a willow tree,
where abundant, green grass always grew. After the killing, the
cattle wouldn’t go near the tree, even when there was luxuriant
grass to be had. They also kind of moaned, bellowed, as if in protest.
When you slaughtered
a chicken, in contrast, you threw its intestines on the ground,
and all the other chickens would scratch at it, fighting over those
intestines.
On her website,
Youqin Wang asks, Which way shall we Chinese adopt — the way
of the cattle or the way of the chicken?
She didn’t
think much of it, but she was surprised to find that this story
was the one thing her fellow Chinese most responded to, when they
perused her website and wrote to her. They would write such things
as, “I hope I have the courage to reject the way of the chicken
— but I don’t know.”
Shiver-making
stuff, presented in a profoundly simple way.
One of
the things that Youqin Wang does is detail the multifarious methods
of torture and murder used during the Cultural Revolution. For example,
they would force victims to drink chemicals, thereby killing them.
Don’t think
it’s not still going on. There was a report the other day that a
Falun Gong member, Wu Qingbin, 37, father of a twelve-year-old boy,
was killed in this fashion on July 20 at Huainan labor camp. He
was forced to consume a disinfectant. Said the report, “Wu had been
in and out of reeducation and labor camps since March 2000, and
had suffered repeated beatings and torture for his refusal to renounce
his faith.”
Every day,
by e-mail, from those who care, I receive reports like this, concerning
brutality — evil — in China and Cuba, especially. This
makes it hard to forget.
You saw,
probably, that the new head of CNN, Walter Isaacson, trekked to
Capitol Hill to meet with Republicans, wanting to hear their concerns
about CNN’s bias. It was widely remarked that Isaacson had to do
this because his network desperately needs to attract or recapture
conservative viewers, whom they are losing to Fox. I think it’s
great that CNN is being made to recognize the need for balance and
fairness: but commerce (ratings) shouldn’t be the motive; right
journalistic standards ought to be. But if the market drives them
there, at least they will have gotten there.
The press
is terribly down on W. because he’s spending a month in Crawford,
Texas. They were never down on Clinton when he hobnobbed with the
swells in Martha’s Vineyard. It always amazed me that Clinton got
away with that: with such snooty vacationing habits. What an Arkansas
wannabe! Of course, he didn’t go to the Vineyard in the summer of
1996, when he was running for reelection. His pollster told
him to go camping out West — more prole, more common, don’t
you know. And then, the next summer, safely reelected, he was right
back with his peeps (not eyes, but people) in Martha’s Vineyard.
The press,
generally, was shockingly uncynical about this. They are said to
be hard-boiled, cynical, skeptical, unrelenting, etc. But the truth
is that many in the press are now themselves in the Vineyard class
— and they appreciated Clinton as one of their own.
What
has made the new Italian premier, Silvio Berlusconi, popular? He
has raised the Italian speed limit to about 100 m.p.h., thrilling
his joy-riding constituents. This reminded me of the sardonic remark
of one Republican in Washington: that the greatest achievement of
the GOP Congress, elected in the Gingrich Revolution, was to abolish
the federal speed limit — and that was pretty much it.
Still, that
was a nice achievement: The uniformity of the speed limit, from
Maine to California, encompassing Manhattan and Montana, was a perfect
symbol of left-liberal policy and thought.
I have
a report from Dan Bloom, a journalist in Taipei: Apparently, the
World Trade Organization’s website requires people from Taiwan to
register their names under the country title “Taiwan, Province of
China.” This is even worse than the Olympics, in which Taiwan (or
the Republic of China) has to compete under the absurd name “Chinese
Taipei.” The WTO should get bent.
In further
Chinese news, you may have noticed that Tibetan freedom activists
have been jailed (to use far too perfumed a word) for “splittist”
activity. As monstrous as Communists are, at least they give you
their language — their asinine, straight-from-Nineteen-Eighty-four
terms — for comic relief.
In Friday’s
edition of Impromptus, I recalled that Judge Bork had been attacked
for his beard, grown during a riverboat vacation in France. I also
remembered, or half-remembered, that he had decided to grow the
beard to avoid the hassle of shaving. (This came up in a discussion
of Al Gore’s new whiskers, also sprouted while on a European vacation.)
I can now report, on unimpeachable authority, that it was not a
riverboat in France, but a canal boat in England, and that the judge
had stopped shaving, not to avoid the hassle, but because it was
pretty much impossible, physically, in the quarters of the boat.
And, no, I’m
still not over it, by the way--those hearings, in darkest 1987.
Was out
in Hollywood the other day when I was approached by a person I knew
to be a conservative. This was in his work environment. Before speaking
to him, at least in a normal tone of voice, I said, “Are you out?”
Meaning, of course, “Are you known, to one and all, as a conservative?
Because, if not, I don’t want to blow your cover.” It came naturally
to me to use the word “out.” I wasn’t trying to be cute. But it
does say something.
Also saying
something is a curious fact I happened to learn today: There is
a certain organization — a relatively secret organization —
that uses a strict quota system, whereby one member must be accepted
from each of the following categories: black, gay, and conservative.
One cheer
for affirmative action?
Who was
the most famous loser — or non-winner — in the history
of the PGA Tour? Probably Bobby Wadkins, who also carried the burden
of being the brother of Lanny Wadkins, a great champion. Bobby always
played well and he always made money — he was the winningest
player, in dollar terms, of any non-tournament-winning player ever.
And when he
turned 50, he joined the Senior Tour, and in his very first tournament
— won. This was just last week. I assure you that this is an
amazing story, and I feel terrific about it. Bobby Wadkins in the
winner’s circle at last, in style.
A couple
of weeks ago, I noted that the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il
was scared — deathly scared — to fly, which is why he
took the train from Pyongyang to Moscow, a very fur piece, as Faulkner
would write. My friend Larry Henry wrote to remind me that Kim was
once reported, by official organs, to have shot a 38 in an
18-hole round of golf. As Larry remarked, “This says something about
delusions, dictatorship, Communism, and I don’t know what else.”
Does it ever.
On Friday,
I had one item about dumb clichés, including “You can’t judge a
book by its cover,” and an item about the pain of a misspelled byline
— a newspaper had me as “Jay Nordingler” (when the correct
spelling is bad enough). I received the following, delicious note:
“As my dear
old dad used to say, ‘If you can’t judge the book by its cover,
don’t buy the book.’ And if you think misspelling is bad for some
last names, try mispronouncing! I could tell you stories.” Signed,
Roy Sheetz.
Okay,
I got in a cab this morning, and the driver — who, sadly, was
crazy — wanted to argue with me about something. In the course
of his fulminations, he said, “Who do you think you are, the vice
president?” I didn’t fully appreciate until a couple minutes later,
when I had gotten out of the cab (aborted trip), what he’d said:
the vice president. What a strange comment! A tribute to
Cheney? To Gore? To some ignorant or devious pundits’ view that
Cheney is “really” running things? In any case, I might have said,
“No, the president.”
Who do
you think you are, the vice president? John Nance Garner would
be amazed.
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