Taiwan, Clinton-China, The Chair, &c.

June 12, 2001 10:40 a.m.

hey are dancing in the streets of Taipei (or at least they’re very pleased): Monday, June 11, was a historic day for Taiwan. For the first time (or so it is thought), the New York Times referred to the island as a “country.” The mighty word appeared smack in the first line of a story by Mark Landler headed “Taipei Weighs TV Network Tied to China.” Forget the TV network, say Taiwanese; how about that “country”! For the sake of posterity, we will record the historic sentence: “With more than a dozen all-news channels on the television dial, the last thing this compact country would seem to need is another one.”

Not long ago, Rudy Giuliani referred to Taiwan as a country, which was thought to be big. Not nearly as big as the New York Times, baby! For Taiwan, this is almost as good as full-scale U.N. membership.

Now if only the International Olympic Committee would permit the country to compete under its own name — until, that is, the island is reunited with the mainland, democratically.

In other news of the East, the Washington Times’s Bill Gertz has a typically outstanding story about new cooperation between the regime in Beijing and the regime in Havana. (That story is found here.) It’s only right that the remaining Communists should look out for each other. A company called Cosco, an arm of the Chinese military, is shipping matériel to Cuba. Gertz’s story is full of fascinating and important information, but the nugget I like has to do with a Cosco official’s visit to the Clinton White House in 1995. This visit occurred “days after Democratic Party fund-raiser Johnny Chung made a large payment to the White House for the president’s re-election campaign.” The visit, continues Gertz, was cleared “by White House National Security Council aide Robert Suettinger, who wrote in a memorandum that giving White House photographs to the group of Chinese officials and Chung, who in 1998 pleaded guilty to making illegal campaign contributions, would not cause ‘any lasting damage to U.S. foreign policy.’”

Okay, here comes the beauty part: “Mr. Suettinger, who described Chung as a ‘hustler,’ also stated in a White House memo: ‘And to the degree it motivates him to continue contributing to the [Democratic National Committee], who am I to complain?’”

Yes, indeed! The Clinton administration in a nutshell.

There has been a lot of commotion lately about the Europeans and the American death penalty: They don’t like it; and a lot of our guys — prominently Felix Rohatyn, Clinton’s ambassador to France — are embarrassed, ashamed before our European betters about the New World’s primitive ways. Well, perhaps the Rohatyns among us should get over it. I remember that, many years ago, West Germany refused to extradite to the United States two beastly Jordanian terrorists. (I may have the details slightly wrong, but the outline is solid.) Why this refusal? Because the U.S. had the death penalty, and German law forbade the extradition of anyone to a country that allowed for capital punishment. And I thought: “How rich. [My internal language wasn’t so delicate, but there you have it.] The Germans, only forty years later [about], have such a highly refined moral sensibility that they don’t trust the United States to deal justly with a couple of terrorists. We have become too barbaric for the Germans. Isn’t that just great?”

One could write, and rant, for hours on this subject, but the essentials are in place. Suffice it to say that the United States has no need to apologize to Europe for its system, and notions, of justice.

Have you noticed the new feature in the Sunday New York Times called “Q and A”? It’s a nifty feature, not unlike our “Ask an Editor,” really. (The Times and NR: two peas in a pod.) In last Sunday’s installment, the question was asked, “Does being Asian-American help or hurt your chances of getting into a selective college?” The Times’s answer was, basically, “help” — and that, as any person who has been awake in America over the last couple of decades knows, is bunk. When it comes to applying to many “selective colleges,” it is a real disadvantage to be an Asian-American. There are “too many” qualified candidates in this class; in that wing of the inn, there is no room. I am told, by people who ought to know, that if admissions were done strictly on the merits, many elite campuses would look like Shanghai. (This is a crude way to put it, but, hey: It’s also direct and true.) As The Indispensable Thernstroms, Stephan and Abigail, have pointed out, attempts to reduce objective criteria in college admissions are blows to Asian-Americans. These students tend to work hard and get good grades — forgive the stereotype, but (again) it’s true. And then those students are penalized by the like success of those who happen to look like them. It’s hard to believe that “liberals,” at some level, don’t feel a bit guilty about this. They should.

For an interesting discussion of the Times’s “Q and A,” check out smartertimes.com. I look forward to the day when Asian-Americans stand up vigorously for their rights — their rights not to be punished for their ancestry. For years, “selective colleges” maintained quotas on Jews — those colleges didn’t want their groves overrun by smarty-pants Hebrews. The same thing is now happening to Asians. It was wrong then, and it’s wrong now. If there’s one word that describes this discrimination, it’s “illiberal.” That is why today’s “liberals” are not true liberals.

And, on the subject of language, may I ask something? When, exactly, did it become incorrect, and impermissible, to say “Oriental” — why did “Asian” have to be substituted? When I, in all innocence, used the word “Oriental” a few years ago, a friend — attuned to the dictates of p.c. — got all over me “like ugly on ape,” as the first President Bush used to say. But why should “Asian” be preferred to “Oriental”? What about it is more accurate, more descriptive, more benign? Why should “Oriental” be judged not just passé but evil? This is another absurdity of our time.

Okay, now that we’re started: You’ve noticed, surely, that when a journalist wants to denote a congressman as black, he says, “a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.” Cute, huh? And a dodge, too. If the journalist wants to, needs to, say a congressman is black, he should say so, without the shield of “a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.” You will typically read, “Jesse Jackson Jr., Maxine Waters, and John Conyers, all members of the Congressional Black Caucus…” It’s sort of comical. I, for one, have pledged never to employ this dodge. But the temptation, I have to admit, is strong. For some reason, we cringe to write, “Congressman X is black.” We do not cringe to write, “Congressman X is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.” If we cringe on doing the former, perhaps we should leave race out of it altogether.

If you have time for some enriching reading, and you should, check out a stunning piece by Peter Hitchens published in The (London) Spectator a few weeks ago. (The piece may be found here.) It is an analysis of the British electorate, explaining the course of politics in that country. The piece is stunning for its own sake, but it is also of interest for its applicability to the American situation. I read (and write) about politics incessantly, and can hardly stand another word: but I felt enlightened by this piece, and, again, commend it to all. Hitchens, by the way, is brother-of — or should we now say that it is Christopher who is brother-of?

While I’m in the piece-recommending business, do not miss Fouad Ajami’s essay in The New Republic, a brilliant short piece about George W. Bush’s foreign policy, and foreign policy generally. (Go here.) I myself paid this piece the ultimate accolade, or one of them: I read it twice, just to let it seep in.

In writing the other day about Dan Gable’s possible run for Iowa governor, I mentioned that he would be joining, in the political arena, other stars of sports, including Jim Ryun and Tom Osborne (the latter gets to be a star in the coaching division). A reader wrote to say (essentially), What is it about athletes and the Republican party? What is it about athletes and conservatism? There is Bill Bradley, of course. But then you have, on the other side, Jack Kemp, Steve Largent, J. C. Watts, Jim Bunning. My correspondent would like to see Mary Lou Retton, of West Virginia, make a run for something. She is currently a “Christian motivational speaker.” She was a spark plug as a gymnast, and she would be a spark plug in office. And is it too incorrect to say that Mary Lou is cute as a button? So was Olga, so was Nadia. So was Kerri. Cuteness is them.

I will conclude by mentioning one of the bravest people I know (and I exaggerate only slightly). There is a woman, an NR reader, in Seattle who organized an anti-Castro rally there when it was thought that the Cuban dictator would make an appearance at the famed WTO meeting. (This woman is not a Cuban — she is merely decent.) She also works at “a funky coffee house” and — get this — wears her National Review T-shirt “for fun.”

I thought I was pretty brave to buy a National Review in my hometown of Ann Arbor; you should have seen, and heard, the clerks (when they knew about the magazine). But I wasn’t half as brave as this Seattle-coffee-house T-shirt wearer. Not half.