The State Department issued a human-rights report and, thankfully, engaged in some straight talk about the PRC. An article from the Associated Press noted that State’s report said that Chinese abuses “peaked around high-profile events like last year’s Olympic Games in Beijing . . .” Gee, you don’t say? But for years and years, much of the world — and almost all of elite opinion — claimed that the Beijing Games would be good for human rights in China. And the rest of us were called cynical, misguided, “frozen in the past,” etc.

Have you heard anyone say that he was wrong about the effect of the Beijing Games? If so, please let me know.

‐Readers are very nice to be patient with my hobbyhorses! (I have been on this business of the Beijing Games — and how no one will examine previous positions and arguments and so on — for some time now.)

‐Meet Pierre Bergé, who was the “life partner” of the late Yves St. Laurent. He was auctioning off two Chinese sculptures at Christie’s — and the Chinese government was having a fit, claiming them as its own. Bergé said, “I am absolutely ready to give these two [bronze] heads to China. All I ask of China in return is that they grant human rights, give freedom to Tibet, and welcome the Dalai Lama.” (For an article on this — in French — go here. For an article on the Chinese government’s vendetta against Christie’s — in English — go here.)

Well, well done, Monsieur Bergé.

‐I saw a headline, “Climate change: chance for US-China cooperation” (over this article). And I thought, “Yeah, ‘climate change’ trumps everything these days, doesn’t it?” And I further thought of Bill Clinton: who, repeatedly from the Davos stage — and surely elsewhere — has said that his number-one concern in the world is this “climate change.”

Just for the record: I consider all-too-credible charges of organ harvesting a greater concern than “climate change.”

I wonder how people in the future will look on this period: when we (for example) glossed over China’s brutalization of people while earnestly pursuing “climate-change cooperation” with them. Will people think we did something necessary, and even heroic, to save the planet? Or will they think that our priorities — our values — were all out of whack?

‐Isn’t there a line in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off about how someone’s priorities are “all out of whack”?

‐Any of you remember a wonderful George Will column saying that Ferris Bueller was the best movie — as distinct from “film” — ever made? (Maybe Will said one of the best — can’t quite remember.)

‐Turn, now, to the Obama administration — in the person of attorney general Eric Holder. I quote from this AP article: “Attorney General Eric Holder said Wednesday the Guantanamo detention center is a well-run, professional facility that will be difficult to close — but he’s still going to do it.”

Yeah, a “well-run, professional facility.” But isn’t that what Democrats and other Bush-administration foes have said all along?

(I will withhold my oaths and epithets, because this is a family column, at least most of the time.)

‐You may have heard that the administration will overturn a longstanding policy regarding Dover Air Force Base: News organizations may now photograph flag-draped coffins, etc., if the families of the dead agree. (For an article, go here.) This was a cause célèbre of the Left during the eight years of the Bush administration. Their line was: The Bushies are trying to hide the human costs of the war, sanitizing our efforts abroad. (As though the dead weren’t relentlessly focused on — for political reasons, I believe, more than genuine human ones.)

The Left’s argument was always bogus. For one thing, news organizations could do whatever they wanted, once those coffins reached their final destinations. (Family consent has always been key.) There has been much coverage of funerals, memorial services, and burials, just as there should be. The public has not been denied. No one has ever hidden the fact that people die in war. It’s just that Dover has long been a different matter: That is the point of arrival, before dispersal to the soldiers’ hometowns or wherever burial or other disposition will take place.

And the objected-to policy was put in place under Bush 41: and kept there throughout the eight years of the Clinton administration. Bush 43’s people often pointed this out, but, of course, got nowhere: since people wanted merely to object and accuse, rather than think through the issue.

Oh, well: Maybe the Left will be happier now? Family consent is still the chief criterion, apparently. And if the Left is happier, is the country as a whole happier? You know the grand old saying “If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.” And if Katie Couric and Jon Stewart (to use shorthands) are calmer — is America at large not calmer?

‐By the way, National Review editorialized about this matter in May 2004. See what you think:

Should photographers be allowed to snap pics of the flag-draped coffins of American servicemen as they arrive at Dover Air Force Base? Since 1991 the Pentagon has said no, though a website, the Memory Hole, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for pictures taken by the Defense Department itself, which was briefly granted (then revoked), and the shots went far and wide. Under the Pentagon policy, coffins may be photographed with whatever degree of thoroughness the families of the slain think proper at burial services across the country. But that would require the media to get their images from a multitude of sources. It would also deprive them of the shot of multiple coffins in their factory-like hangar setting: an image of industrialized death that is, in two senses, a cheap shot (cheap to arrange, and cheaply polemical). John Kerry’s suggestion that publishing pictures from Dover would “honor” the dead “to the fullest measure” is absurd; the Memory Hole website, and several media outlets, were so reverent that they used images of coffins of the crew of the space shuttle Columbia, which they had obtained by mistake. We should be clear about the motives on both sides of this controversy: The Pentagon, and the Bush administration, does not want the deaths of American servicemen to seem meaningless; the media and the Left simply want to hurt the administration.

‐Sen. Jim Bunning, Republican of Kentucky, is an interesting cuss. He talks off the cuff, and he is not overly concerned with image. He is up for reelection in 2010 — and many Republicans are hoping like heck he’ll retire. Let me quote a bit from an AP report:

[Senate Republican leader Mitch] McConnell has not publicly asked Bunning to retire, but he has ducked questions about the race, saying he will wait until Bunning makes his intentions clear. Bunning, who has said over and over that he is running, said later that McConnell must have “had a lapse of memory.”
He has had even harsher words for Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who is leading the GOP’s re-election efforts for next year. Cornyn had similarly deflected comment on the race, prompting Bunning to say Cornyn “doesn’t understand English.”
Bunning did not appear to be mollified when Cornyn said he supports the Kentucky senator. “I don’t believe anything John Cornyn says,” Bunning said.

It’s nice to have a senator who has some individuality and fire. But I wonder why Bunning wants to run again. He will almost certainly lose (or so the experts say). He’s almost 80 years old. He’s had a nice long career in Congress. He’s in the Hall of Fame (baseball). Why does he need it still — need the Senate, need the campaigns? Does he think he has something unique to contribute to Congress? Does he?

Why not put your feet up, tell stories, write memoirs, throw out first balls? Ah, but these decisions are extremely touchy, and very, very individual: as opera singers know, as politicians know — as a lot of people in some kind of twilight know.

(Of course, to Bunning, Byrd must look like Gramps.)

‐In my monthly music chronicle for The New Criterion, I related something about Samuel Ramey, the veteran bass. He was co-host of a gala (Marilyn Horne, 75th birthday). And he said maybe the most poignant thing I’ve ever heard a singer say. Introducing himself to the audience, he said, “I’m Samuel Ramey — or at least I used to be.” It was amusing, yes. But also not-amusing.

‐In this article, I’d like to point out two things. This is a news report, headed “Rival Palestinian sides agree to release detainees.” Those sides are Hamas and Fatah. And I’m thinking, “Will this exchange be as lopsided as the traditional Palestinian-Israeli ones?” You know: The Israelis return 500 live terrorists for the corpses of three soldiers, or something like that.

In fact, at least one wag has been heard to say, “Doesn’t the world believe in ‘proportional responses’? What about proportional releases?”

The other thing comes in the below:

In a goodwill gesture, Fatah on Tuesday freed 42 Hamas detainees in the West Bank and promised to release more.
Leading Hamas figure Izzat Rashaq welcomed that release but said it was not enough. Unless Fatah releases more detainees, “it will turn to a bomb that would explode in the face of the Palestinian-Palestinian talks,” he warned.

The English is a little shaky there. But I was fascinated by that phrase “Palestinian-Palestinian talks.” A sign of our times, no?

‐I know this headline isn’t funny — but it’s funny: “Danish, Chinese navies deter suspected pirates.” (Article here.) Danish and Chinese navies! Deterring pirates! Not funny, I know.

‐On Wednesday morning, I had an interview with John Negroponte, the former director of national intelligence, and the former just-about-everything. He is now in the private sector, for the first time in a while. Obviously, I will be writing up this interview in due course.

Before going to meet him, I was doing some reading about him — and was sort of charmed by something. Stephen Kinzer, the noted left-wing journalist, wrote an article against him at the time Negroponte was nominated for U.N. ambassador. He quoted a State Department official who said, “Giving him this job is a way of telling the UN: ‘We hate you.’”

I was thinking: I wonder what the official thought when the U.N. got Bolton! (Actually, I don’t wonder.)

‐Saw a headline on Drudge last night: “Jewish Leaders: She’s Not the Hillary We Knew.” (The article was this one.) Well, she’s not a senator from New York anymore, is she? She is now free — at least freer — to be herself. It was absolutely shocking when she came out as gung-ho pro-Israel, those ten or so years ago. Certainly more shocking than her donning of a Yankees cap.

(Imagine if she had run for Congress in the Michigan district that includes Dearborn!)

‐Richard Yates is the late American novelist who wrote Revolutionary Road, now the subject of a movie. He purveyed the view that American life, particularly in the suburbs, is sterile and sad and soul-destroying. That view is enduringly popular, whatever its truth. (American Beauty is probably the movie apotheosis of this view, although I have not seen Revolutionary Road — maybe they’re equal.) (I do believe that American Beauty is the sickest, most offensive, and most vile movie I have ever seen. It releases rivers of poison.) (You recall the sweet detail that the psycho neighbor enjoys old Reagan movies on television?)

Our David Pryce-Jones knew Richard Yates, as they both taught in the Iowa writers program. He did a blog entry on Yates and the movie: here. And it is so beautiful and keen that I thought I should point to it, here in my own lil’ acre.

(You remember that WFB used to refer to Notes & Asides as his “half-acre of space”?)

‐If you’d like to receive Impromptus via RSS, please go here.

#JAYBOOK#

‐Want some fun with names? (We’ve been doing this in this column lately.) (Well, actually, we’ve done this in this column probably from the inception.) Man sent me an e-mail about names, and he ended it as follows:

“By the way, I love it when people ask me my own name. I always answer with a shrug and a puzzled tone . . .”

That reader’s name is Dan Difino.

‐Let me take you back to dear old Ann Arbor town. There was one man who was known to be a conservative. I heard him mocked and scorned for this. His name was George Bigelow, and he taught at Tappan Intermediate (as it was then called). I had him for typing. Fine teacher, fine and good and kind man. He also lived in our neighborhood. He would walk his dog, a Scottish Terrier named Scottie. (I believe he had successive Scottish Terriers named Scottie.) I remember he had a garage sale once. I bought a copy of Sincerely, Ronald Reagan, edited by Helene von Damm, who was Reagan’s personal secretary during his Sacramento years. He later named her ambassador to Austria (her native country). The book was a collection of letters Reagan wrote when he was governor, I believe. When I bought it, I felt like I was buying something really illicit.

The other day, my mother sent me an article from the Ann Arbor News, which some of us used to call Pravda West. I read it with fascination. I’d like to share it with you now. And have a very good weekend.

George Bigelow, a retired Tappan Middle School teacher, never talked about what happened to him Christmas Eve 1944 when he survived a disaster at sea.
“It was just horrible,” said Bigelow, 84, who divides his time now between Florida and a condo in Ann Arbor. “Even my daughter didn’t know about it until 1999. When you want to forget things like that, that’s how you survive. Therefore, you don’t talk about it.”
Bigelow survived the sinking of the S.S. Leopoldville, a Belgian liner carrying 2,235 American soldiers from England to France. Five miles from its destination, the ship was torpedoed by a German U-boat and 763 men drowned or died from hypothermia. The bodies of 493 were never found.
The tragedy is the subject of a National Geographic Channel documentary . . .
Last April, National Geographic flew Bigelow to Europe to relive that fateful voyage and visit the site of the sinking in the English Channel.
Bigelow was a 20-year-old staff sergeant with the 66th Infantry Division en route to fight in the Battle of the Bulge when the torpedo hit.
Everything went black and it was immediate chaos, he recalled.
The British destroyer escort Brilliant pulled up alongside the ship and men were jumping across to safety. Those who missed fell and were crushed.
Bigelow, however, went down with the ship. Literally.
And as he was struggling against the suction to swim to the surface, he got caught on part of the ship and feared he would drown.
That’s when he had a near-death experience he describes as watching his whole life on a 9-inch TV.
“TV wasn’t even invented yet, but that’s just what it was like,” he recalled. “I saw everything that had made me happy in life up to that point, and that caused me to be calm and peaceful.”
The next thing he knew, he had surfaced and was slapped with salt water. He saw a piece of wood about the size of a picnic table, swam over to it, and hung on.
“Guys were screaming, yelling, praying,” he said. “Some were floating by, their heads in the water, dead. You just can’t envision how bad it really was.”
Along with other soldiers, Bigelow clung to the wood in 48-degree water for 20 minutes that felt like two hours. He slipped in and out of consciousness.
He was rescued by a tugboat crew and hospitalized for a week in France and treated for exposure.
On Christmas the next day, he received in the hospital a supply of toiletries from The Red Cross.
“It was the best Christmas I ever had,” recalled Bigelow, who returned to duty a week later and served until V-E Day.
Bigelow said it was therapeutic to return to Europe for the taping. It was his first time aboard a ship in 64 years.
“I was hesitant about going over there because I didn’t know how I’d react,” said Bigelow. “But I feel so much better now. It’s kind of a closure for me. I feel free to talk about it now.”