Over and over, I read a news report that makes me think of Cole Porter (in slightly amended form): “And they all kow-tow.” Yes, they do.
This was from a few months ago: Marriott International listed Tibet as a country in an online survey. This got a lot of Chinese pretty mad. It pleased others, of course, including a Tibetan independence group, which tweeted its praise.
Roy Jones, in Obama, Neb., “liked” this tweet. He was working for Marriott, running social-media accounts. After this “liking,” Marriott fired him, of course.
He made the following comment: “I was completely unaware of what was going on. We were never trained in any of the social graces when it came to dealing with China.”
And today’s story? Here. “The U.S. clothing retailer Gap apologized Tuesday for selling T-shirts with what it says is an incorrect map of China that didn’t include self-ruled Taiwan.”
It’s bad enough that the Chinese dictatorship is the boss of all of vast China. Must it be the boss of the rest of the world, too? A great many people comply.
Not just Cole Porter but Willi Schlamm is reverberant: “The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists.”