Two or three years ago, David Allen, father of the "Getting Things Done"/GTD approach to life, started a personal blog. He kept it up for a couple of months and then, no doubt realizing that this kind of daily fritter was at odds with his larger message about sensible use of your time, put it to sleep. (My 2004 Atlantic article about David Allen here; recent item about GTD-type software here.)
In the absence of blog-world messages from The Man himself, many other GTD-related blogs have continued to spring up. That's all to the good -- but a few weeks ago Allen and his team launched their own blog, straight from GTD Central. It is called GTDTimes and is worth checking out.
My wife's new favorite food is fresh yogurt, which comes in individual ceramic pots at the local grocery store. (Full one in the middle; already-enjoyed ones on the sides.)
The pots are about four inches tall, and quite solidly made. Empty ones could serve as nice little vases or general knick-knacks and could easily go for a dollar or two apiece, or more, in a U.S. housewares store. Here each yogurt plus its pot costs two and a half RMB (35 US cents). It's either two RMB (28 cents) for the yogurt and one-half RMB (7 cents) for the pot, or vice versa. My wife didn't remember which the sign said. We're building up quite a supply. Maybe the foundation of a specialty-import business if we can get them back to America? The spirit of Chinese entrepreneurialism is infectious.
Update: Several correspondents have usefully pointed out that the pots can be returned for a deposit, just like beer bottles. Makes sense! It turns out that my wife knew this (I have never bought them myself) but just didn't mention it to me! Now I know -- the real communications problems are within one language, not across language boundaries -- and we can haul a bunch of them back to the store for pockets full of cash.
Hundreds of entries later, the results are clear. An absolute majority of contestants spoke in favor of ... mandates and subsidies for ethanol use as the stupidest manifestation of bipartisan public policy in the last 50 years.
There could have been a recent-events bias in this choice. (We all think that today's athletes are "the best ever," and so too with stupid policy decisions.) Still, the sentiment was strong, and so was the reasoning. I quote from the lucky subscription-to-the-Atlantic winner, Justin Cohen, who himself begins by quoting his father Reuben Cohen on the stupid aspects of this policy. The Cohen-Cohen team is chosen winner because they entered early, and because I have decided to show a bias in favor of collaborative family efforts:
"I think bi-partisan support for ethanol is more stupid [than the McCain-Clinton 'gas tax holiday' plan], because it's actually harmful and because it not only panders to the public ... worse it panders to a special interest group (Midwest farmers and their regional politicians).
It's harmful because: 1) it helped to catalyze higher levels of food inflation, 2) it consumes as much energy to make and distribute as it provides, 3) it deflects attention from developing trying sound policies to enhance our energy security, 4) it didn't allow for removal of taxes on the import of truly energy efficient ethanol produced in Brazil from sugar, and 5) it's a such an extreme example of government disfuntionality it causes people like me to become truly disillusioned with the political process."
I would add on my own that, to my limited understanding, most of the money for ethanol goes to large corporate farms and trickles down and around through agro-business, with only minimal impact on small family farmers (the ones our politicians claim to support), making the whole venture politically disingenuous in addition to economically-unsound and environmentally dubious.
After the jump, a list of some other popular nominees. Where I can think of some reason why a particular suggestion didn't end up the winner, I include that in parentheses. Thanks to all! And God help our country.
Beijing must-see: "Tibet of China, Past and Present"
This week the "Cultural Palace of Nationalities" in Beijing -- 民族文化宫 in Chinese, also known as "Cultural Palace of Minorities" -- opened an exhibit on the history and future of Tibet. Let me just say: if you want a quick but thorough immersion in the prevailing Chinese view of this issue, you could do far worse than to spend an hour or two here.
The historical part goes under the general heading "The Feudal Serfdom of Old Tibet." The narrative introduction begins, "Before 1959, Tibet was a feudal society of serfdom, darker and more backward than European slavery in the Middle Ages." The more contemporary part is under headings like "New Tibet Changing with Each Passing Day" and "Emancipated Serfs Become Masters of Their Homeland."
As documentation for the historical perspective, the hundreds of pictures in the exhibit include some of tortured serfs from the old days, and a photo of what appear to be two nearly-whole human skins -- one of an adult, one of a child -- from what is described as a human sacrifice of serfs in the olden days. (I'm just telling you what's in the exhibit, and I am not including a photo of this item.) For the modern part, there are pictures of the progress and prosperity of today's Tibet. Here is a modern Tibetan herder, with a fridge full of beer:
.... in the Pittsburgh election-eve rally ongoing as I type:
1) Michelle Obama, comparing her husband to his crucial Pennsylvania supporter, Sen. Bob Casey. "They both have households full of bright, beautiful young girls." Fine; charming. "And they both married brilliant, accomplished, and beautiful women." What??? The husband says "I married up." The wife doesn't make that point.
2) Barack himself, talking about his new approach to politics, points out that he discussed energy efficiency in front of an auto-industry audience in Detroit, discussed progressive taxation in front of fat cats on Wall Street, and generally believed in telling truths the hard but honest way. I was waiting to hear how he'd work in "and I discussed the biases of small-town Pennsylvania losers before rich donors in the Bay Area." But he just kind of slid to a different topic. Probably wiser not to have started down this rhetorical road to begin with -- not in the Keystone State. (Addendum: not meaning to hype the importance of "bittergate" here, just saying this is a rare instance of Obama not addressing a "Hey, wait a minute" point that would be on many Pennsylvania listeners' minds.)
I blame the fatigue (a theme close to my heart these days). Get out the vote, Pennsylvanians! And let these candidates get some sleep.
I will confess that I have never actually seen Sex and the City on American TV. (I know, that's a shocker.) In fact, we didn't have HBO in America, so we saw the Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, etc, via the video store. (And king of them all, The Wire, via pirate-video store in China.) But because I had never seen the Sex and the Cityopening credits, I didn't realize what Danwei.org'sSexy Beijing was making fun of.
Even so, I knew that it was very funny -- and the star Sufei, aka Anna Sophie Lowenberg, is all the more charming when you think of her playing off Sarah Jessica Parker. A sample is below (the subtitling is great). I mention it now because apparently an episode is going to be on the PBS show Global Watch on the night of April 9. Check it out.
Update: 1) I hear from Luke Mines of SexyBeijingTV that tonight's episode is "Beijing Caucus," in which Beijingers talk to the star, Sufei, about Hillary, Barack, Chuck Norris, and so on. Clip here on SBTV's site or here on YouTube. 2) I also hear that SBTV is no longer part of Danwei.org.
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Thanks to many people who wrote with kind inquiries about my terse "going offline" note of several days ago. I had meant merely to be private, rather than willfully cryptic. To be somewhat less cryptic but still discreet: for a while I am out of China and in California, with my father.
Let me mention only one point I would have mentioned earlier, if it hadn't happened just when I was scrambling to arrange a trip from Beijing to Los Angeles: the sentencing of Hu Jia to three and a half years in prison is serious and dismaying news.
Hu is best known for his work advancing the rights of people with AIDS and HIV in China. He was arrested early this year on charges of "inciting subversion of state power," because of quotes and articles on his blog and in foreign papers, and was convicted and sentenced a few days ago. Rob Gifford's book China Road, mentioned here earlier, includes some descriptions of Hu and his work. Except by the Chinese security services, he is widely admired and respected and considered a "reformer" rather than a rebel directly challenging the legitimacy of the Chinese regime.
Here is the one and only mention of his sentencing that I see in the China Daily, official voice of the government to the outside world. That is worth comparing with the statement from the U.S. State Department, hardly a source of rabble-rousing observations about China. Or with this, from Rebbeca MacKinnon. Or this posting by Simon Elegant, of Time. Elegant is writing about Tibet rather than Hu Jia, but he explains the perverse logic, which applies in both instances, by which internal Chinese repression and controls are very likely to be tightened just as the world turns its attention to the country for the Olympic Games, rather than relaxed -- as normal PR instincts would dictate and as the regime promised years ago when China was bidding for the Games. The paradox, as discussed earlier here and elsewhere, is that much of real, daily Chinese life is fairly free-wheeling and uncontrolled. But what the Chinese regime is showing is the most repressive side of its nature, at the time the world's attention is directed there.
Hu Jia's case is on a scale different from the events in Tibet, but in its way it is as disturbing.
I have been planning on making a quick trip to Russia, which for reasons unrelated to my comments here will not occur. But in preparing to apply for my visa at the Russian embassy in Beijing, I was just adjusting to the quite amazingly thorough visa form ("List every educational institution you have ever attended... Give name, supervisor, and supervisor's telephone number for everywhere you have worked for the last XX years...") when I encountered the real problem. US cash!
Depending on how quickly I needed the visa, the fee would be $150 (for five-day service) or $300 (same-day). But the fee had to be in cash, U.S. greenbacks, and not just any old dollars but "new bills with the watermark and large portrait." Hmmm.
Since I have about $28 in US cash with me in China, I was asking American friends for help ... when I recently learned that the policy has changed. No more Yankee dollars! Only Chinese RMB accepted -- no word on required newness. And at a punitive exchange rate too. (The rapidly-sinking dollar is worth just about 7 Chinese RMB now, so $300 would be 2100RMB. But the Russians are multiplying it at the rate that applied more than a year ago, 7.8 to 1. So the "$300" visa now costs 2340RMB, or about $334.)
Of course the exchange rate is not the issue. It's the "your money is no good here" aspect that I found interesting. Another round in the Bush-Putin war of nerves? Just a scheme to profit on exchange rate arbitrage? A sign of respect to their local Chinese hosts? Or maybe the Russians are reading the U.S. financial pages too?
This is the kind of scene I wish I could convey to people who worry about China as the all-conquering juggernaut that has coped with every internal challenge and is sitting around thinking about how to take over the world.
My wife and I spent the afternoon at a public "High Tech Middle School" in Ningxia autonomous region, in western China bordering Inner Mongolia. The students could not have been more charming or open-spirited. Here's how a few of the girls looked:
There are wearing school uniforms in the picture -- it's a Sunday afternoon, and they'd returned from their homes and villages in a 25-mile radius, to spend the next six days at school. During the week they live in dorms eight to a room. But you'll notice something about the uniforms:
(Update after the jump.)
Out of Net range for the next few days, a picture before going.
Looking towards Puxi, from the river, 7pm, on a visit to Shanghai last week:
Our fondly-remembered former home visible in middle distance, but only if you know just what you're looking for.
JMW Turner, some time ago:
Previously in the European Artists Come to China series here and here.
The other is Mike Huckabee, who (as I see via Andrew Sullivan and others) dared speak as a human being rather than as an on-message apparatchik in his comments about Obama and Wright. More specifically, he spoke as a "hate the sin, love the sinner" Christian, as a preacher who has delivered extemporized sermons of his own, and as a white product of the segregated South who did not blind himself to how that world would look if he were black. Consider and be in awe of this:
And one other thing I think we've gotta remember. As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say "That's a terrible statement!"...I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack -- and I'm gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who's gonna say something like this, but I'm just tellin' you -- we've gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told "you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can't sit out there with everyone else. There's a separate waiting room in the doctor's office. Here's where you sit on the bus..."
And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.
Actual honest and empathetic discussion about race...! We've come to expect that presidential campaigns will be the equivalent of World War I trench slaughter, in which there is a "winner" at the Somme but really everyone loses and it's a matter of who is farthest from being bled dry at the end. But the idea of actual discourse about real issues -- it would be nice to think that it could happen.
It was a moment like this that first drew John McCain to my attention as a politician, nearly 30 years ago.
About a third of the pirate videos we get in China are fine, in the sense that they play properly and are in the advertised language. About a third are studio-promo copies, which were originally handed out "for your consideration" at Oscar time. When you watch these, you see "Property of Columbia Pictures" or some such label across the screen every few minutes, like this.
The other third of the videos are in Russian. (The really cheapo videos, shot by somebody sitting in a movie theater with a concealed camera, and chock-full of audience noise and people walking around, are pretty rare now.) I don't mean movies made in Russia or starring Russians. I mean the standard American or British studio film dubbed into Russian language. For instance, the lightweight Hollywood aerial-action movie about the WW I Lafayette Escadrille, Flyboys. Here's its opening menu
Russian? Why so many films in Russian, and not, say, Spanish or Thai? What does it say about a country that China looks to it as a source of pirated videos? I wonder this every time I play pirate-video-roulette and wonder whether this new video will be another unintended step in my familiarity with the Russian language.
Reader Ed Fisher helpfully provided the answer, which appears to check out:
Regarding your knockoff DVDs: The reason so many of them are dubbed into Russian is because the studios have started releasing movies for Region 5 (which includes Russia) much earlier than in the US, to combat piracy. Of course, it's had the opposite effect - Russian releases are immediately pirated and then either distributed as-is or merged with US audio from the theatrical release.
Next on the trail of gray-zone inquiry: Who, exactly, in China controls the business that makes these billions of DVDs, and how are they so thoroughly protected against enforcement? Like most people here, I have my suppositions; and like most people here, I prudently keep them to myself.
I don't think the Oscar show was run live here in Beijing, and anyway I've been out interviewing people all day. (About Chinese coal mines and so on. Bracing!)
I had a personal though divided rooting interest in one category, Best documentary. There, one film that I hear is outstanding -- Taxi to the Dark Side, by Alex Gibney, son of the esteemed late writer Frank Gibney and brother of my friend and Atlantic colleague James Gibney (which I haven't seen because it has not yet shown up in the local pirate video stores) -- was up against another film that I know is outstanding. This is No End in Sight, by my friend Charles Ferguson. I had talked with Ferguson while he was developing this film and had a little cameo interview appearance in the final version.
Maybe they could share the prize?
Alex Gibney's film won, and sincere congratulations both to him and to Charles Ferguson for illuminating the consequences of America's perverse approach to "security" these last six years.
The odd part is, the clip that was shown at the Oscars to introduce No End was apparently of me talking, from my cameo interview. Via instant-feedback on Blackberry, I got a quick pulse on which of my friends and family were watching the Oscars (as I would have been, if in range) - and which were not. And, yes, in the "not" category I'm talking about you, Dad! Time to get back in touch with mass culture!
My ambition for next year: the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
I have liked and admired Ralph Nader so much. I first worked for him when I was in my teens (and he was in his 30s). Under his auspices, encouragement, and relentless pressure, I'd written two books for his organization by the time I was 23 -- if only I'd been able to keep up that pace! Or that sales success, since one of them -- Who Runs Congress, turned out in eight weeks, with Mark Green and David Zwick --- eventually sold in the millions.
Nader was funny, warm, brilliant-seeming, and, yes, caring. He visited my wife in the hospital after our first child was born. For years after that, he never failed to ask about both of our kids (or my wife) whenever I talked with him. I say all this as an indication of why Ralph Nader has so many people who actually are loyal to him -- and who wish they didn't have to face the reality about the choices he has made over the last eight years.
That he stayed in the race in 2000 was tragedy. (See: Invasion of Iraq, 2003, and subsequent occupation.) That he came back in 2004 was unfortunate; his entry in 2008 is farce. Farce because it suggests detachment from political reality (the differences between the Republican and Democratic nominees are so faint that we can say, What the hell!) and, worse, narcissism. The fact that it won't make any difference in the outcome actually is sad.
I will always like and respect Ralph Nader and will always admire the wonderful things he has done. But I wish to God that he had not made this decision, or will reverse it soon. (And, I am sorry that saying this will make me an enemy in his eyes.) He is a better man than his recent decisions indicate.
I have known and liked Chuck Spinney for a very long time, since I wrote about him and his original "defense reform" colleagues, notably John Boyd and Pierre Sprey, in the Atlantic and in National Defense in the early 1980s. Boyd of course originated the concept of the "OODA Loop." This was the idea, derived from Boyd's "Patterns of Conflict" briefing, that the victor in any conflict would not necessarily be the stronger or better-prepared party. Rather it would be the one who recognized changing realities, and chose and implemented the right new course of action, faster than the opponent. Boyd came up with the theory by analyzing aerial combat among fighter planes, but in his view it could be applied to every sort of human contest, from sports to business to armed conflict.
(OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. To react to changing reality faster than the opponent can, or to interfere with the opponent's ability to perceive realistically what is happening to him, is to "get inside his OODA loop." Everything anyone would ever want to know about Boyd, Spinney, Sprey; about their contemporary colleagues like Chet Richards, Donald Vandergriff, WIlliam Lind, GI Wilson, etc; and about OODA loops and the related concept of 4GW, or Fourth Generation Warfare, can be found at two excellent, related "Defense and the National Interest" sites, here and here.)
And the theory also applies to politics, as Spinney has argued in a recent item about the contest for the Democratic nomination. His analysis, "Is Obama inside Hillary's OODA loop?" comes after the jump. The incidents he mentions are all familiar; what's at least a little new is his combination of them in Boyd-style perspective -- in particular Bill Clinton losing his sense for how the battle is shifting. I am posting this before the Wisconsin results are known, and before the (in my view bogus) "plagiarism" flap has died down, so that Spinney's observation can be tested against those results.
As I mentioned a few months ago ("Tales from the everything's-slightly-substandard economy"), there is a strange trade-off in a lot of daily life in China. Nearly everything's cheap. But a whole lot of everything is a little bit off, marred in some subtle but grating way, not quite legit, and, well, cheap.
Today's illustration: On my trip to the U.S. last month, I saw that a 14-screen theater near the office in DC was playing a whole bunch of movies I had heard about and wanted to see. Juno. There Will Be Blood. The Great Debaters. No Country for Old Men. Charlie Wilson's War. American Gangster. Sweeney Todd. Eastern Promises. A revival of I'm Not There, about Bob Dylan. And some others I'm surely forgetting now -- whatever was popular a month ago. (Even Golden Compass???)
I thought: hey, I'm here on my own, I'll see a bunch of these. Life got busy, and I saw only one. But this weekend, on the street in Beijing, my wife and I found a good video store -- they're slightly more discreet than in Shanghai -- and loaded up on every movie I've just named, plus a bunch more, at a little under $1.40 each. Extortionate, compared with Shanghai, but the best we could do.
The good news is, we get to see these movies, and they don't cost much. The bad news is, there's something a little bit wrong with all of them. For instance: tonight's showing was The Great Debaters, with Denzel Washington and Forest Whitaker, which we actually liked. Here is a typical scene, featuring Denzel Whitaker (no relation to the other Whitaker, or to Washington) as a young Wiley College debater, going up against some snooty Harvard boys:
Sigh. I assume it was a "for your consideration" Oscar-promotion version of the movie. At least it hadn't been dubbed into Russian, like a lot of the cheapo movies we see here. For another time: consideration of what this gray-zone existence might mean for the Chinese economy in the long run.
Outside the Instituto Cervantes, the Spanish language and cultural organization (like the Alliance Francaise or the Goethe-Institut), in Beijing . Apparently it's not just Little Havana any more!
Update: Those spots next to the bicycle, in the inset in the bottom-left corner of the map? Apparently they're the Philippines! As reader Andrew Miller points out, counting them in the world of Espanol, even cross-hatched, is a much bigger stretch than counting the United States.
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To spell out the joke for non-Americans or those not sodden in U.S. politics: Tancredo, now disappeared from the Republican presidential race, was the main alarm-raiser about the immigrant menace to America -- especially immigrants from Mexico and points south. How would he feel about a sign saying: "Do you know that Spanish is spoken in more than twenty countries?" -- with a map showing the United States already halfway there??
(Previously in the Brueghel comes to China series, here.)
Sunday morning, February 10, 2008, Houhai area:
A few hundred years earlier, in Europe:
A friend is doing a story about the odd variety of vehicles Beijingers have adapted to the ice, so nothing more about that now. I will say that on the latest supply run from the U.S. I had brought along an old, crummy pair of ice skates, with frayed and re-knotted laces and blades as sharp as a rolling pin. Imagine my relief in spotting a sign that said 北京冰刀王 -- Beijing Ice Skate King -- and being helped by the king himself, as he put a razor edge on the skates and added a new set of laces, all for 35 RMB (a little under $5).
Yesterday the New America Foundation announced that Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, would become the new chairman of its board. He replaces the person who has been in that job in the nine-plus years since New America was founded, ie me.
In 1998, during a brief spell when I was not working for the Atlantic, I heard from a group of people who had been cooking up plans for a new, non-partisan, non-crony-ridden think tank that could help young journalists and policy people get started in their careers. These were Ted Halstead, Walter Russell Mead, Sherle Schwenninger, and Michael Lind -- people all known by that point for their writing and editing achievements who were hoping to create a new institution.
Their appeal to join this effort was persuasive. Over the next year, Halstead (who became New America's president, and who by that time had cowritten a cover story for the Atlantic) and I spent a lot of time raising money to get the institution started -- I mean, mainly he did. Mead (who has an article in the Atlantic's upcoming issue) has been on New America's board since that time; Schwenninger and Lind (lots of good articles too!) have been important figures in its operation. If we were honest all of us would have to admit we are amazed at the scale, importance, and standard New America has attained.
Last fall, Ted Halstead, still in his 30s, stepped down as president after nine years of non-stop effort, to be succeeded by the highly accomplished Steve Coll. In a complementary move toward new blood, Eric Schmidt has agreed to become the new chairman of the board. Given the gazillion-dollar enterprise that Schmidt oversees at Google, versus the tiny, ramshackle enterprise of my own writing life that I "manage," this is a preposterously out-of-scale transition. But it is evidence of Schmidt's public-mindedness that he would take it on.
(Steve Clemons, whom I met while living in Japan twenty years ago and who is now a New America comrade, has a separated-at-birth hypothesis about the Coll-Schmidt working relationship.)
Congratulations to all. Not being by nature an organization guy, I'm actually very proud of what this organization has become -- and has ahead of it.
Twenty four hours into Year of the Rat, and safely back "home" in Beijing. Actually feels like home -- or maybe it's just the travel-induced thousand-yard-stare 24 hours after starting the trek from DC. Apartment looks and smells great; Beijing Capital Airport keeps applying various de-bureaucratizing (!) speed-up tactics US international airports could study*;and my wife and I are hoping that the ongoing cannonade of New Year's fireworks outside the window, will, in compliance with "strict city regulations," end as promised at midnight.** Or that we'll be tired enough not to care.
新年快乐, Happy New Year.
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* One-third as many forms to fill out as on our previous visits. Immigration card, yes. But no longer a public-health screening form, which I assume got started during SARS; and no customs form at all, unless you have goods to declare. Despite our huge, groaning suitcases full of supplies from the U.S., we technically had nothing to tell the officials about.
** This might sound like an amusing festive touch, but based on last year's New Year celebrations in Shanghai, it's closer to living through some documentary about City At War, with concussive blasts round the clock. In this new year of pre-Olympic orderliness for Beijing, we'll see how the not-past-midnight rule goes. Outside just now: KABOOM!!!
...where I have (intentionally) spent very little of my previous life but where I have been, for oddball reporting reasons, these last couple of days:
Being in the San Francisco Bay area makes me feel old, since everyone else is 25.
Being in the Boca Raton area makes me feel young, since...
Pretty soon I'll be back in Beijing, where I'll have no time to fritter away on such thoughts, since like everyone else I'll mainly be concentrating on surviving the next traffic jam or "mist" event that would be called deathly smog elsewhere. I am weirdly beginning to miss the focus-on-the-now such daily challenges educe. Rather than "old" or "young," it makes me feel... engaged.
(Update below) Traveling during the Barack-Hillary debate, so no thoughts on that until I see a replay. But this passage from today's NYT, perused during an endless session on US Air, certainly caught my eye:
REDLANDS, Calif. — The most trenchant symbol of the California presidential primary can be found on an isolated stretch of Interstate 15, smack in the middle of the Mojave Desert. There, affixed to an old trailer, is possibly the largest candidate billboard in the entire state, and it is for the Republican fringe candidate, Ron Paul.
Why did I notice?
1) Redlands is where I grew up and where my dad still lives, and it doesn't get that much national ink. So, great!
2) Redlands is not "smack in the middle of the Mojave Desert." To put this in terms that might resonate with the NYT copy desk, this would be like saying: White Plains is smack in the middle of the Adirondacks. More or less in the same part of the country? Yes. In the middle of? Not hardly.
3) Interstate 10 passes through Redlands. Interstate 15? Unt-uh -- at its closest point 15 or 20 miles away.
Maybe the writer was talking about some other place? Fine. But (not that I want to look a hometown gifthorse in the mouth), why this dateline?
On to weighter matters another time.
Update: Fellow son-of-Redlands Brian Beutler observed the same phenomenon on his blog.
Seriously, wasn't sloppiness about datelines one of the complaints about the NYT during the wild and woolly days of Howell Raines? I'm sure what happened in this case was the following: the Ron Paul sign in question was probably someplace on I-15 en route to Barstow, which is in the middle of the Mojave Desert and which is the heartland of Paul-type libertarian/survivalist sentiment. And for the Times's purposes, it was no doubt all close enough to fit under a 40-miles-away dateline. On the other hand: Bill Keller, the NYT's editor, went to college right in this same area and presumably would have known better if he had seen the story. That's all on this subject.
The stupidest thing I've done (twice) in China; a stupid thing I didn't do in the US
Twice during my first year in China I did something so obtuse I can hardly stand to think back on it. In each case I was so mad at the bus or taxi that had come within one millimeter of running me down -- while I was in a crosswalk with a green light and it was roaring at full speed straight ahead through a red light -- that I slapped its fender as it went by. I didn't even have to move my arm to reach it, since it was right there.
In many American cities, perfectly normal! I've seen road-raged pedestrians or bicyclists in San Francisco and New York yell at and pound the hoods of cars they judged to be cutting it too close.
But in China -- not such a good idea! The screech of brakes and squeal of tires. (Hmm, if the brakes work so well, why couldn't they have been applied before the red light?) Door flung open. Multi-lingual festival of curses and gestures. Contorted face of rage on the Chinese driver's side. And my chagrined realization that I had for no good reason made somebody very angry at me and, by extension, the outside world of laowai (老外, foreigners). Even though the bastard did almost just kill me.
I've had this reaction on each of my previous return trips to America over the last 18 months: the abundance! The affluence! The choice!
I walked into a high-end Whole Foods grocery store in Washington this morning -- and after a few minutes, had to walk out again.
The burnished fruits and vegetables. The forty varieties of bread. The souvenir-looking cuts of meat. The wines and cheeses. (The beers!!) Emotionally it was too much.I realized that my wife and I spend a significant amount of time each day in China thinking about how to get stuff -- food, clothes, supplies. I know that America is on the verge of disastrous recession and that China is dynamic power of tomorrow, etc etc. But, my lord, life can be good here. (And where are the men pulling carts full of coal or scrap paper down the street, as if they were human beasts of burden?)
One of many memorable columns by the Atlantic's former editor, the late Michael Kelly, came after he'd spent a wonderful summer spell at Cape May with his family, and it began this way: "I have been for some days at the shore, in the company of many of my fellow middle-aged Americans who are wearing not a lot of clothes, and I have a report. My fellow middle-aged Americans, we are some kind of fat."
I don't mean we are getting a bit thick around the middle, or that we are pleasantly plump, or that we are zaftig, or Rubenesque (we are Reuben-esque), or settling into our bodies. I mean we are fat, fat, fat. It's true: As a people, we have never been this fat. Probably, no people has ever been this fat. We are billowing immensities of avoirdupois, great, soft bins of finest quality lard, a nation of wide loads wallowing down the highway of life.
Americans are indeed the proud world champions of fatness. But here as in so many areas we may soon be pushed from the throne.
At least that's what I thought after a few days at a Chinese beach resort where virtually all the other foreign visitors were Russians. For sure in the men's division, they're giving us a run for the money.
Perhaps the group at the resort was unrepresentative of its home population (rich enough to travel -- and eat everything they want?). And perhaps they unfairly seem bigger than they are because, unlike Americans of similar stature, they prefer Speedos. But the three shown here (two more after the jump) are a fair sample of the travelers we saw. OK, the first one was larger than normal - but the other two were on the svelte side and, from their faces, appeared to be no older than about 35.
Clean your plates, America! There are hungry middle aged men in Russia who wish they had that food.
Imagine my surprise when I switch on the TV a few hours ago, Sunday night China time, and see -- a NFL playoff game! And one involving my "hometown" team, the Redskins! (My boyhood hometown team, the LA Rams, is of course lost to history.) But wait a minute... They're playing in Seattle. And as I turn it on, the Redskins have just stormed from behind to take a 14-13 lead! And, the Seahawks mishandle the ensuing kickoff return, so that the Redskins get the ball deep in Seahawks' territory, with a lead, in the fourth quarter. Huzzah!
As anyone still reading knows, what followed, from the game actually played one week ago, was about the most disspiriting ten minutes in any franchise's history. Moral question: with full foreknowledge of what's ahead, do I leave the TV on to watch those ten minutes?
Would Red Sox fans keep watching if they happened upon a replay of the 1986 World Series? Would Yankees fans, if they found a broadcast of the 2004 AL playoffs? If they were in China, maybe they would. And I did.
I have decided to be happy that a waste-gas line in our apartment building in Beijing is no longer (as of two days ago) feeding into our own apartment's ventilation ducts. Rather than making myself.... less happy through dwelling on what we have been breathing and living in these last two months.
I think this is part of my ongoingacclimatization process: learning to look on the bright side. Mind over miasma!
For another day: observations on the uneven levels of fit-and-finish in a country that is developing and modernizing, as opposed to developed and modern.
A fact to understand about all the candidates' performances
If you have not worked or traveled on a political campaign, you really cannot imagine the importance of sheer mind-destroying, bone-sapping, emotion-straining, personality-fraying exhaustion as a factor in performances by candidates. Especially the moments that seem angry, thin-skinned, dazed-sounding, ill-advised, or clumsily-worded. Where there is a "gaffe," there is usually an over-tired candidate backed up by over-tired staff.
I'm not saying this is the only activity that pushes people beyond reasonable limits, sleep-wise. (Combat. Medical-intern duty. Overnight shift work or long distance trucking. Infants in the house. Etc.) I'm saying that it's the one where the very great importance of the fatigue-tax is most likely to be missed by onlookers.
Two masters of their disciplines, who triumphed while young and stepped aside from competition (Clinton because he had to) while still in top form. Gibbs was 52 when he retired for the first time as Redskins coach, with three Superbowl wins behind him and election to the Hall of Fame ahead. Clinton was 54 when he watched George W. Bush sworn in as his successor, knowing that he would have won in a landslide if he were allowed to run again.
Then each returned. Coach Gibbs, for a disspiriting 31-36 four-year stint with the Redskins capped, if that's the right word, by the extremely disspiriting playoff loss to the Seahawks three days ago (and his resignation today). President Clinton, for what looks like a disspiriting 0-2 run as his wife's campaign booster and apparent strategist, and occasional negative-spin specialist against the candidate who is beating her. [Update: Coach-President Clinton has in fact opened 1-1. The questions below still apply.]
Will either of them be glad he came back into the fray? Were they rash to defy the maxim that there are no second acts in American lives? Other people have much worse problems, and Bill Clinton is probably not the most disspirited member of his household right now. Nonetheless I feel for both him and Gibbs.
Addendum: As readers Matt Megas and Robert Lamirande have pointed out, other obvious entries in this category include: Earl Weaver, who was brilliantly successful in his first stint as manager of the Orioles and then had his only losing season ever during his brief return run; Michael Jordan, who had the least successful of his several comebacks when he joined the Washington Wizards at the end of his career; and, tragically, too many boxers to mention, all of whom kept coming back.
For a little glimpse of life in a not-quite-new apartment building in Beijing, and as a way to pass the time while the NH vote comes in, see if you can guess why my wife and I are spending so much time studying sites like this one.
(OK, if you don't want to click, it's about how to tell if you're being poisoned in your dwelling by sewer gas. Ah, the glamorous life of the foreign correspondent!)
For further amusement and distraction, feel free to tell your friends that in China the overnight news will cover primary voting in the state called 新罕布什尔 or sometimes 新罕布夏, xin hanbushier or xin hanbuxia. Yes, those are two versions of "New Hampshire," the second apparently with a Boston accent.
The essential exchange of the New Hampshire Democrats' debate
It involved Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, on the power of words in presidential leadership.
Each made his or her respective point clearly, calmly, and appealingly. This was not an ambush or a gotcha or a gaffe or an unintentionally revealing quicksilver exchange. It was the expression of thought-through and well expressed views. And on the merits I think it left the Clinton camp at a terrible disadvantage.
Clinton, after pointing out that Obama voted for an energy bill that was full of the special-interest tax breaks he now criticizes in speeches:
So you know, words are not actions.
And as beautifully presented and passionately felt as they are, they are not action. You know, what we've got to do is translate talk into action and feeling into reality. I have a long record of doing that, of taking on the very interests that you have just rightly excoriated because of the overdue influence that they have in our government. And you know, probably nobody up here has been the subject of more incoming fire from the Republicans and the special interests, so I think I know exactly what I'm walking into and I am prepared to take them on.
Then, after an appeal by John Edwards to the Teddy Roosevelt tradition of head-on trust-busting, this response from Obama:
Look, I think it's easier to be cynical and just say, "You know what, it can't be done because Washington's designed to resist change." But in fact there have been periods of time in our history where a president inspired the American people to do better, and I think we're in one of those moments right now. I think the American people are hungry for something different and can be mobilized around big changes -- not incremental changes, not small changes....
[T]he truth is actually words do inspire. Words do help people get involved. Words do help members of Congress get into power so that they can be part of a coalition to deliver health care reform, to deliver a bold energy policy. Don't discount that power, because when the American people are determined that something is going to happen, then it happens. And if they are disaffected and cynical and fearful and told that it can't be done, then it doesn't. I'm running for president because I want to tell them, yes, we can. And that's why I think they're responding in such large numbers.
Of course each of them was right. Each expressed part of the job of a president, or any leader. Words and deeds. Talk and action. Poetry and prose. Presidents obviously do best when they can do both.
But only Obama captured what is unique about a president's role. A President's actions matter -- Lyndon Johnson with his legislation, Richard Nixon with his opening to China -- but lots of other people can help shape policies. A President's words often matter more, and only he -- or she -- can express them. Grant led the Union Army, but Abraham Lincoln, in addition to selecting Grant, wrote and delivered his inaugural and Gettysburg addresses. Long before Franklin Roosevelt actually did anything about the Great Depression, his first inaugural address ("the only thing we have to fear...") was important in itself. The same was true of Winston Churchill just after he succeeded Neville Chamberlain. It would be years before the Nazi advance would be contained, but Churchill's words and bearing were indispensable to Britain's recovery.
Certainly Hillary Clinton knows this. And she knows the political record of poetry-vs-prose matchups in the past. Kennedy vs. Nixon. Carter vs. Ford (yes, Carter was a man of healing-America poetry in those days). Reagan vs. Mondale. And of course the first Candidate Clinton against his Democratic rival Paul Tsongas and then against the first President Bush. She is playing the hand she holds, but it's worse than the other hand.
One extra thought on this point, from Jimmy Carter himself. This is the way he described the words-vs-action tension in the major speech that laid out his human rights policy, the commencement address at Notre Dame in 1977. I am partial to this formulation, because I was involved in putting it together. But I think it, like Obama's comment, is closer to what Americans expect of their president than what Hillary Clinton has been left with, the "let me handle the details" appeal. Especially what they'll expect of the next president:
We live in a world that is imperfect and which will always be imperfect--a world that is complex and confused and which will always be complex and confused.I understand fully the limits of moral suasion. We have no illusion that changes will come easily or soon.
But I also believe that it is a mistake to undervalue the power of words and of the ideas that words embody. In our own history, that power has ranged from Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream."
After the jump, updates from readers on three points: the etymology of "Suntime" wine and the Uighur Autonomous Region in general; a critique of my wife's feather-light Sherpa haul from the U.S.; and, about that battered ThinkPad T60 keyboard.
Procedural note: I appreciate hearing from readers via the "email" button to the right. I will try to be less slothful about posting interesting responses and elaborations. Toward that end, I announce this policy: Unless a writer says otherwise, I will assume that I am free to quote the comments and attribute them to the writer by name. If you say "Please don't quote" or "Don't use my name," no problem! But to avoid having to email each person for permission, I'll assume from now on that a comment is on the record unless otherwise stated.
A little more about the "art factory village" of Dafen
Because I can't help it, a few more pictures below and after the jump of the "art factory village" of Dafen, outside Shenzhen. All are clickable for larger version.
Plus, two updates: First, thanks to Evan Osnos of the Chicago Tribune for getting his story about Dafen back on line, here. It explains some of the business fundamentals of the place.
And, from Keith Snodgrass of the South Asia Center at the Jackson school at the University of Washington, this background of the Dafens of yesteryear:
[You give] somewhat the impression this is a new activity. As a matter of fact, Chinese artists have supplied mass production art for western markets for at least 200 years. Many early 19th century paintings of George Washington circulated in the US were originally produced in southern China, as were many of the "ship portraits", paintings which look like 2-3 ships at sail in a bay, but which are actually 2-3 different views of the same ship.
Ajay Sinha at Mt. Holyoke college gave a talk on this topic at the University of Washington in 2004. You can find him through http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/misc/profile/asinha.shtml
Yes, I would be glad that my wife is now back from an unexpected trip to the U.S. even if she hadn't hauled along a suitcase full of provisions for the Beijing winter. But she did! Much of this is in the comfort-food category. Several items were made in China but are not that easy to find here. Not fully visible is the element that brought the sherpa suitcase up to its full 60-pound weight: twenty-plus new books from Amazon. But as I pointed out to her, they couldn't have been as heavy as they seemed, because after all most were paperbacks.
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The keyboard propped up in the background is a replacement for my battered eight-month-old ThinkPad T60 keyboard.
Not to run the topic into the ground, but: following this and this on what makes fiction remember-able (subtly different from memorable) and which "genre" books achieve that goal, a little more.
- I recognize that what I'm about to say slightly undercuts my point that powerful fiction, of any sort, gets into your mind and won't get out. Still I will confess that I (ahem) forgot to mention unforgettable genre books like Ken Bruen's The Guards and related novels, from the cop-and-criminal world of Ireland. Or, Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen mysteries, set in Venice. Dibdin's unrelated but remarkably creepy (and funny) The Dying of the Light is very much worth finding. Or, The Whispering Wall, by the Australian writer Patricia Carlon. (Premise: a rich old woman has had a stroke and can't talk or move, but she can hear and understand every detail of the plot being hatched by her relatives to do her in.) Or, three Japanese murder mysteries that have nothing in common except that each believably creates a sociopathic monster as the central character: Honeymoon to Nowhere, by Akimitsu Takagi; Out, by Natsuo Kirino; and the recently-released The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, by Soji Shimada. Or, for a monster of a different sort, the "Ripley" books by Patricia Highsmith.
- On remember-ability in general: I am not sure how I feel about the fact that on average I can remember movies more completely and clearly than I can remember books. Take some oddball feature I saw on a Saturday afternoon as a kid --The Cardinal, let's say, an Otto Preminger potboiler from the 1960s about a Boston boy who becomes a prince of the Church.
Like most people who enjoy spy novels and crime fiction, I feel vaguely guilty about this interest. I realize that crime fiction is classy now, and has taken over part of the describing-modern-life job that high-toned novelists abdicated when they moved into the universities. My friend Patrick Anderson*, who has reviewed mysteries for years at the Washington Post, recently published a very good book to this effect: The Triumph of the Thriller. Still, you feel a little cheesy when you see a stack of lurid mystery covers sitting next to the bed.
So I've figured out a way to tell the books I can feel good about reading from the ones I should wean myself from. The test is: can I remember something from the book a month later -- or, better, six months or a year on. This is the test I apply to "real" fiction too: surprisingly often, a great book is great because it presents a character, a mood, a facet of society, a predicament that you hadn't thought of before reading the book but that stays with you afterwards. Rabbit Angstrom, Captain Ahab, and Clyde Griffiths (of An American Tragedy), to choose the first three examples that pop into my mind from American fiction.
I say that "genre" fiction, like spy and crime novels, ascends into the "real" fiction category when the world it presents can exert the same tenacious hold on your mind. (Meta point: in choosing life activities, I place a high premium on things I'm likely to remember -- new places, new activities -- because otherwise you feel you're just tearing pages off the calendar, in the way that old-time movies illustrated the passage of the years.) As I've thought about it I've been struck by how many "genre" books marvelously pass the test. For example:
I am in the local WuMart -- largest supermarket chain in Beijing, so I'm told, signage not that different from the nearby Wal-Mart's, motto "a dream of establishing an everlasting retail chain that Chinese people love patronizing, and that mingles with their daily lives" -- and I spot a great bargain in the wine department.
The label says "China Red Wine" in English, and 中国红葡萄酒, or "China Red Wine" in Chinese. It costs 11.8 RMB, or $1.60. I ask myself, How bad can it be?
Knowing that in this last year-plus I have often been startled by the answer to that question, I decide to wait for a while to find out. But I am curious.
It must have been the travel blear of the Beijing-Tokyo flight, but I missed the obvious point about the Tommy Lee Jones "Boss" advertising campaign mentioned earlier. Here we truly have a case of life imitating art. Jones is living out the fictional role portrayed by Bill Murray in every gaijin's favorite movie about Japan, Lost in Translation:
I realize that Murray's role was itself art imitating life, based on countless Japanese ad campaigns by foreign celebrities. But Jones's "Boss" presentation does seem to owe something to Murray's "Bob Harris" in the movie. Thanks to Eric Redman for pointing out the connection. I'm sure that he, like me, remembers that Lost had another main character "Charlotte." Of course the homage to a great movie could not have gone that far, but it's interesting to think about.
My family has so many real and important things to be thankful for that of course I can only address the ephemera here. For instance:
Windows Vista is no longer consuming the totality of my hard drive! Talk about your happy Thanksgiving Day!
Anton Kucer and his colleagues at Microsoft dutifully tried to figure out why, on a 105GB hard drive containing maybe 30-35GB of "real" data, my computer kept showing that it had virtually no space left.
They came up with an answer! We won't exactly call it a bug, and we won't exactly call it user error, but we will call it an interaction among three forces: Lenovo ThinkPad design, Microsoft Vista design; and JFallows user design. All details are after the jump, but the headline version is: if you have Vista and are using a ThinkPad, there is a way to keep your hard drive from being totally gobbled up. I take my Thanksgivings where I can find them.
Good: bonding with other expat Yanks over our shared secret national ritual. Foreigners know about the 4th of July but are always a little hazy about the point of Thanksgiving and when exactly it is. Bad: just another Thursday for everyone else. No NFL on TV.
Last year: a very nice turkey dinner with others of our tribe in our apartment in Shanghai. This year: our apartment building in Beijing is thoughtfully having an evening turkey dinner, advertised this way: "See you in your scariest costume & display your creativity in the Pumpkin Carving Competition." Hmmmm.
But to start the list of things to be thankful for: the English-language state-controlled Chinese media! Life would be duller without it. For instance, today's front-page story about the problems caused by the Three Gorges Dam.
Perhaps the predictions they have in mind are those in the Book of Revelations, about the End of Days? It's a possibility.
Here is the the way the keyboard on my Thinkpad T60 looked three months ago, when it was four months old.
Here's the way it looks today, at seven months of age, after three more articles and one bazillion additional emails have been pounded out on its keys:
This second one is a little harder to see, but here's the casualty count.
Now entirely gone: the E, N, and A keys, plus the < marking.
On their way: L, M, R, S, and >
Worried: D, O.
Should be worried: U, B
No wonder my fingers are tired -- I mean, strong! And good thing China is dotted with electronic parts shops where I can buy a new keyboard, cheap, when too many letters vanish from this one. I can probably find a supplier who sent them to the factory in the first place.
When I find that guy, maybe I'll ask him whether they would consider investing an extra 50 cents for more durable keytop decals. (Yes, I know the Mac's, and others, are molded in.)
Last year I mentioned how disorienting it can be to come across people wildly famous in their own culture whom you'd never heard of and to whom you'd ordinarily never give a second glance.
In that context: we can hardly turn on CCTV at night without seeing one or both of the gentlemen below hosting a variety, talk, or game show:
The pictures, from our apartment TV both on the same evening, don't do justice to the androgynous charm of their varying outfits.
Veterans' Day (and, my interview with Donald Rumsfeld...)
...back in 1993.
By my local China time it is now the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. This is November 11, which means variously, Remembrance Day, Armistice Day, or Poppy Day among countries on the Allied side of World War I, and of course Veterans' Day in the United States.
Originally this was a moment for looking backwards, to honor those who had served in the Great War and mourn those who had died. Its retrospective purpose remains. But for Americans right now it should also be a moment to honor the men and women who continue to serve and sacrifice and be injured and die -- and to reflect on the fact that, for the first time in our modern history, they do so with absolutely no shared sacrifice or service from the public at large. Everyone knows this and avoids thinking much about it. Today it's worth at least remembering.
Also it is worth looking at several articles the Atlantic has brought up from the archives and made available free, for now. They're about Vietnam, not Iraq or Afghanistan (or Iran), but several are significant in their own right in addition to shedding indirect light on our current and continuing wars. Let me emphasize two:
With all the expertise that comes from a full two days in country, en route to Beijing.
1) These people are tall! For my purposes, human beings come in two sizes: Taller than me, and any other height.* I can't help noticing that many more Germans fall into the first category than I am used to encountering -- and don't get me started on the giant Dutch. I had followed the whole academic/journalistic discussion of the fact that Americans are no longer, on average, the tallest people on earth. It's hard to appreciate this when in China, where people are larger in all ways than they were twenty years ago but on average nowhere near as tall, big, or heavy as the typical Yank. In Western Europe you see that the phenomenon is real.
2) I had better start thinking of Germans as a distinctly good-looking people, because apparently they're how I look. In most places where I don't belong, culturally or linguistically, my outsiderness is obvious at a glance. In Asia or Africa: naturally. Even in France -- maybe it's the clothes, maybe the lack of a Gallic je ne sais quoi, but for whatever reason no one ever approaches me there and starts speaking French.
In Germany, they come up all the time and start speaking German. It's happened every time I've been there, and it happened often this time. My point is not: "people in Germany are always speaking German." What I mean is, "people in Germany are always speaking German to me." Which I can't speak back.
It's quite a strange feeling to be assumed to belong -- as someone asks quickly for directions on the street or a shopkeeper starts making colloquial banter, in the quick informal tone you use only with native speakers -- and then have to explain, haltingly, that in fact you have little idea of what's being said. In Germany (or Holland or Sweden), the speaker then usually apologizes and switches to a cultured variety of English, which completes the humiliation. This gives me a glimpse into the experiences of my Chinese-American, Japanese-American, and Korean-American friends who show up in their ancestral homeland without knowing the ancestral tongue.
* Ask me if someone is closer to 5'6" or 5'10" and I'll say, I'm not sure. Ask me if someone is 6' 1 1/2" versus 6'2" and I'll know exactly, since that's the critical zone.
Executive hypercompensation: this time it's personal
So it appears that Stanley O'Neal will leave Merrill Lynch with > $160 million in stock options and other retirement benefits, after being paid nearly $50 million last year and immediately after the company reported a gigantic loss, based largely on sub-prime mortgage risks O'Neal had decided it should take on.
I know that markets are markets, that financiers go into finance because they like the dough, that compared with 99.9% of people on earth I myself am rich, and so on. But every now and then one of t
