Why Mainland Chinese distrust (hate?) the Japanese

I once taught English in Germany. Many of my students felt guilty about what their grandparents had done in the Second World War. Some of the grandfathers who were devout Christians carried the guilt every day of their lives. One good man, who’d done impressive things in his life despite having a metal plate in his head from the Russian Front ,was in agony in his 70’s because he wondered how he and other Christians could have done what they did in the 1930s and 1940s,.

On the other hand, students from Japan have told me the Rape of Nanjing is a myth, there were no comfort women, and China started the Mukden Incident. (Comfort women were Korean and Chinese girls who were enslaved by the Japanese so their men could have sex) Most of these students were fine human beings but the facts weren’t in their K-12 textbooks. It took until 2006 for a Japanese newspaper to break the news that Japanese, not the Chinese, had been behind the Mukden Incident (the Chinese call the debacle  September 18^th).

Why did this happen?  The Republican Party, which was against the war before it happened, had the slogan “Who lost China?” MacArthur, who administered Japan, was convinced the Communists were the enemy and he forgot about how vicious the Japanese had been during the war. We needed allies to fight the commies. In Korea we encouraged the rich Yang ban, who had been collaborators with the Japanese, to take over the government, because with all their loot they certainly wouldn’t turn communist.

We were right to fear the communists, but for 30 years being ant-communist was the only consideration in our attitudes toward other governments.

At UCLA, and in many places around America, people of Japanese and Chinese ancestry, who had nothing to do with this history, are best friends. In fact, you’ll mostly see Koreans, Chinese and Japanese walking together and doing things that don’t involve whites. Because of their shared attitudes towards education they have strong bonds of friendship   In this area America has been a true melting pot.

In Japan recently the Prime Minister went to the Yasukuni Shrine where the  seven most evil Japanese war criminals have their ashes. Can you imagine Germans visiting a temple to Hitler placed over his bunker?

American citizens whose ancestors once lived in Japan believe what they’ve been taught about World War Two from their textbooks and have no interest in preserving the face of their ancestors. But they were brought up knowing the truth and, anyway, it was a long time ago.

For the Chinese, whose ancestors had been raped, disemboweled and beheaded, it is not an old memory. Every year the Prime Minister returned to the Koa Kannon temple was a slap in their faces. I’ve talked about how important face (Mianzi) is to a country that was treated badly by the white man and the Japanese for a century.  It's a very important consideration. If the Japanese want to stay in denial, there will always be a gulf between them and Mainland Chinese.  It’s too bad they don’t understand how 25-year-old Chinese feel about them, while we’ve been buddies with Germans for at least 30 years. Denial is not the cornerstone of friendship, and for a country that is growing old, with no real army, it could prove to be disastrous.

Exciting News on the Economic Front

 Lloyd Blankfein, who is famous for saying he was “doing God’s work” in running Goldman Sachs, decided to take it further and announced today he is leaving Goldman to run a series of loan tranches for the Vatican Bank.

Also today, Charles Prince, who has admitted he didn’t know what was going on when he ran Citicorp, finally had subprime tranches explained to him. He has decided to give away all the money he walked away with from Citicorp toward the establishment of the “Too Big to Fail” chair at Middle Tennessee University.

In other news, both Bank of America and J. P. Morgan Chase have cut mortgage payments in half for anyone who can “fog up a mirror.”

Barney Frank has come out for shutting down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, saying “every boondoggle has to come to an end sometime.”

Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers again announced it wasn’t his fault the bank fell like a haystack in the wind and the government caused it.

Unfortunately  Fuld ruined a great dream. I awoke to a world filled with crooks who still haven't been prosecuted for destroying our financial system.

The Power of an Example

There is a success story in Barack Obama’s life that only tangentially involves the Presidency.

To describe this, I must tell the reader that I taught for 28 years at a university that was 1/3 African American and 1/3 Latino. In my life at the University, I had long discussions with students whose fathers had abandoned them. Since my father died when I was seven and we lived for years on social security payments there were some connections that came easily.  However it took awhile for them to believe I was supportive and non-judgmental because I was from another race. Eventually students passed on their positive assessments of me to new students.

The stories were almost uniformly sad. One woman used a lot of Kleenex when she said; “What’s wrong with me, he left before I was even born.” Many had never had a male figure in their lives. What that had done to their psyches had different effects on different students. Many intelligent students sabotaged themselves because they thought they were not worthy of success.  One expressed outright hatred of the absent biological father whom he said he would kill if he ever met him.

I also had students who had surmounted this and were my best students. They all had a will and an ability to transcend what cards they’d been originally dealt.

Barack Obama is really the poster child for all of my best students. He stands as a beacon for those who want to be something despite the obstacles that stand before them.

Obama’s father deserted him when he was very young; he had a stepfather who his mother divorced, which saw him returning to Hawaii without that male figure. But he had a grandmother and grandfather who showed him love and gave him support.

His drive and determination, along with what must be a very solid, physical brain structure, helped him achieve and he moved from success to success. Although I became Assistant to the President of Occidental College after he left for Columbia, everything I have ever heard  from those who taught him was laudatory.

His success or failure in the Presidency as evaluated by historians will not affect his importance as a symbol for young African-Americans.

By the way I have another blog called My Student, My Hero that discusses one of my former student’s successes.

Cuomo moves up while Wall Street rejoices

Soon, Andrew Cuomo will be Governor of New York, which means he will no longer be Attorney General. This could be a very bad thing for those of us in America who want the people who caused the financial crisis to stand up and face the music.

As long as Cuomo’s been Attorney General he’s pursued the shady people on Wall Street and their accountants. Today we learned Cuomo is close to filing civil fraud charges against Ernst and Young for staying silent while Lehman Brothers cooked its books and lied in its reports to stockholders and the American people.

The Justice Department has done virtually nothing and the SEC needs to have more enforcement agents that I can’t see it receiving from a Republican House.

Let's listen to how it might sound in the future:  “His campaign contributions can’t be ignored as we decide whether to prosecute. Let’s watch things awhile, after all he deserves to get some slack because of his loyalty to our party.”

“You know this operation looks a lot like what Madoff did, but what if we’re wrong and we upset him. Let’s hold off until we’re sure we can absolutely get a conviction.  We don’t want to be embarrassed by a big time loss in court.”

“I really want to pursue this but I don’t have enough enforcement people to get the data we need to prove this conclusively.”

So let’s remind ourselves who is not in jail:  Angelo Mozillo of Countrywide, whose fines were paid by Bank of America; and Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers.  There are a lot of people who brought this country to its knees who are walking around with a lot of money they earned by lying for years.

Without someone ambitious such as Cuomo, who was brought up by a former Governor lauded for his ethics, many of the miscreants are going to walk. And it will be the same as it was on Wall Street before he became Attorney General  in a world where greed tops ethics every time.

Start Christmas On Labor Day to get the country moving again

Labor Day, 2016, American Pie, Rhode Island

Rev. Roger Williams today decried using Labor Day as the beginning of the Christmas season. As the chairman of the “Put Christ Back in Christmas" movement, he has been adamant that Christmas no longer be used as an economic stimulus.

“I believe this all started in 2012 when retailers put up Christmas decorations two weeks before Thanksgiving Day," he said. “Bernanke couldn’t get the economy moving quickly enough even after using Fed employees to give out $20 dollar bills on street corners. He then suggested the so called ‘magic of Christmas’ could fix America's problems.” Democrats wanted rich people to only take ten dollars a day, but the Republicans said that “truth, justice and the American Way” demanded everyone get the same cash.

In 2013 the Christmas shopping season began in October when Christmas music began appearing on the radio, after Bernanke’s plan to flood the country with newly printed Benjamins failed to drop unemployment to six percent.

The next year was marked by the collision of a Walmart and Amazon drone attempting to deliver Christmas packages to the same home in early October.

Rev. Williams has a big sign on his church that says, “Wo ting Ye Su de” which translates in Chinese as “I listen to Jesus,” in the hopes that the Chinese company that owns the mortgage on his church will understand his position. He is awaiting foreclosure on the building.

From the Ming Dai to Today

A recent story in the Wall Street Jounal focused on China's potential directive that western companies must share their proprietary technology in electric car manufacturing if they want to sell cars in China. This is no surprise to those of us who read a book called To Change China: Western Advisors in China by Jonathan Spence. He described how the Jesuits in the Ming, then Qing Dynastys shared their advanced knowledge of astronomy with the Emperor, then stood there waiting, hoping they could proselytize in China. (Back then predictions on where celestial objects would be was important to the Emperor's face). The Emperor then looked at the priest and said, "Why are you standing there?" The priest asked what was in it for the Jesuits. The Emperor said,"Thanks a lot."

This drama played out through Chinese history and culminated with the ouster of the Russian advisors when they were no longer essential to the communist revolution and the rebuilding of China. (In fact, the book Odd Man Out draws a picture of how Stalin manipulated the Chinese Communist party and put them in a position where they had to fight in Korea. It wasn't always a good things to have Russians around)


So, a few years ago, when I watched this American bank buy a Chinese bank and build ATMS all over China I was amused. Beijing didn't allow them to take deposits from Chinese. Of course, the bank could have foreigners use the ATMs. American bankers never seem to know what's going on, only how big their paychecks will be.


More and more companies that used to be described as American moved their operations to China because the CEOs wanted bigger bonuses and the less they paid employees the more they got in their pay envelope. They didn't care whether a lot of Americans wouldn't have a job, they just wanted more money.


So the idea that technology would be taken over is a logical expectation given Chinese history. If companies don't want to sell cars in China, they can go home. Since most Americans couldn't find China on a map, it is to be expected that these corporate barons wouldn't know anything about Zhongguo li shi. America is an insular land where the only other languages besides English are spoken by the children of immigrants.


So this step was inevitable. A couple of  months ago, Boeing sales made our trade deficit less horrible than usual. Wait until the Chinese produce a plane. 

Riding the Purple Wind

When I was young, Syracuse, New York had no Chinese food and you had to drive across the bridge to Canada to get tang cu xia (sweet and sour shrimp). Asia, especially China, called to me because I wanted to walk among Zhongguoren (Chinese) and look at the world from a different perspective.

It was when I was living in New York City that I read "The Razor's Edge" by Somerset Maughm, a novel in which a rich American, disillusioned by World War One, gives up his life in Chicago to go to India and study in an ashram. He ends up driving a cab in New York as he provides spiritual sustenance to old friends. It was clearly about transcendence of the world's pain in a journey to enlightenment. I would read it on the subway and one day teenage boys were whipping each other in my subway car while I went on absorbing the plot.

 As life progressed I wanted also to know about 5,000 years of Chinese history.  I figured that there was so much I hadn't been exposed to that could enlighten me. I knew little about the world, because I was looking at it through the eyes of an Upstate New York white guy.

As I grew older, everything Asian attracted me. I wanted to hang wind chimes that came from there, learn to speak Chinese, and develop an Asian mind that looked at the world from a different perspective from the Western mind that made my decisions. I studied Kong Fu Zi (Confucius) and tried xin fo (practice Buddhism).

Now most of my friends where I live are Chinese and we talk about things it would be hard to talk about with most Americans. One of them said to me writing English is just a bunch of letters put together while Chinese characters are an art form. I can say “Wo you Zhongwen ji chu,” (I know basic Chinese) but I know the limitations of my knowledge of the Chinese language.

One might say this is just the attraction of a different way of life, and I’m sure that’s part of it. But before I die I want to have an Eastern mind set as well as a Western one. How do people persevere in the midst of the Cultural Revolution or the Korean War, and still keep striving? Why did a shame society like Japan condone the Rape of Nanjing? Soon the yuan, and to a lesser extent, the won, will be world currencies and Asia will be the place that matters. I have walked the steps to Sun Zhong Shan’s mausoleum, walked a short portion of the Great Wall, and seen the Laughing Buddha in all sorts of temples. I’ve been in places where fo jia is called Chan and Zen. I’ve walked in the Forbidden City. I feel the change in my outlook. I once worried my upbringing would hold me back. In bad times, or even in good times, I pray and thank Ye Su (Jesus) and have decided what is right or wrong based on training in Sunday school, but I’ve figured I can keep those beliefs and attitudes and add other insights. After all, I've discovered the journey never ends, and as it was for the main character in "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" by Joyce, the epiphanies still keep coming.

Prince Charles, Austerity, and America's Ostriches

The picture on the front page of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal shows England’s Prince in Perpetuity, Charles, and his unlikely replacement for Princess Di, being attacked by students who don’t want to pay more money for college. The students can’t escape to America to study because it’s more expensive here, even after England’s rise in tuition.

That incident put in perspective America’s approach versus the world. They’re mad in Greece and England because they have to suffer because of the fiscal crisis America Created. America doesn’t have riots because no one in government is telling us to tighten our belts and deal with deleveraging. We’re pouring money we don’t have into driving our economy with the Fed buying 600 billion worth of our own bonds. According to pundits that isn’t working and won’t.

It’s like Margaret Carlson said about body screening. She said all that’s been asked of the American people while fighting two wars is to submit to body screening and we don’t want to do that. The American people who are not unemployed are not being asked to do anything. The unemployed are bearing the entire burden. People who bought twice the house they ever could have afforded are sitting in those houses waiting for the house fairy to save them. While Ireland is moving to apply a 90 percent tax on bankers, ours are paying themselves big bonuses, which they did all through the crisis they caused.

I must admit that when things get tough for me, I put my I pod in the car and listen to Country Gospel, which reminds me of the churches in upstate New York I attended growing up. These are the hymns they have stopped singing in mainstream American churches. But I’m going back to a memory of when America was a pleasant place if you were white. The Tea Party wants to return us to that time and it’s a non starter. We have to suffer in today’s America and fix it. Americans have to face up to the fact they thought there was twice the amount of money in this country then there really was. Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns had loaned out 30 dollars for every dollar they had and Americans believed that was real money.

Yesterday we found out the tax cuts won’t disappear and we’ll be spending more money than we have and increasing the deficit. I guess none of our politicians, who are used to payoffs from companies, want to be foolish enough to tell Americans that they have to suck it up and suffer as the Europeans are ready to do. What happened to the America that fought World War Two and launched a Space Program? The only program we’ll be launching is a modified debt repayment program.

Joe Wong told his son he had to learn both English and Chinese if he wanted to be President. He said his son would need English to govern the country and Chinese to deal with debt collectors.

America and the Future of Basic Science

In a recent post I ranted about how the AMA had pushed to restrict the number of M.D.’s produced in America. But what happens in the other fields of science? Here’s how the process works, for both social sciences and physical sciences.

A professor encourages a lot of people to go to graduate school in his field and when they can’t get a real job, he hires them at low wages as a postdoc. So not only don’t you have to teach undergraduates, (I guess they smell funny once you’ve got a paper in Nature), you’re building a cheap labor pool.

In my article (Education in America and China) I quote one of the college seniors I was teaching, who said, “Hey, tell me more about that verb thing.” As you can imagine not a lot of Americans like him choose to study science or even learn how to figure out a percentage. Anyway, for a long time, becoming a college professor has been like winning the lottery. (I wonder how many history professors have been hired in the last 20 years. If it’s more than three, please hold up your hand.)

In the sciences, they long ago discovered that Indians and Chinese understand math and science and are driven to be very good at what they do. So they’ve filled up our graduate programs. I think maybe there is one white guy in biostatistics.

In addition, labs run on postdocs. There are training grants from NSF and NIH for labs to hire Americans as postdoc researchers, but not many want to become one as postdocs are well known to be "overworked and underpaid".  So now a majority of postdocs in our universities are from foreign countries.  A long time ago, foreigners from places like China wanted to stay after getting their seasoning in some white person’s lab, but now places like Peking University, Tsinghua and Fudan are full of brilliant people doing fascinating things, so why stay in a place that doesn’t have Lanzhou pulled noodles?

We can’t make them stay by giving them a teaching job at a university because there aren’t enough for American citizens. As India and China surpass America in the number of people who can understand logarithms and do difficult math, the future for science in America looks pretty dim. American college students have figured out that, even if they know calculus, going into that science pipeline isn’t encouraging. With states trying to pull themselves out of debt, they won’t want to hire new professors. Who will fill up those labs NSF chipped in to build? What does this mean for basic research in America? Sen. Arlen Specter was the guy who cared about NIH funding and he lost his job. Maybe Sarah Palin supports basic science and the Tea Party will make it one of their causes?

Wonder Why It Costs So Much to Get Sick?

I have a friend from China who we are going to call Zhong Shan in this essay. He is compassionate, intelligent, and at 42 he’s going to sit for the medical boards in America.  Since he already has an M.D., PhD. From China, he’s going to do well on the exams and be a great doctor here. He will need to get a residency, but his great personality will help him.

In Pulaski, New York, they have a great doctor and he’s from Korea. He’s beloved in this totally white town near the Canadian border. He practices medicine in underserved areas, as will Zhong Shan.

It’s interesting how Medicine denies the basic law of supply and demand.  The more doctors, the more costs go up. Big cities have a lot of expensive doctors.

How can this happen? It’s very hard to get into medical schools and there are not enough of them, partly because the AMA has worked to restrict the number of doctors produced every year, driving up costs. States like California keep upping the cost of tuition, so people leave medical school with, perhaps, $200,000 in student loans. Can you afford to be a pediatrician or family doctor with that debt burden? I don’t think so.

The rule for a physician is that he has to have a procedure to make money, you have to be an orthopedist, heart surgeon, or as the most highly paid public employee in California is, a liver transplant specialist. To cut is to cure, as they say. It’s also a good way to pay off those loans. Dermatologists can concentrate on Botox or laser faces so folks can look young. That’s another good way to earn a buck. But being a family doctor or a pediatrician means you’ll take forever to pay off those loans. Even neurologists don’t make a lot, after four years undergraduate, four years medical school, 3 years residency and then specialty training.

To cut costs why doesn’t the government open more medical schools, make tuition low, so people can afford to take jobs where there aren’t enough doctors. People would respect you and you would be where you can form relationships with a society that’s appreciative you’re in South Dakota. Medicare is going broke and health care costs keep rising while the unemployed can’t afford to get sick. If the costs of student loans, plus an implied right to make a lot of money after toiling for twelve years  to be a specialist, were taken out of the equation, then maybe we wouldn’t be facing a health care Armageddon.

My friend, Pete, and the American Dream

I have a friend named Pete who’s had a dangerous life. He was of elementary school age when Eichmann wired the Budapest ghetto with explosives. Luckily for Pete and his fellow Jews, The Russians entered Budapest the day before it was to be blown to bits. They were spared, only to come under Russian rule, which on some days was less anti-semitic than that of the Germans.

But Pete and his wife, Marta, who had also been in that ghetto as a child, lived under the Soviet regime until 1956, when a friend stole an army truck and 16 men, women and children drove out of Hungary into freedom in Austria.

A Jewish charity brought them to America and he became an engineer for some of America’s biggest companies. When he retired he owned one of the small companies that make our country so productive.

I remembered back 20 years ago when I complained that the Japanese were beating us, and  buying up Pebble Beach and a lot of prime American real estate. Pete looked at me and told me you can never give up on America, the country that had given him freedom and prosperity. He was right of course, Japan's stock market is worth a third of what it was in 1989 and the land under the Emperor’s Palace is no longer worth as much as the land in California

The other day, feeling discouraged about our debt and the fact that it is China that is now eating our lunch, I was worrying about the United States. However, I thought of what Pete, the consummate American, would say to me. He would tell me never to give up on our country, and that this is just another bump in the road in the journey of a free nation toward its destiny.

I've Seen the Enemy and It's My Television

The Economist quoted Keith Poole (UCSD) saying this congress will be the most divided since the civil war. Does that mean our congress reflects us? There are a lot of signs that  different sections of America, both philosophically and geographically, are not speaking to each other because they don’t share the same views.

I want to talk about 24 hour cable news as an enabler for this dissolution of good will in the body politic. There is not enough news to go around. It’s like watching the news at Christmas time in Tulsa. Sometimes there isn’t any.

So television created the Tea Party, so Fox News would have something  to fill their time slots and Rupert Murdoch could then get more money from advertisers. MSNBC tried to get viewers by putting people of the left on their broadcasts. CNN just decided to keep being a boring place that looks for endangered species in New Orleans.

Walter Lippmann always talked about the decline of civility, but there’s no way he could envision the world we live in today.  He lived in a time when there were only three national networks, each with one half hour of news a night. There were no news outlets to make stories out of whole cloth. Everything that happened then wasn’t all that important; if you wanted to find out about something weird you bought the National Enquirer.

But today's 24/7 news networks spend time on some preacher with three followers who wants to burn the Koran. We had this brouhaha recently where a conservative got a piece of videotape in which a woman was talking about her experience with racial tolerance. He twisted it around and got the woman fired. Think of what Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, an alcoholic bully who got professors fired in the ‘50s, could have done on Fox News. His day came too soon. With 24 hour cable news, he might have ended up President.  “I have the names of over 500 communists in the State Department. One communist in the state department is too many.” When asked to provide the names he always avoided the question, because these communists didn’t exist.

That’s the danger of this organism of 24 hour news. It can make something out of nothing to fill all that time. So more and more outrageous things that good newsmen and women once wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, are now put on the air, even it pits one part of America against the other. But it does sell ads.

Dancing with the Hurricane

As all of you know, the blog talks about serious issues, which is why I have to address the crisis involving “Dancing with the Stars.”

As a student of American political philosophy, I will try to put it in perspective. The story of Bristol Palin actually involves a down to earth, sweet, nice person who can’t dance but is headed for the finals of America’s second most popular show, “Dancing with the Stars” (I guess the number one show is “Survivor: Orange County”).

You can’t help liking her, but you are surprised frequently by her staying power on the show despite being the kind of dancer I was in high school. Her mother is in the news a lot (she provided support for a witch who tried to become a U.S. Senator).  Because of her daughter’s success, Republicans believe Sarah Palin will run for the Presidency in 2012, with Jim Carrey as her running mate.

Bristol always gets the lowest score from the judges, but since votes by the public count, she stays on. There are tea party people who vote many times, through multiple e-mail addresses, to keep her on the show. Because of this, our future is clear; this highly organized group is going to run the country, while the Democrats continue watching “Masterpiece Mystery.”

The midterm elections pale in importance next to this “Tempest in a Tea Party Pot.” We understand that if we had direct voting on TV, the next president would be Justin Bieber. Even Brandy couldn’t overcome Hurricane Bristol. While the rest of the world worries about currency imbalances Americans are staying focused on what is really important. And except for the Wisconsin man who shot his TV set in frustration after watching Palin dancing, we know what the important issues are.

Of course I await the final verdict. Since sociologists always write in a way that makes the words unclear to anyone who isn’t a sociologist, we will have to wait for their final judgment on this issue and hire a translator to explain it to us.

Is China Really at Fault?

I’ve written before on the relationship between America and China and the problems with one country setting up a mechanism that prevents their currency from appreciating. I’ve advocated tariffs, because that would be the only way to make the Middle Kingdom understand that one country can’t control its currency with a state run apparatus, when all their trade partners do not have such a mechanism.

Lately, China has been saying that our quantitative easing is doing the same thing. I disagree, but I do wonder when we, as a people, are going to admit we thought there was twice the money in the country than there was, because places like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers lent out over 30 dollars for every dollar they had in reserves. Our houses weren’t worth more, but we took this ephemeral equity out of our houses and bought boats and took trips that we couldn’t afford. We extended our debt by running our credit cards up to the limit and acquired new ones. Now a quarter of the houses in this nation are underwater. Doesn’t it look imprdent now that we thought the beans would grow to the sky?

Just as the people who use drugs in America create drug cartels in Mexico, we were at least partly at fault  as the slimeballs who ran America’s Banks. Now our houses are under water and we won’t admit that we made improper decisions to take on so much debt. It will take an immense amount of deleveraging and pain to get us back to where we should be. There was a guy I knew who would scream at me that deficits didn’t matter; why was I so stupid to worry about it? He probably won’t ever admit he was wrong, but his ideas were shared by many on Wall Street and we let them get us into the biggest mess in financial history.

But the Chinese always know what they are doing and they looked at this  country turning into a debtor nation and said: they’re doing it to themselves, so we can hold the value of the yuan down and take advantage of their mistakes. George Bush once justified his trip to the Beijing Olympics because he “was going to visit our money” (he does have a good sense of humor). Unless America can stand up and deal with the pain of deleveraging, the America I love will be on the way to the poorhouse, printing money while our ship goes down. China took  some advantage but we encouraged them to do it. Wouldn't Wall Street have done the same?

Here’s a you tube clip that puts it all into perspective.

America Demands To Know

1.       When they autopsy Dick Cheney, will they tell the American people where the 666 was hidden on his body?

2.       Was  Vice President Biden taken to the hospital to remove a Cole Haan from his mouth?

3.       Did Obama really go to India “because I love curry?”

4.       If Nancy Pelosi ever stops getting Botox, will she  begin to understand the American people?

5.       Has anyone counted the hours Sarah Palin watches Russia every day?

6.       If she stops, will the National Security Agency be able to pick up the slack?

7.       Does the Tea Party secretly drink Dragon Well tea and supplicate themselves before pictures of Hu Jin Tao?

New York with Palm Trees?

I drove down the coast the other day and ended up In Brentwood. I remembered what the clerk in the DMV told me when I first arrived in Los Angeles. She was from Upstate New York. She had me move close and said; “they’ll smile at you and act friendly, but don’t you trust them.” That was the best advice about West Los Angele I‘ve ever received.

I’d come from a job in journalism in New York City, and I would describe West L.A. as “New York with Palm Trees,” but that was doing New York a disservice.

Just because someone says “Let’s have lunch” means nothing. I learned to say “have your people call my people.” I, of course, had no people because I was a college professor, but this was West L.A. and you had to learn to blend in. I learned to never step into a crosswalk on San Vicente at seven a.m. because I’d just piss off the broker or banker who had to clean his bumper after he hit me going sixty.

Since I lived in a place that only elected Democrats, I learned what an important  word really meant. Having gone to the Maxwell School, I thought I knew what liberal was, but I was wrong. I was with a nice man who happened to be a pediatric specialist. He was going on about how the school system needed to be more integrated. I asked him why both of his children went to private school and he told me his kids were too sensitive. Since his daughter taught my daughter how to say f—k, I understood his plight. To be liberal is to help people poorer than you as long as you don’t have to touch them or go to school with them. But you could hire them as a nanny or housekeeper where they would work 70 hours a week, hoping the spoiled offspring wouldn’t make something up about them and get them fired and deported.

Since the city council never met a developer they didn’t like, it’s almost impossible now to drive east after three p.m. It can take between 30-45 minutes to get to the 10 freeway from UCLA. It got so bad I considered moving back to Syracuse and its 300 overcast days. The people are real there, but you can’t survive without a heated garage. I  taught at Newhouse with a  nice guy who was allergic to sunlight.

I have to go now, because you can never know if they’re going to tow your car. By the way did I tell you LA only survives because now photo tickets cost $450?

Happy Deepavali

Today is Deepavali in Singapore. While it’s a Hindu and Sikh holiday celebrating the victory of good over evil, it also seems to represent tolerance for different races who live together successfully in that Island Nation.

I was thinking how great it would be if every country had such a holiday that made us all seem worthwhile to our fellow citizens of the globe.

When I was younger I believed that by now White and African Americans would be intermarrying and no one would even comment on it.  I believed in a world in which everyone would be valued equally.

As I think of the people of Singapore lighting lamps in this Festival of Lights, I think of so many places where race is pitted against race or religion is pitted against religion. These places should all have a Holiday in which the equality of all would be celebrated.

Zuckerberg is Us

Walter Bagehot, a British political philosopher in the 19th Century, said that you can tell a lot about a country by looking at who its people admire. Now if I talk about Mark Zuckerberg, you’re going to say what a loser, but that of course is not  an honest reaction. Among recent generations, who really wouldn’t have wanted to create Facebook? Remember when a lot of people from the Ivy’s wanted to become merchant bankers on Wall Street? They could make a lot of money really quickly and ethics wasn’t the most popular course in business school, so anything went.

This is not to throw rocks at any generations, because America has been moving in this direction for quite a while. People have learned to cut corners, shade the truth, and withhold evidence. The only things that impressed a lot of Americans were money and status. I remember when Monica Lewinsky was invited to lots of parties. She was famous for a gulp, but that didn’t matter. She was famous.

Notoriety and picking up a lot of cash were what a lot of people wanted and worked to obtain. Who do you think were the underlings that put together the sub-prime mortgage tranches? It was guys who before would have become professors of Math or Economics. They might have spent a couple of years in the Peace Corps if they came of age during the ‘60s.  But people think professors are people who want to be poor forever and striking it rich is what America’s all about. I wonder if today you would know how to find a lawyer you could really trust. I don't.

This has been evolving over the years; we’re just at one dark point in the journey. There’s a reason congressmen are slimy, they represent us. There’s a reason Bank CEOs are people who act like they crawled out from under a rock. Those are the guys in today’s America who won.

Once Mark Zuckerberg developed Facebook he got laid a lot. Mark Zuckerberg is us.

Mandate,Shmandate

P.J. O’Rourke was on Bloomberg TV today to push his book Don’t Vote; It Just Encourages the Bastards.

I had already decided to write this blog, but listening to him only increased my desire to let this feeling out. The Democrats won in 2006 and 2008, because George Bush was too dumb to realize that all of Cheney’s ideas were stupid and dangerous. The Republicans are going to blow out the Democrats in the midterm election because Obama let two egomaniacs, Larry Summers and Nancy Pelosi run away with his first two years. He had little experience, but I voted for him out of blind faith he would be better than Bush, but I realized my standards weren’t very high. I should have voted for someone in the primaries who’d actually understood what being a President really required. Today O’Rourke called Obama an “Ivy League smarty pants.”

Pelosi thought she had a mandate, so she called the shots on the health care bill. (The only reason I’m glad it passed is that three of my friends desperately needed the coverage.) The bill didn’t try to control costs. The Dartmouth group, whose research Democrats used to show it wouldn’t increase the budget deficit, say their research was misinterpreted.

Obama and Pelosi didn’t have a mandate to turn America into a liberal paradise, and  they pissed off the American electorate and made a lot of people very angry, because they should have spent all their effort on finding jobs for Americans, rebuilding infrastructure and saving our National Parks by thinking like FDR.

Now the Republicans are going to blow out the Democrats by running witches (I’m still not sure O’Donnell isn’t one) and people who want to eliminate social security. The Tee-Hee party is filled with people who have major personality disorders who want to emulate Herbert Hoover. They’ll think they have a mandate. They don’t, people just want jobs. The problem is that the Republicans are the party of the employers, they really don’t care about employees and they love bankers. They’re going to think they have a mandate. They don’t, and when they try to privatize social security, everyone will say we want the Democrats back.

The average American isn’t left wing or right wing. There are new people becoming independents and carrying picture of Michael Bloomberg in their wallets every day. In fact, the average American doesn’t buy into either party’s radical philosophies. And they think members of congress are one step below used car salesmen.

Fathers and Daughters

Very soon I’ll take my daughter out for her birthday. She’ll come up from where she goes to college and we’ll eat Prime Rib to celebrate. She calls about four times a week, so I don’t know why that old song by Sara Evans called “Suds in a bucket” upsets me so much. In the song a girl turns 18 and takes off with a guy in a white pickup and it’s clear she’s leaving for good.

I feel like I’ve got a lot of nerve being upset by that song. I ran away from home when I was 15 and dropped out of college once to figure out what was going on. It’s clear everybody has to spread their wings.

But when you’ve put her to bed for years, taken dance lessons with her in the Canary Islands and had her sit next to you at the bar in Germany while you had Schnitzel (it’s perfectly acceptable in Germany), it’s hard not to think about how I’d feel if she moved to Alaska.

I wrote once before about carrying her on my shoulder into a drugstore when she was a little more than one. She started stroking my hair and from then on she owned me.

But for the father who didn’t walk away before she’s born, or isn’t mad she’s not a boy to take to Dodger’s games, it can be a great experience to love someone for the first time without reservation. It doesn’t matter how great your life is with someone, a daughter has a key to your inner self. She can finish your sentences; remember when you acted like a fool and forgiven you when you took her cell phone away.

It could be the same thing with a son. My Sunday Chinese language exchange is with a great guy from Inner Mongolia and his Dad frequently calls him when one of us is explaining his native tongue to the other. I can tell from the conversation they’ve got a close relationship. I guess any father is lucky to get a least one other homo sapiens who they can watch grow and then create life him/herself.

Lesser Songs for Lesser Cities

Many American cities have songs about them: there’s "New York, New York”, two songs for Chicago, many about Tulsa and, of course two great ones about San Francisco. Every city should have a song, but they might sound like this one:

“Omaha, you’ve been hanging heavy on my mind. I’m leaving even if I have to crawl.” That’s a little ditty made famous by Waylon Jennings.

So we should have some songs about other cities. They can all be sung to the tune of Omaha:

Syracuse is overcast 300 days a year. I’m leaving to try and find the sun.

Concord, New Hampshire is the world’s most boring place. I gotta get out before the snowflakes fall.

How about a new song about Gary, Indiana? They already have one:

Gary, Indiana is a city that’s barely alive. It’s nothing since they lost the Jackson Five.

Culture, Conflict and Calamity

In  Los Angeles, which is allegedly the future of America, they speak at least 120 different languages. You have to be careful not to insult people. Don’t tell me everybody should speak English and share our values. My people arrived here in 1620 and needed Native Americans to help them survive. Our next generation killed them. A whole lot of innovations were brought about by immigrants whose parents didn’t speak English. You don’t need to speak English in Zhongguocheng (Chinatown), or in the Spanish areas of Los Angeles. (To Tea partiers, I’m sorry our country changed, but we can’t do anything about it. By the way, Norman Rockwell is dead.) Here are a couple of things Americans need to know:

 Koreans show respect by looking down; therefore if you’re African American, they aren’t dissing you.

Don’t pat a Thai child on the head. That’s where his soul is located.

If your mother in law is Chinese, you can’t tell her you like her, and especially don’t tell her you love her if she’s really a great mother-in-law.

Never leave you shoes on when you enter a house inhabited by Chinese.

If a high end BMW is tailgating you in the morning on a normal road in Germany, don’t throw him the finger because he will try to drive you off the road. This is really important if you are driving into Frankfurt-Am-Main. He’s probably a banker or broker, just like the BMW drivers coming out of Brentwood in the early morning in Los Angeles. If you are on foot, you are just a little person who might mess up his bumper if he hits you in a crosswalk.

Nigerians and Ethiopians value age and wisdom (China, still). Americans don’t. Who needs wisdom if you  have learned to tweet while driving? I once followed a guy on the 60 in LA, who was trying to dry his hair by sticking his head out the window. Putting on your mascara while driving is normal.

In Australia they used to call a suit a bag of fruit.

Don’t use “keep it on the down low,” because people might think you’re one of the downlow brothers.

Meet Chinese Female Billionaires

The Financial Times today wrote about the Hurun report which states that 11 out of the 20 richest women in the world are Chinese. Those who follow my blog know that I have written on the qualities of Chinese women, but for you Calvinists out there, here is more proof that they are among the elect.

Think about the fact that Oprah is only  ninth on the list and you remember Horace Greely’s advice to go east.

Not only do they look 10 years younger than their age as time passes, but they could be worth a bundle. It’s not so hard to remember to turn out the lights when you leave a room, when you’re sleeping next to a billionaire.

Here’s how you go about getting one. You only have to know two sentences.

1.       Ni hen piao liang.

2.       Wo ting tai tai de.

The first means you’re beautiful and the second, which she will teach you, means “I listen to my wife.”

You knew there was no such thing as  a free lunch, right?

The Devil is in the Details

Because Democrats made compromises on the Financial Reform Bill in the hopes of getting more Republicans to join in and do something, a lot of specifics were left to the regulators. The Republicans, except for those who lived Down East, threw the Democrats the finger. In other words, all the attempts to get Richard Shelby and the rest of the banker’s toadies to support the bill ended up weakening it. So now every detail is being fought over in the myriad groups that are supposed to control some part of the economy.

They didn’t have The Commodities Futures Trading Commission absorbed into the SEC, so there will be turf wars that will last into the future.

Sheila Bair and the FDIC decided banks should hold at least five percent of the credit risk when they come up with a new plan to securitize America into a crisis. Five percent doesn’t seem like a lot to hold onto, but it made the Treasury mad., because Geithner can’t stand to have a woman with guts, like Bair, standing up for important rules. He doesn’t want to have trouble playing footsie with the bankers.

Did you ever wonder how come the bankers hate a guy who kisses their butts?

How come banks didn’t give up the right to lobby when they took the TARP money? (It doesn’t matter, because the Roberts Court would have said it was an unconstitutional restraint on free speech anyway).

I’m trying to figure out what banks really want and all I can see is Adam Smith’s unseen hand. The problem with that is that every year there are a lot less people you can trust to play fair. I knew that every time I gave a test that seventy percent of the people in that room had cheated before. More and more we’re producing individuals with situational ethics. Situational ethics is when you are for anything that will make you money.

In a perfect world, you wouldn’t need cops. But, in the world we live in now, there should be 1,000 State Troopers assigned permanently to Goldman Sachs.

Why people are yellow

“If you keep studying so much about China, you’re going to end up yellow,” she said.

“I don’t understand this yellow thing, you’re whiter than I am,” I said. "How did they come up with this description of Asians?"

“It makes it easier for White people to treat us as if we’re not human.”

Obamadrama

The big news today is that a poll shows that only 38 per cent of Americans think Obama should be re-elected.  We apparently want to shoot the first guy who tried to fix the 15–year-old entrenched mismanagement of the American economy. Obama followed the dumbest president since Warren G. Harding, so how could he screw it up?  He screwed it up because people are generally hurting and anyone on top is considered the causative factor in their suffering.

George Bush was a loser who listened to Cheney and…..Cheney when he was in the white house. As I’ve said before, Alan Greenspan believed the market was rational and that companies (like banks) would never do anything not in the interest of the stockholders.  His old friend, Ronald Reagan said “trust, but verify.” But Alan didn’t believe in verifying anything, because Ayn Rand had spoken to him from Mount Olympus.

Our country was in terrible shape when Obama came into office; however, some of the people Obama surrounded himself with resembled foxes entering the henhouse. Larry Summers has been called an egotistical son of a bitch (Who is only, apparently, transcended by Richard Holbrooke). Summers earlier, along with Henry Paulson and other banksters got rid of a depression-era law called the Glass Steagall Act that separated commercial banks from investment banks to protect the people of America So much for Obama leading a populist charge against the entrenched special interests that really run our country.

He then found a guy who didn’t pay his taxes and made him Secretary of the Treasury. His big claim to fame was he was Paulson Jr. Smart thinking, Barack.

He didn’t revive the Civilian Conservation Corps, or fix bridges and roads, or bring back any of the kinds of things that Roosevelt used to give people self respect, while fixing our disturbingly disintegrating infrastructure. He didn’t rail against the bankers who were sucking this country dry while California had an unemployment rate of 12.4 percent.

But the Republicans, who helped drive this country over a cliff, don’t have any ideas on how to fix things either, because they’re running around quoting Barry Goldwater, Hamilton Fish and that great intellectual, Sarah Palin.  They want the country to have less money to pay off the deficit, because rich people need the extra cash.  How do you sell the country on a stupid policy like that? They already did.

I’ve said before that independents should have somebody speaking for them, but I don’t think they believe Obama is their guy. After writing this, all I can hope is that one day he'll be my guy.

War Between Japan and China?

On September 8, 1931, a staged incident at Mukden (now Shenyang) led to Japan’s takeover of Manchuria, a precursor to the Rape of Nanjing and World War Two.

On September 8, 2010, a Chinese boat captain  was seized by Japan near islands claimed by both China and Japan, but administered by Japan. Today, Japan threw in the towel and let him go. It was a big time loss of face for the land of the Rising Sun. There’s the potential for a lot of oil in the Yellow Sea, and the two countries are both going to claim those islands.

A Chinese friend of mine, yesterday offhandedly said he wouldn’t be surprised if sometime in the next few years there might be war between Japan and China.

Many Chinese think America has rebuilt Japan into a powerful military nation, but that’s really not true.

At the close of the war, Gen. Douglas MacArthur drew up a constitution for Japan that prohibited Japan from having a standing army. Ever since, America has rued that day.  Time after time we’ve wanted Japan to be a strong military nation, so we wouldn’t have to protect it.

So Japan has Self Defense Forces that number around 240,000 men. Chinese have about 3,000,000 in the People’s Liberation Army. Sun Yat Sen (Sun Zhong Shan) once said that the Chinese people are like sand that fell through his fingers.  That hasn’t been true since 1949.

  I can’t see 240,000 Self Defense Forces going up against 3 million, well trained, men. There is still a lot of anger in China toward the Japanese (Shinto shrine, anyone). As for worrying about Japan’s power, it is like our fearing the army of Paraguay.

There can be demonstrations against Japan across China when the Government allows it. There are reasons that remain for that anger.( One of my Japanese students told me the Rape of Nanjing and the fate of the comfort women were lies). But as for fear of the Japanese, they just might as well worry about the return of the Bai Gu Jing, the white bone demon in To The West.

Tariffs and China

Free trade works as long as everyone plays by the same rules. Countries should practice it as long as every other country accepts the rules. That’s why European countries who try to protect their agricultural sector run afoul of the rules when they provide subsidies for farmers.

America has believed in free trade because the business sector wanted us too and because they pushed their friends in Congress to treat it as a holy mantra. Bush and the Republicans thought it was great, and Geithner and Obama also seem to worship it. Every time Geithner went to China it was as a supplicant. Schumer would rail against the yuan, and then visit China where everyone treated him so nicely and gave him so much Moutai, he forgot why he was there.

I respect China and have many good friends there, but I would like everyone for the moment to think of this as a poker game. The US and Europe are playing poker with the Chinese, so whenever someone raises, the US and Europe put in a dollar and China puts in 80 cents. But when China wins, they get everything on the table. Their currency is at least 20 percent lower than it should be. The yuan, unlike all of the currencies of China’s trading partners, is not allowed to float. (Our dollar may go up in value, but the government can’t officially do anything about it. The Chinese, however, can decide how much they allow the yuan to appreciate.)

Given this situation in which America has prostrated itself in front of the Middle Kingdom and the yuan has not made an appreciable move higher, what can America do about it?

In the past America has said, “Oh goodness, gracious, that doesn’t seem fair.” There is another way to deal with this and the house is apparently moving that way this morning. It’s only possible because both Republicans and Democrats are up for re-election. Most people in this country want something done about this.

Therefore, tariffs are the answer until the yuan is allowed to rise to its real level. I will be talking to some of my friends on Saturday to see what their reaction is to this, but I believe that America has to wake up and do this.  China recently indicated that companies that want to sell cars in China have to turn over proprietary information on electric car technology to China. There are many ways in which the Chinese government controls access to its markets.

But when placing the tariffs on selected goods, America must say plainly that it was forced to do this and has no antagonism towards China. All it would take for it to end would be currency parity.  This is not a step towards estrangement from China or indicates anything else is below the surface on this move.

We should emphasize that we respect China, and explain the American people want it and that it’s  fair. It’s not a bellicose move that we are making.

On Chinese Women Two

This is a description of a beautiful Chinese woman in America in the late 30’s.  It appears in my book Tommy Babcock . It describes the particular charm of many Chinese women, and is a follow up to my earlier Blog “On Chinese Women.” The description is by the Tommy Babcock, the story’s hero. It takes place on a Hollywood set.

“Feng Feng played the daughter of an important businessman in partnership with my white friend, who was putting me up in his house on the Peak. (That’s the expensive area of Hong Kong, where everybody stoically bears “the white man’s burden”)   As parts went, it wasn’t much, but if you are an Asian woman, it was as good as it gets.  You know Hollywood; short of playing Charlie Chan’s daughter, this was the crème de la crème.  Imagine that the finest bone china had elasticity and you can picture her skin, with a natural whiteness that Chinese say only women who live along the Chiang Jiang are blessed with.  Her eyes are as large as cheaters can get. Looking into them was just like falling into the Grand Canyon.  She is five seven, weighs maybe 110 pounds at the tail end of a shower, and has  full, sensual lips that took to red lipstick like a Labrador to water.  In fact, those lips and Factor’s finest were meant to be together.  In a just world, she would have been the star and her maid would have been played by Mary Astor, but, as you know, that’s not the way it works.  We’d send missionaries to China to convert the populace to Christianity, but never tell them they shouldn’t immigrate to the missionary’s country if they believed that God, or the constitution, really made everybody equal.

She is proud and it shows.  Her bearing is that of an aristocrat, which she would really have been if the Qing dynasty hadn’t fallen like a house of cards in a windstorm.  While her features were soft, there was something that told you not to take liberties. At first I thought she didn’t know the score and imagined that the gates of Hollywood were going to open up for her, but I soon found out she was just passing time between graduation from the normal school in San Jose and teaching  at the  elementary school in Chinatown.  She knew even Franklin Roosevelt didn’t have the power to make her a star, so she never gave the casting couch a second thought.”

“Hollywood isn’t exactly known for fighting prejudice,” Ginny said. “The Jews may run the studios, but the stars all are WASPS, or look like they are.”

“She had that figured.  This part was just a way to make some money until she was happily reading stories to oval eyed children. I was sure every man who ever met her, must have dreamed of her, but then, maybe everyone didn’t have my good taste.

I was the big star, but she made me feel as if I were an understudy in summer stock on Cape Cod, waiting to smell the perfume of the female lead.  Her face was round in a way that only Asian women’s faces can be without hinting at the onset of obesity.  Luminous is a word I’ve never tried to use before, but that was the word that seemed to fit.

Her mother, who was also a knockout and a lot older than she looked, was there every day on the set to make sure nothing happened to her daughter; although Hollywood power and its ravenous need for new women is a more important force in the City of the Angels than a mother’s love. Louis B. Mayer and David O. Selznick made the rules there and the rest of the city went along, even the rich shagitzhim at the Los Angeles Country Club. However, one day when her mother wasn’t there, I talked her into having lunch with me in my office.  She looked like she didn’t want to be there alone, but she understood that being seen with me in the commissary would have made her a target for every narrow-minded thug on the lot. It probably seemed like the only option, short of pissing off the pushy movie star.

            “I had ordered lobster and crab legs, and a bottle of Chardonnay.  I didn’t bother to open the wine after she proclaimed she didn’t drink.

“Thanks a lot for joining me today,” I said.  “I thought it would be a good experience for me to talk to you.”

“Why?”  She looked as if I had recently had my frontal lobes cut.

“‘Because I don’t really know anything about Chinese people,” I said, fumbling.

“‘Why are you interested?”  She was being pleasant, but clearly dubious.

“‘Well, we’re making this movie about Hong Kong,” I said.

“This movie is being made in the same place they made your movie about Buenos Aires and the same place they filmed the Rocky Mountain movie,” she said.

“‘Maybe I just wanted to talk to you,” I said.

“Okay, but I still don’t quite understand it,” she said, in a way that meant she really did understand.

“‘Your mom is really beautiful.  It’s amazing how she looks as if she’s thirty,’ I said, trying to regain some footing in the conversation.

            “It’s funny how white people always say that.  Chinese women seem to have elasticity in their skin for 15 to 20 years longer than Caucasians,’ she said. ‘There is a joke about some Methodist ministers who come to China and are trying to learn Mandarin, but they don’t have a full grasp of the language. At the same time, they decide to adopt a girl they meet on the street who looks like she’s very hungry.  They take her home to the Methodist compound, but feel bad that every night the girl cries herself to sleep.  Unfortunately, their Chinese isn’t good enough to understand what she’s saying, so they ask a local woman to stay at night and tell them what words are accompanying the tears.  The woman, Mrs. Hong, comes downstairs after listening to the girl.  The missionary couple looks expectantly at her, hoping for an insight.  ‘She says she misses her grandchildren,’ Mrs. Hong reported.”

            I laughed. “Your mom didn’t come today.”

            “Did you invite me to lunch so you could get close to my mom,” she said, trying to throw off my rhythm.”

            “You figured it out, I feel so transparent,” I said

             “She’s up having sherry at UCLA,” she said.

            “UCLA?”

            “It’s a university,” she said, digging meat out of a crab claw.

            “Even I know that,” I said.  “Why is she there?”    

            “They’re celebrating my dad’s new book on Kong Fu Zi,” she said, daintily cutting up some lobster.

            “Is that an important political figure?”

            “In the West they call him Confucius.  My Dad is the expert on him at UCLA.”

            “Now that is interesting?” I said.

            “Good.  I can see we have much in common,” she said, looking around the room at the collection of posters from my Broadway shows.  “Is there anything in this room that isn’t about you?”

            “No.”

            “Now that is interesting,” she said.

Education in America and China

Recently it was announced that Shanghai students were the best in the world in all categories. America, which didn't do well at all, was second to last in math. The following article talks about just why we are where we are:

I once had a class of juniors and seniors in college to whom I gave a writing assignment. I had to change the assignment because no one in the class could do a percentage.

To enter college in China you have to know differential calculus.

Some mothers in the U.S. say, “My son just can’t do math.”

In China, any woman who said that would be experiencing Mei Mianzi, a loss of face.

A Sociology Professor said; let’s face it, “Our kids just don’t have the minds for math.”

No one would remain a Jiao Shou (Professor) in China after that statement. China wants to become the largest economy in the world, and you can’t do that with students who graduate from college without knowing basic algebra.

The writing examination for graduation from the college was judged “holistically”. The man who told me this, an English professor, said that maybe it was important to people like me, a guy who taught journalism, to make sure punctuation and sentence structure were correct. He said in other disciplines it is enough to figure out what the student is trying to say.  He was one of the professors who graded the exit examination.

In China there are nationwide examinations to see which students are admitted into which college. The examinations are fierce with only a few gaining admission to Beida (Peking University) or Tsinghua, the Cal Tech of China. But Chinese students have been taking tests every week in many subjects, so those competing understand what they’re up against.

America has some colleges where a substantial amount of the student body are special admissions. One of these students in the 1990s once wondered why I kept saying 20^th Century when the years started with 19--. She didn’t trust me about this issue, so she went to other professors who broke the news to her we lived in the 20^th Century. I would tell other professors about these experiences and they’d give me a look like “so?” Clearly none of them had read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or believed they had any responsibility for the students that were under their charge. Mayor Bloomberg has tried for over three years to get rid of bad teachers in the New York City school system. The teachers union has made sure he only got rid of six.

I’ve known Chinese who have friends in America who dislike the place and don’t want to be studying their field because they have no interest in it. But because their parents would be shamed by their returning without a degree, they stay and finish that degree.

To those Americans who now seize on the last paragraphs and say America is better because Americans don’t have parents who would be that clueless, I close with an experience from one of my classes.

I was urging my students to read The World is Flat. A student said to me, “Dr. Turner we play football and basketball, Chinese put math books in their baby’s cribs.” That’s a true story, like all the rest on this page. I wonder why everyone thinks China looks like the future?