Jew-Hater Returns to ESPN

Y'all know I'm a devotee of Gregg Easterbrook, author of the weekly (during football months) Tuesday Morning Quarterback column, at least when it comes to football. On politics, economics, and science, I think he's a smug Brookings demi-fascist masquerading as a sensible independent, despite a history of writing for nominally liberal rags (Atlantic, Washington Monthly, New Republic). Be that as it may--and it is--Easterbrook's football writings are funny, if increasingly formulaic (Easterbrook himself told Salon's King Kaufman that "There is a formulaic aspect to it, but the formula seems to be pretty popular.").

Easterbrook spent a couple of seasons on NFL.com, the official propaganda organ of the NFL, after ESPN fired him in the middle of the 2003 football season for making a comment in his non-football writings about Jewish media executives (Michael Eisner and Harvey Weinstein, specifically) making money by worshipping/glorifying violence. There were dumb things about the comment--Easterbrook embarked on this rant in the context of Kill Bill, one of the greatest fucking movies ever made, and Michael Eisner was, at the time, Easterbrook's CEO at ESPN--but you had to stretch pretty hard to make a racism case. ESPN stretched, having just gone through the debacle of firing Rush Limbaugh as a football commentator for his rather more clearly racist remarks about Donovan McNabb, and Easterbrook spent a couple of weeks in the wilderness before getting picked up at NFL.com.

Easterbrook told Kaufman in a recent phone interview (membership or brief advert-viewing required; shut up and do it) that he had to tone down his act a tiny bit writing for the NFL (he wasn't allowed to call Dannyboy Snider "Lord Voldemort," but that doesn't stop the rest of us), but said it was "OK" writing for that notoriously overblown hype machine.

Now? Easterbrook has been bribed back by ESPN. His price? Free family tickets to the Super Bowl and other major sporting events.

Sigh. I'll still read, until it makes me hopelessly tired. But this is just effing dumb.

All The Whining In The World

I promised some blogging on China, and I am a man of my word. When it suits me. And I feel like it. And my allergies aren't too bad. And I don't have something better to do. And I don't feel like doing something I'm supposed to be doing. You know, all that. So here we are.

Quick review: Trip to China. Large international conference attended by people from all over the world--seriously, something like 85 countries were represented. I was there as the finance officer, handing out money to people from poor countries--this made me fairly popular. I was also doing some evaluation work on the conference itself, trying to answer questions like, "Why am I here?" and "Couldn't I have figured out a better way to do this?" and "Whose idea was this, anyway?"

I spent months wriggling to avoid the Beijing trip. It's a long, long trip, and I knew that sightseeing opportunities would be limited and the work grueling. It just wasn't worth the tradeoff. I had a fair degree of success at avoidance; I adopted the "I'd be happy to go but you don't need me" strategy, which worked brilliantly; at only two points did the chance that I would have to make the trip escalate alarmingly, and it quickly subsided both times. The second of those points was about a week before I found out I'd have to go, and I made the problem go away by finding someone else to pass out money.

Then, nine days before the conference was to begin, disaster struck; my sacrificial disbursing victim had to back out of the trip. I woke up to a good life, one where I'd soon face a week of an absolute dearth of supervision; at eleven, she and I were sharing a taxi and she was giving me the mournful news; by noon, I was figuring out the visa process and planning my workload, and by four, I had a nonrefundable e-ticket on Air Canada. It was stunning how quickly a day could go all the way south.

My main work task in the next few work days was ensuring that I'd have enough money to pass out in China. The client sponsoring my trip purchased $54,000 in travellers' cheques so that I'd be able to make payments with those. This totalled 630 cheques, each of which I had to sit there in the bank and sign. And record the serial numbers.

We were worried about how to get all this money into a commie country with strict border controls. Nobody wanted to see me in a Chinese prison (not even the inmates--I'm just not that pretty). After I had a little discussion with a mysterious official at the Chinese Embassy in Washington, we decided to try shipping the travellers' cheques in by DHL. Everything was open and aboveboard.

So we shipped in about 25 boxes of conference materials--folders, exhibits, displays, office supplies, conference supples, conference tchotchkes, pamphlets, all kinds of crap with no export value and no possibility of being resold or illegally distributed in China. It got detained in Customs and we had to pay a bribe duty of about $500 to get it out. Once I got there, of course.

My $54K? Two envelopes, clearly marked as to contents, breezed through, waiting for me at the hotel desk when I arrived, no theft, no duties, no bribery, no nothing.

China is not an easy country to enter. A Chinese visa is fairly expensive, as these things go, and there's an interesting price structure. It's something like $35 for citizens of every country in the world, save one. U.S. citizens pay more like $50. Of course, if you need the thing quickly, start handing over additional fees. We were, of course, in a great bloody hurry, so I made a number of trips to the consular section of the Chinese Embassy, doing the application process and getting the whole thing sorted. The day came for me to pick up the visa, and it's a lovely and officious-looking little sticker in one's passport. Very shiny.

However, they fucked up my passport number on the visa. More visions of Chinese prison danced in my head as they reconfiscated my passport and redid the visa. They were kind enough to do so while I waited. I still shudder, thinking about what would've happened at Chinese Frontier Security had I not accidentally discovered their error.

Just so you know, so you have a little index of where you are in life: we're still a few thousand words from me actually discussing China as a country or as an experience, per se. I'm still busy telling you about me. Pretend to like it.

I was flying out of National, DC's close-in airport. We have three, each with its own set of peculiarities and disadvantages. At National, parking is inconvenient, expensive, and not particularly safe. It also suffers from the phenonmenon of idiots who don't live here (and some who do) calling it "Reagan." This unspeakable appellation was forced onto Washington National Airport by a crazed fascist-controlled Congress during the Clinton administration, as a way of reminding the President who was boss. I will never call National Airport by any other name, not even after the self-same fascist twits start calling BWI "Marshall," its recently acquired nom de guerre, after my very own uncle Thurgood.

BWI is a great airport, with one serious and near-fatal flaw; it's in Baltimore. No, not in Baltimore, actually, but it's as close to Baltimore as National is to Washington, time-wise. For denizens of the Peoples' Republic of Montgomery County, Maryland--or, just as important in my case, for denizens of the Independent Cult of Fairfax, Virginia--Baltimore is about 12 hours away, 16 hours during rush hour. Okay, I exaggerate, but it's way the hell out there, well over an hour from the Cardboard Box Fortress of Landrutude, nearly two hours from the Domain of Ilse over in Fairfax (no, we're still not living together). Cheap parking, and it's a Southwest hub, but absolutely abysmal location.

Dulles--which we really call Dulles, making the local airport naming scheme a clear victory for Cold War-style imperialist oppression--has a similar problem, compounded by its location just outside of the ICF. Unless one is travelling from Dulles to West Virginia, there is no way to avoid entering Fairfax en route to one's final destination. Which, seriously, ought to be somewhere other than Fairfax. This problem is further compounded by a simple fact: flights only leave or arrive at Dulles during rush hour. I don't think I've ever flown to or from Dulles, or picked someone up or dropped them off at Dulles, at a time of day that didn't involve 237,000 cars per second traversing the Beltway at the Dulles Airport Road exit.

Dulles is also hampered by its physical layout, which requires one to take a bus from the gate to the terminal. These snorting, lumbering monuments to diesel pollution were all the technorage when the airport first opened. In 1962. They tell us that the airport subway at Dulles, linking the main terminal to the concourses, will be done about fifteen minutes after I die of Dulles-induced apoplexy in 2012.

Let's not even discuss public transit to My Local Airports. There is no public transit to Dulles; BWI is theoretically within spitting distance of a train line, but don't try taking it if you have a flight to catch; and while National is, in theory, convenient to Washington's subway system, I can assure you that this is only for a given value of "convenient," that value meaning "a lot of walking while you're carrying luggage."

Parking being what it is at National, and knowing that I was to return to a different airport entirely, I got my brother, 32-Ounce, to drive me and my copious baggage to a hotel near the airport the night before my 6 AM flight. It was a Wednesday night, there was a new South Park scheduled, and Ilse was to drop by the hotel for one last roll before my long trip off to incarceration in a Chinese prison. I had only to watch a little TV, do the wife, roll over and sleep, and get up at 4 AM to clean up and catch an airport shuttle.

The hotel didn't have Comedy Central on its cable, and the airport shuttle didn't leave until 20 minutes before my flight, so I had to call a cab, which didn't arrive for 35 minutes.

The wife worked out fine, though.

This is getting long. I think we'll get to China in the next post.

Different

So some heckler jumped up and heckled Chinese top guy Hu Jintao at the man's arrival for his unofficial pajama party with our President. She was apparently a Falun Gong supporter. Maybe Falun Gong's a cult. Maybe it isn't. In China? It's a cult, because the government says so. End of discussion.

Some folk don't know what to think about President Hu's visit. Is China evil? Is it a dangerous Commie state, or one that's taking longer to open up that did the Soviet Union and its solar system? Is it good or bad that China has become more open to Western ideas, especially ideas on economics?

But even dumbasses who think that Communist countries are inherently dangerous, just because they're there, or that Communism equals totalitarianism, and that our Local Superpower hasn't taken a totalitarian turn, understand one thing pretty clearly. You don't want to fuck with a country of 1.2 billion people, especially since they're not just armed with bamboo stakes. Military classicists will add the famous corollary about land wars in Asia.

The Chinese aren't like we are. They're different. I recently had an opportunity to visit China briefly, and although my head was down for most of the week (I was on the staff for a large and busy conference), I did get to step out a bit, and to talk pretty frankly with many (lets say between 50 and 100) Chinese persons from various walks of life. I was surprised, for a variety of reasons, by the candor of the persons I spoke with. I'm now guessing that surprise was a result of something deeply ingrained in many Americans; I expected, deep in my greasy little heart, for the Chinese to be so wildly different from us as to be incomprehensible. That, I think, is the driving force behind many Americans' opinions on China and Asia in general. The operating system there is just plain different--economically, socially, culturally, politically, religiously. That doesn't make it bad (I'll cheerfully concede that in many ways, from our perspective, it is bad--but it's not being different that makes it so). The problem is compounded by Americans' nonexclusive tendency toward an inability to see shades of grey.

For example, this country was founded on a framework that specifically encodes religious tolerance. This has led to a number of abuses by both the government and by religious sects. That doesn't mean all religious sects are bad. It means some are. Some have gone so far as to try to inject their principles into government--a clear violation of the social and political contract, despite the inability of millions of dumbasses in this country to understand that, and their infinite ability to turn it into some kind of slur on them.

There is no such framework in China. Buddhism and Taoism are prevalent there, and no small number of Chinese have converted to Christianity. I don't know enough about Falun Gong to know if it's a cult. But compare the uproar over attempts to impose Christian values on our politics--in a culture where there is a political tradition of religious tolerance--to what the Chinese government sees in the Falun Gong movement as a political threat (in a culture where any large movement of people has to be viewed as at least partly political), and it's pretty easy to understand where the Commies are coming from.

Not that everyone here wants to.

There's another problem here, that plays on American sensibilities about China, and it also boils down to "different." Except not really.

You see, we've been encouraging the Chinese to open up their economy to capital. And so they have. And now they're kicking our ass--our trade deficit with them is huge. So we're pansying up, because it appears, for the moment, by that measure, that they're better at capitalism than we are. Boo-fucking-hoo. We went through this with another large Asian country not so long ago--anyone remember the Japanese kicking our asses economically after we bombed them into submission, then helped them rebuild? The American tendency to ask for a change in the rules when we're getting our asses kicked is positively revolting. It's no wonder the Chinese are confused by our requests for a rules change--we taught them the fucking rules. They just did what we told them to. Now? We're a whimpering pack of nancypersons. You go, China.

More on China later. I have, it seems, broken the blogging habit, a thing of which several of you have complained. Up to now, I've chosen to respect the tremendously huge silent majority of those of you who haven't. Oddly, in that time, I've gotten a lot more work done, too. Hmm. In any event, I compiled during my trip a page and a half of bullets on China, on which I will expound in the fullness of time. Rejoice or weep, as suits you.