Thank God that China has overcome the madness of those dark days.
The cultural revolution was a reign of terror concocted during the end of Mao's life by his wife, Jiang Qing, and a gang of underlings who were jockeying for power.
Power hates to concede, hates to give up anything. From the 1949 revolution onward, the Communist party under Mao's leadership had imposed a series of authoritarian transformations upon the ancient nation of China. By the late 50's, a severely misguided, mismanaged, famine-inducing "great leap forward" industrial policy had wreaked havoc on Chinese society. It became obvious to many that the Marxist/Maoist way of doing things was insufficient for successfully governing the people. Something was wrong.
Mao wasn't the brightest star that ever shined on earth, but he was a very smart guy. After the Chinese, with help from the Allies, had thrown the Japanese out of China after WWII, Mao had figured out how to organize the communists to overcome the Kuomintang, which was the other major military/political faction contending for leadership. In 1948-49, he and his troops ran their rivals, led by Chiang Kai-shek, off the mainland to Taiwan.
After being in power for ten or fifteen years the Mao-imposed governmental plans began to fall apart at the seams. Things were not really going according to plan. Instead of analyzing the faulty communist idealism upon which his program was based, Mao and his lackeys embarked upon a strategy of blaming most of the people who had been put in charge after the revolution. In the late 1960's his wife Jiang Qing manipulated, with a little help from her friends, the party rings of power to preserve the cult of leadership that had been building up around the old grand master of Chinese-style communist authority.
The resulting "Cultural Revolution" was all about the younger generation being turned loose against their parents' generation to teach them a thing or two about how things are s'posed to be. From Nien Cheng's description, and also from the accounts of many others, history reveals that the kids were quite judgemental and unmerciful toward the old folks who had screwed up Mao's perfect vision of what China might become.
The young "Red Guard" whippersnappers were
turned loose upon their all-too-human, but faithful, cadres who had preceded them in authoritative roles. The younger revolutionaries were enlisted in droves to correct their elders' administrative errors, and they
got pretty heavy-handed about it. They were not merciful.
While flower power was the order of the day across the Pacific in San Francisco (haha), ridicule became the basis for new indoctrination being projected onto Chinese cadres during those terrible times.
It was mass confusion. Anything goes as we try to figure out who's in charge here? That was the tyranny of the moment. The Red Guards turned China upside down with their unmerciful denunciations and public displays of ridicule against faithful communist administrators. History shows that the main governing principle that "Mao Zedong Thought" espoused was an unworkable ideal of perpetual revolution. The result was anarchy.
It wasn't until after Mao's death that these abuses came under the analysis of more sensible leadership. Someone was praying for China, because what appears to be a providential turn of events produced Deng Xiaoping as China's new helmsman. Deng's reforms seem to have produced a steady stream of improvement in the government of China. The Tianenmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989 is a lamentable exception. Today, Chinese citizens persist in working constructively to rectify the governmental abuses of the past, and to establish a bedrock of democratic innovations.
Let's hope Hu Jintao , Wen Jiabao, and other leaders will not deny the efforts of those patriots, and will accept reforms to constitutionally protect freedoms of speech, assembly and worship for the people of China.
Nien Cheng, the
author mentioned in our first sentence above, was a victim of cruel
humiliations and injustices during the Cultural Revolution, beginning in 1966. After
spending six and a half years in prison on false charges, she had managed to live
and tell about it. I find her testimony very informative, although it is
tragic.
More about this question of where authority comes from...later.
Carey Rowland, author of Glass Chimera
and an upstart prophet named Isaiah who spoke during Hezekiah's time into the lives of the ancient Israelis. Isaiah purported, as was the custom for prophets during the times of the kings of Israel, to speak on God's behalf; Isaiah made, in what's known as chapter 56 of his writings, this declaration: "For my house will be called a house of prayer for all the peoples."
And so has it been. The site where once the Jewish temple stood has become, indeed, a place of prayer for "all peoples." God knows...the Muslims pray there, in their two mosques that presently occupy the site. And Christians, me among them, have an obsession with the place and its environs--Golgotha, ethlehem and all the holy land up beyond Jericho and Nablus into Galilee.
So it happens that the modern Israelis who administer the land of Israel and its holy mountain find themselves somehow keepers of a sacred tradition of monotheistic devotion that has spread, like it or not, beyond the Judaic traditions and into the legacies of Christianity and Islam.
It's quite a tricky role for the Jewish tribes to play in world history, being the keeper of the flame...
especially since modern Jews have, in large part, replaced their old religion with secular devotion to enterprising benevolence and progressive emancipation.
They've passed on the "chosen people" label. It gets them in too much trouble. Jewish identity has morphed into a secular--some would say socialist, some would say mercantile--sense of, as Michael Goldfarb calls it, mission. With the Adonaic tradition represented by Isaiah and other Hebrew prophets now considered, thanks to evolution, somehow obsolete or naive, world Jewry exerts itself proactively into a developmental role as "a light unto the nations, " to use Michael Goldfarb's reference. I have no problem with this. I love the constructive involvement of Jewish activists that I see in public life.
As I was reading, a few days ago in Global Post, Goldfarb's thoughts about this, I saw that he quoted the 19th-century pioneer, Mendel Hess: "Israel must be exemplary for all peoples, must reach the highest rung on the ladder of moral perfection."
The otherworldy standards of Hebraic tradition have thrust upon modern Jews a self-appropriated "mission" to serve as benefactors and founders of a world in which justice and equality become the fulcri of civilization. That's a high calling indeed, one that, I think, Isaiah would approve.
But our present situation is not simple. To start with, about 1300 years ago Mohammed really threw a monkey wrench in the religiously historical works when he metGod on Mt. Moriah. And then his followers went and built a mosque there to commemorate the occasion.
So as it turns out, 20-century Jews who took possession of eretz Israel as their domain have, like it or not, appropriated for their progeny a role as administrators of the world's prime prayer hot-spot. It comes with the territory. We other Abrahamic covenantists must therefore present this challenge to the keepers of the Shemitic flame: What are you going to do with it? Keep it to yourself?
I hope not. How 'bout ...can you recast Jerusalem as a "house of prayer for all peoples?" I mean, especially since religion is no longer that important to you anyway. And maybe free up the west bank, democracy style, while you're at it?
We just celebrated twenty years of having no Berlin wall. I beseech you, Bibi and company, are you going to make the world endure, as the Russians did, twenty years of apartheid-like oppression while you micromanage ethnocentric settlements between checkpoints? No! For God's sake, lighten up. Mr. Netanyahu, tear down this wall.
I'll be praying that you see the light, and that all west bank residents can see that same light where once a wall was. Liberte, Fraternite, Egalite, next year in Jerusalem.
]]>And wherever on earth the people dwell,
or the icons of the web do sell,
and planes of air descend,
you inspire their poverty to end.
Then do they bid you adieu, like they did the British
before you.
Your golden-headed ingenuity hath inspired them all;
still, do you evade the final margin call?
In days of old, your silver-shielded inclinations gave breath to greatness.
Not hateness.
With your strong-armed enterprise enabling masses to bust the hardscrabble,
O America! how your simple speech doth strive to overcome the Babel.
Back in the day, your bronzen halfbacks scampered,
unhampered
through smoke of kamikazis
past the ghoulish camps of Nazis
which now you accuse each other of becoming.
You're so cunning.
Not!
Oh iron-legged one, who runneth at the game
and at the mouth,
in all directions north and south,
what will you do now upon your feet of iron and clay?
Shall I compare thee to a tragic play?
Entropy doth assail thee like a worthless m-b-s,
which thou doth seek to unload before it can digress.
Yet it sachs thee to the ground, bearly stearns thee round and round;
with jolting, bofa torts, you fall like ponzied citicorpse.
Oh! quoth the raven evermore,
upon thy credit-defaulted shore:
Prosperity, prosperity, burning bright
in the newshours of the cabled night
what financial convoluting instrument
can forestall thy fateful detriment?
What prophetic lens or scope could foresee such slippery slope?
Upon what back of mortgaged securitee
will he who bailed the bank bail thee?
But wait! What light through yonder window breaks?
What hope, what blessing, for what
God's sakes?
Arise! and go, and fly with me
into uncharted
opportunity.
]]>China is fast becoming the new economic engine of the world. They are revving up now, as we did about 120 years ago, during our time of "manifest destiny" and railroad-enabled continental expansion. The 21st century will be the era of Chinese expansion and swelling GDP.
But China's impulse to economic power has not always been so well-focused; their long plodding path to world leadership was punctuated by a few false starts. Two of the most notable of their newfound prosperity's costly pangs were the "Great Leap Forward" of the late 1950s, and the "Cultural Revolution" of the late 1960s.
These events took place on the other side of the world from
where I grew up here in the USA. I had no significant knowledge or
understanding of them, being caught up as I was in the bourgeois pop-culture comfort
of American childhood and teen angst.
But I have learned something about what was happening in China during those perpetually revolutionary times. Earlier this year, I read a book about it: Wild Swans, by Jung Chang. She was a woman born in 1952, the year after me. This summer I visited Sichuan province, where Ms. Chang grew up and played her part in the tumultuous "Cultural Revolution" as a teenager while I was an American kid.
Her father, Wang Yu, had been the governor of Sichuan province in the early 1950s. He had served the people of China in that capacity as a dedicated, competent communist party official. Ms. Chang writes in chapter 23 of Wild Swans:
"It was then (the early '50s) that the Communists were at their most popular--just after they had replaced the Kuomintang, put an end to starvation, and established law and order..."
But fifteen or so year later her father was denounced and humiliated as a "capitalist roader," someone whose personal accomplishments and political identity did not fulfill the shifting requirements of chairman Mao's fickle finger of favor.
Why was he denounced after many years as a loyal agent of the party?
Among the many political mechanisms of Maoist control during the cultural revolution of the late 1960s was the regular practice of gathering peasants to denounce former leaders whom the party had determined were counterrevolutionary. In the commune at Deyang, Sichuan, where she lived and worked in 1969, Ms. Chang recounts one such public humiliation that she had witnessed.
"A 'speak bitterness' session was organized for the peasants to describe how they had suffered under the Kuomintang, and to generate gratitude to Mao, particularly among the younger generation." (Wild Swans, Anchor edition, 1992, page 417)
Local party organizers conducted a meeting in which they criticized former officials whose alleged malfeasance and incompetence had caused a terrible famine years earlier. On this particular occasion, they singled out one cringing forty-year old man--now working among them as a forced laborer--to be insulted. He had been the leader of the production team during the Great Leap program of industrial development about ten years earlier.
But this man had been appointed by the communist party; he was not a Kuomintang leader. The zealous peasants were confused and misled. They pointed to him and proclaimed their accusation: "... that man ordered the (other working) men away to make steel, and half the harvest was lost in the fields." He had been one of the dedicated cadres who supervised gathering up woks and other metal resources to be re-smelted into industrial goods, thus supplanting essential agricultural works with misguided industrial programs.
What a dear price was paid for those force-engineered steel
products extracted from Chinese productivity during the Great Leap Forward--famine in the countryside. The same thing had happened 35 years prior in Stalinist Russia.
Such were the meddlesome policies of party-mandated, best-laid plans of proletarian mice and men--and their vindictive aftermaths during the unpredictable political swings of the Cultural Revolution. This unfortunate official had been guilty of towing the party line, having told his charges that they were "in the paradise of Communism now and did not have to worry about food." But now, a decade and a famine later, he was being officially blamed and maligned, just as the author's governing father had been.
Ms. Chang later sought out the humiliated production manager and asked for his story. He said: "I had to carry out orders... Of course, I didn't want to lose my post."
Just following orders. Where have we heard that before?
This fickle dynamic of human inconstancy is something to ponder now that the world's cultural revolutionaries of forty years ago are now its financiers.
Be careful, Mr. Hu. Don't let your country suffer the fate of Governor Yu.
]]>
Mt. Ebal stood warm, dry, and high in the morning sun. The red, gold hues of its boulderous ridges projected starkly into whisper-blue sky. On a soil-laden saddle nestled within the lower, rocky welts a man was digging.
Yesterday, the man had tilled the sandy soil and thrown in manure, which he had gathered from the sheep field. Today, he was hoeing trenches in the dirt.
Setting the hoe aside against a nearby shrub, Yahya Najah lifted his arm, moved the forearm across his sweaty brow, thanking God for another beautiful day. In order to give a moment's respite to his aching back, Yahya stood up straight, looked southward across the valley to Mt. Gerizim. He drew a deep breath, and drank water from a plastic bottle.
He had lived here since he was a child. Today, he was extending the stewardship of this land that his father had acquired and developed for olive-growing over thirty years ago. Yahya's father, Hassan, moved to this valley in the late '60s after the old Mughrabi quarter, just below the Western Wall in Jerusalem, had been demolished. His family had been planting, cultivating, and harvesting olive trees since his father's arrival here.
He reached into a burlap bag, pulled out several short lengths of olive branch that had been cut the day before, tossed them into the trench he had just dug. Then he grabbed the hoe and covered them with dirt. He moved to the next section of trench and repeated the procedure. Several times he performed the task, until his burlap bag was empty. Having placed this collection of propagation-stock in the dry ground of Mt. Ebal, Yahya watered the new rows with a water sprayer. When the tank was empty, he picked up and strapped the tank on his back, picked up the empty bag, grabbed the hoe, and walked down a rocky path to the garden patch. He would be going into Nablus today to sell vegetables at the market.
After harvesting a truck-full of vegetables, Yahya and his brother, Kader, drove the fifteen miles into Nablus, backed the truck into the usual stall and unloaded their produce for sale.
They spent the rest of that day selling vegetables. In the evening, after most of the produce had been sold, Yahya left Kader to finish their day's enterprise while he took a stroll up the street to get some supper for them. Satisfied to have gathered the increase of their labors, Yahya enjoyed the evening sun as it bathed the busy West Bank cityscape with golden light. As he ambled along, he noticed an American news reporter speaking into a microphone. While passing the scene, and curiously surveying the camera as it turned silently upon a cameraman's shoulder, the farmer's face was projected to television sets around the world. But he wasn't thinking of that; he was looking for a good falafel.
The American spoke into his microphone.
***
Half a world away, Rachel Vinnier saw, for a couple of seconds, the face of a handsome middle eastern man on the TV in the corner of the restaurant.. She had glanced up at the TV while inspecting a case of French wine that had just been delivered to the Jesse James Gang Grille. As she watched, the cameraman in Nablus panned the busy streetscape, and ended his movement with a focus on John Demos' serious face.
"
and some hard place
that JFK was stuck
before he was struck.
Maybe it was between
some terrible course of action
and a place he could not would not go.
We do not know, you know,
the contents of those daily intelligence reports,
with choices between
tragedies unseen
by us,
with news of shooting and burning
that could terminate the turning
of our regular ignitions
and our convenient conditions,
not to mention our munitions.
We just don't know.
Nevertheless
Whose woulds these are we think we know,
going to and fro between Michael,
and Angelo,
but never really knowing who's right or wrong
in any given situation,
yet always having to take sides because,
you know, we're the big kid
on the block.
Maybe it was between some rock
and a hard place
with dastards on both sides
that our Prez was found
and so they laid him down,
because he could not do both.
He had taken an oath,
gave his last full measure of devotion.
And while the car was still in motion
Jackie climbed atop the seat
where widows wail and orphans bleat.
We just do not know, you know
what those offal briefings show.
I know not
what course the hot-seat man may trace;
I wouldn't want to be
in that oval-smelling place.
May God help us.
]]>I know this because I went down to Louisiana and spent a week there, my sister-in-law educating me to the foxy preferences of hinterland America, or maybe it's just because I was in the south, south/Midwest what's the difference--mainly unions, I guess.
Anyway, just when I had started to harbor a mild respect for the fox because of O'Reilly's relative objectivity (compared to Limbaugh and Beck) as they were speaking some serious truth about deficits and devaluation of the dollar or some such, Friday morning dawns up with the announcement that our Prez had won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Cool.
So I'm flippin the radio from NPR to AM talk to hear what Limbaugh and Hannity are saying about it, as if I couldn't predict. And it's like, give me a break.
They just totally dis our Prez, and for what I don't know. I mean, a Nobel is not just spelling-bee hubris. It's much more than that. You gotta hand it to the man from Kenya/Honolulu/ Chicago--it's a great honor.
On the other hand it does seem that the Nobel committee is using their coveted prize to put a spin on our imminent military superpower directionality.
What's with this choice that puts Prez in the same category with Mother Theresa? Is it because Mr. Obama is leaning on the Israelis to forsake their apartheid? Or because he wants to talk to Iran?
And I don't even trust the Iranians. Something inside of me wants to classify them with Hitler and Ribbentrop, because of their reported holocaust-denial statements. Is this a case of Prez in lala land? Obama as Neville Chamberlain?
Gosh, I don't know. History is so much easier to discern when you're looking backwards.
Or maybe it's that the Nobel committee is hoping to dissuade him from further troop buildup in Afghanistan. I wouldn't want to be Barack Obama now. I feel for him. This is one tarbaby in which his centrist strategy will alienate one side--hawks or doves--or the other, no matter how the chips fall, and McChrystal's proclamation doesn't simplify matters any.
So anyway my sister-in-law has me tuned into Hannity one night to get a sampling of the foxy hinterland view of things, when lo and behold who shows up on the fox but Michael Moore. Who'd a thought it?
And I'm watching this little exchange. But Hannity gets on my nerves because he keeps wanting to change the subject , to talk about Moore's accumulating wealth and influence, with its capitalist implications, as if Michael is, you know, a hypocrite, a closet capitalist.
We're all hypocrites of some kind or another, for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
But Michael Moore keeps wanting to talk to Sean about Jesus, as if the Nazarene's impact on human events were a real influence on his own worldview and work and as if Jesus had some opinion about how to deal with the 46 million uninsured. Well,
I hope so; my modus operandi has for many years been WWJD.
What would you do, if your mother asked you?
]]>I once walked on the top of the wall that surrounds the most fiercely disputed real estate in the world.
Clueless American tourist that I am, I had purchased a ticket from a guy in a booth at a place called the Citadel of David. So my wife, son, and I had obtained what seemed to us to be some kind of official clearance to take a hike along the ancient rampart top. Our sunlit sojourn there afforded an elevated, comprehensive view of the old holy city area.
As it turned out, however, our purchased tickets provided only
limited access. We encountered an impediment on the south end, somewhere near
the Zion gate, which required that we descend to the ground via a narrow stone
stairway. So we wandered back through the old city, generally north by
northeast, past the wailing wall (a different wall), and far beyond it. At some
point in, I think the northeast quadrant of that temple area, we were able to
get back up on the perimeter wall and continue walking. We were no longer in,
as they say, the Jewish quarter. But
getting back on the wall required us to crawl under an immobilized turnstile in a place where nobody could see us.
This did not seem like something that officially authorized tourists would do. Nevertheless, we resumed our stroll from that point. I remember thinking that, somehow, the value of our wall "tickets" seemed questionable, or perhaps, dare I admit it, worthless. Passing from one domain to another brought us under a different set of rules.
Sure enough, a couple of military guys discovered our adventure and asked some nosy questions. We showed them our tickets, but they were not impressed.
So we had to get off the wall again.
And this is what I thought about when I saw, last night, a scene in Simone Bitton's 2004 documentary movie, Wall. Many scenes in the film showed real-life westbank residents climbing over "the wall," or through breaches in it and around barbed wire that enraps it. This movie is about the wall being built by the Israeli government to separate two ethnic groups, Palestinians and Jews, on the west bank.
So I, subjectivizing my experience of the movie as people do, remembered myself crawling under an abandoned turnstyle in old Jerusalem, and feeling a little guilty, or threatened, or something dubious like that, about it. Although I'm talking about two different walls here, the idea is the same: a wall is intended to keep one people group on one side, and a different people group on the other. But one of the great lessons of human history is that where some folks build high walls, other determined souls find ways to get over, around, or through them. A couple of relatively recent examples would be the Berlin wall, or the Dachau wall.
Anyway, my crawling
under an abandoned turnstyle in Jerusalem was one little memory that crossed my
mind. There were other memories evoked as I watched this documentary. In my mind's ear I heard echoes of Itzhak Perlman's wailing violin that came at the end
of Schindler's List.
This potent strain of musical pathos drifted into me when Simone presented in her film an interview with an Israeli citizen, Schuli Dichter. His description of the wall in Samaria found me smitten with the tragedy of it all. With video footage of the Samarian chainlink wall, Schuli's testimony includes a mention of his home kibbutz, Maanit, which had been founded in the early 1940's by some of the first Jewish settlers in that area. Here are a few of his statements that propelled Perlman's violin strains into my mind:
"Our parents in Maanit came here from the shtetls of Lodz." and and "This fence has eliminated... the possibility of a Jewish home in this world."
So what has changed since Nazi walls enclosed victims 69 years ago? In some ways, the world has seen many
changes. In other ways, perhaps not so much. People build walls, and other people find
ways over, through, or around them. From one side of a wall to the other, hapless human
beings overcome one bondage only to encounter another.
"Closure and enclosure are the cornerstones of our lives here," said Schuli to Simone, as he drove her through Samaria to the west bank.
That's when another memory that came crawling under my radar. It had been recorded thousands of years ago by an ancient, emotive documentarian, Jeremiah. He wrote: "Indeed, who will have pity on you, O Jerusalem, or who will mourn for you, or who will turn aside to ask about your welfare?"
]]>
I mean, how many people do you know who don't have indoor plumbing? How many in your circle of friends don't have a car or a TV? We are rich, I tell ya. Even the folks whose incomes hover around the poverty level all this stuff.
In the developing nations of the world, folks don't have all this booty yet.
In the formerly-third-world places--India, Brazil, South Africa, and even in China, the streets and malls and markets are teeming with millions of people who have yet to acquire the wealth-multiplying trappings of middle-class comfort. These are great, teeming markets yearning to be full. They're the next wave of aspiring consumers, like your kids in the supermarket with miniature shopping carts and little flags that read "shopper in training." So many of these minions have yet to buy that first washing machine, that first microwave, that first automobile.
But they will eventually, as their collective economic tides swell and their proverbial boats rise. Then the enterprisers among them will form companies and employ neighbors and friends to manufacture goods to meet the escalating demands of prosperity. But it's not likely their new acquisitions will originate in Dayton or Birmingham or Oxnard where the costs of affluent American labor render finished prices prohibitive.
We've got a high standard of living in this country that has propelled us, for lo these many decades, ahead of the the thundering herd. But now our opulent baggage has landed us in the dust as the pack passes by. We've priced ourselves out of the world market. But don't go blaming our politicians or our business leaders. This is just the way things work in a world where energetic workers and smart managers are free to make a better affordable mousetrap. It had to happen sooner or later; it's been a long time coming. We had an incredibly long ride on that post-wwtwo wave while it lasted; now it's time for us to paddle out and catch the next set.
Here's what needs to happen: find a way to pump some of the hot air out of our expansive, expensive American standard of living. Position us, once again, as lean and mean, efficiently productive contenders in the world marketplace. We've already, you know, burst one bubble. Can't we puncture another one? Dean Baker opined yesterday that economists should have identified our "over-valued dollar as a main cause of imbalances in the US economy."
As it turns out though, the reserved Fed has issued a prescription for our economic obesity. They have found a way to trim the fat real quick. And it just might work. It's called: the devalued dollar.
If Joe Sixpack and Jane Doe found, rather suddenly, their wallets full of greenbacks that had the purchasing power of, say, 60% of last year's dollar--the effect would be just like knocking our standard of living down by 40%. That might be enough of an overhead reduction to get us back in the game of competitive manufacturing. Then maybe we can again crank out washing machines or widgets or memory chips or hula hoops or solar collectors as inexpensively as they will in Manila or Mumbai or Mombasa.
Devalued Federal Reserve Notes will be a mixed blessing. On the down side, they'll mean less buying power for us yankee producers. But hey, we've got plenty enough stuff to last us for awhile anyway.
Folks would have an abundance of dollars again; everybody could get back in the game, pay off some debts, maybe take the kids out to eat.
Now, if that "over-valued dollar" could be knocked down a notch or two so that it is no longer so uppity, what would it take to accomplish such a feat? Everybody take a 40% pay cut?
No way. It'll never happen. Too complicated, and politically impossible. But there is a fix. It might hurt a little bit, but it would work pretty quickly, though not quite as fast as instant breakfast or drive-up food.
Make dollars. Print so many of them that Uncle Tim can push a big stack of chips out on the table to stay in the game. The bluff might just work if he keeps a poker face, although it's Uncle Hu's face that the world will be watching.
]]>