Bring the Cute: Panda Diplomacy and the Charm Offensive

In a better world of my own design (I’m avoiding the word “utopia”—you see how that worked out for Thomas More) conflicts between nations are resolved by pandas, snow leopards and lemurs. (There are other components to my plan: reseeding the primeval forest from Maryland to the Mississippi, restocking free-range bison from the Mississippi to the Rockies, a guillotine on Madison Avenue as a warning to publicists, and secluding Dick Cheney and his Eurasian counterparts in Death Valley or the Rub' al Khali, where they can fight their own goddamn wars to their hearts content— but hey, it’s Christmas, so in the interests of Peace, I limit myself to the Cute Animal Problem.)

After years of negotiations, China is making a gift of two giant pandas to Taiwan named Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan. (Please note that on this blog, we will distinguish from the red panda, Ailurus fulgens.)

This is the first success after ten failed attempts at panda diplomacy between China and Taiwan since 1992. Even their names were problematic-- Taiwan wanted pandas named "Independence" maybe "Friendly Harmony", but "Reunion" and "Unify"--? Fahgeddaboutit! See, if the pandas are on "loan" from mainland China, per international wildlife statutes, then Taiwan is being treated as an independent state (yay), but that also means the taxpayers of Taiwan will have to pay Beijing for the privilege of having pandas (boo)... but if Taiwan accepts the pandas as a "gift" from the mainland, then that implies Taiwan is a province within China, and not an independent entity.

I thank the Baby Jesus that this was all about cute little fuzzballs (see illustration) and not about bombs or anxious refugees. No panda skipped a meal or worried about hidden training camps. I'm a Confucian, not a utopian; it's all about incremental changes, chipping away for a lifetime at the stones in my passway until they turn to pebbles and someday, Lord, turn to sand. As Melissa Etheridge said when deciding to let Rick Warren say the goddamn prayer. "Maybe if they get to know us, they wont fear us." There is a paranoid streak in Taiwan that won't give an inch to the pandas-- beware that cuteness, for it hides the dragon's claw-- but it was interesting to me that Taiwanese editorials blame the KMT for selling them out, since it was the Kuomintang that started all the trouble in the first place-- Sterling Seagrave's The Soong Dynasty is a good place to start on our dysfunctional relationships in that part of the world. Still, and I cannot say this enough, better to be sniping about pandas than about invasion plans and missiles.

Mock if you will, but more serious thinkers than me prefer cultural exchanges-- cute critters, Peace Corps volunteers, well-digging, road building, Habitat for Humanity and NGOs like Doctors without Borders-- to the bullying, bombs and puppet dictators we’ve used instead of diplomacy for the last fifty years. Richard Vague, for example, believes that sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan will not solve anyone’s problems: “…That is the last thing we need to do… The trouble is that we could defeat the Taliban, al-Qaeda and the warlords in Afghanistan again and again, but unless someone provides a viable economic path forward for the broad citizenry there, it won't matter. They'll just come back."

Here's to a year when the ascendant voices will not be those of the hysterical and the violent, but the protectors and the sharers and the builders. "Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses too." Just a world where we can all smile at unconcerned, roly-poly pandas, joy without logos and without fear of either the madman in the crowd or the imperial satellites above.

Monkey Puzzle

Monkey is the great trickster hero of Asia, kin to Coyote and Odysseus, Brer Rabbit, Mouse Deer and the rest. Monkey is always wandering, bragging, grabbing at everything and never shutting up, showing off, asking questions, and getting in and out of trouble. They call him "the animal with a hundred hands" because he's always grabbing at things, like the mind that won't stay still but gets itself into unnecessary trouble: the mind, the Zen masters tell us, IS a monkey.
I made this drawing some years ago as part of a long abandoned project. The monkey bodies spell out his name. There's a big painted version in color as well, with the word MONKEY arranged vertically, a blue-green background and the monkeys in red and yellow. An art lover paid me good money for that one (now will I believe that there are unicorns), so it either hangs on some wall or in a rummage sale somewhere.
Monkey: Journey to the West is a classic Buddhist novel of Monkey's adventures traveling with a Buddhist monk in search of enlightenment, faced with 80 impossible tasks 100 chapters and demons and temptations galore-- even pissing on Buddha's hand-- and despite all his character flaws, Monkey finally achieves enlightenment, hope for the silliest.



Now I'm pleased that Jamie Hewlett (Tank Girl and the Gorillaz) has combined Monkey's adventures with the Olympics as an intro for BBC Sports. It's a connection that was hanging there waiting for someone to grab it, so I'm glad it was them and not Disney or some other corporate thief of other people's dreams. Carlo Collodi invented Pinocchio and James Barrie created Peter Pan. Felix Salten wrote Bambi and Hans Christian Anderson dreamed the Little Mermaid (with an unhappy ending) and Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Books" is ten times more profound than that jazz-track abomination. Walt Disney may have been the Thomas Edison of idea factories, but that's scarcely a recommendation.

Happy Independence Day! Bush at the Olympics! Screw You, Tibet!

So Bush will attend the Olympic ceremonies and Tibet can suck hind teat, despite the empty wind rhetoric from all sides about human rights and hypocrisy. What puzzles me is that anyone (especially you, Dana Rohrabacher) can express surprise about this.

The merchants that run this country have shown an ability to swallow anything, gnats, camels, even slavery and genocide if there's money to be made. We celebrate the 4th of July and tell our children it had something to do with tea and taxes on playing cards, when in fact a bigger issue was George III's decree to keep settlers out of Indian lands and England's growing discomfort with slavery. "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" Dr. Johnson asked. The Indians and Africans were more thoroughly screwed than the Tibetans (who, if DNA is to be believed, are direct cousins of the Native Americans), and that crime is treated with mild regret, like tearing down a historic building for another parking lot. A character in Jim Harrison's novel The Road Home comments on the poverty of the Indians, "You only give reparations or rebuild in the economies of the like-minded as in the case of Germany or Japan."
In spite of the best efforts of the Constitution, this is a mercantile empire, with talk about the Four Freedoms saved for Sundays and Holidays, and success in money-making the primary measure of reality. We will go along to get along with the Chinese, and deplore the situation in Tibet from a safe distance.

The Mandate of a Mad Heaven, or the Whim of a Malign Thug

My friends find me almost mute about the earthquake in China, odd considering my interest in Chinese history, and my need to alert the world to the fall of the smallest sparrow. The best coverage has been that of Melissa Block on NPR, a story I'm sure she would rather have lived without seeing. This was a sad case of being the right person in the wrong place at the right time: Block and Robert Siegel were in China for the Olympics, and Block herself was interviewing a Chinese Christian about his flock in the west of China when the towers began to shake. The next day she had to watch mothers and fathers identify the bodies of their dead children, and on into the night with rain falling and candles flickering around small bodies as families burnt offerings for the dead, paper money and incense and firecrackers, and paper toys if they had them, in the old tradition. This was not ambulance chasing; just being there and bearing witness. Siegel himself was covering a makeshift emergency rom where the doctors had gone days without sleep, mentioned his own daughters safe at home, and learned that the doctor he was interviewing, up to his elbows in another patient, had lost his twenty-six-year-old daughter in the quake. Who must do the difficult things? goes the proverb, He who can.

The Lisbon earthquake and tsunami back in 1755 was one of the events that fed the Enlightenment and led people like Voltaire to question the blinkered praise of a merciful God:
Unhappy mortals! Dark and mourning earth!
Affrighted gathering of human kind!
Eternal lingering of useless pain!
"If God's up there," Dr. Lecter tells Clarice Starling about church collapses, in his role as the demon who always puts a little bit of truth in the lies he tells, "He just... loves... it." And Voltaire's Candide watched the tsunami murder the innocent while the wicked bobbed like corks, and forever after considered themselves as blessed by God. If ever you wonder how the Bush administration sleeps at night, there's your answer: their friends and children didn't die, and yours did.

One of the early commentators on the Chengdu tragedy mentioned the "Mandate of Heaven", an ancient homily that says every dynasty in China survives only so long as it has the clear approval of the Powers that Be-- that is, so long as a dynasty keeps winning, then God must approve. The fellow who mentioned the Mandate caught some flack later on, usually along the line that China is a modern country now and doesn't believe in such superstition any more, but I think they missed the point he was making. The influence of natural disaster on the Mandate of Heaven has always been a practical one: regimes that do a good job of coping with natural disasters do well, and those who fail to take care of the people in a crisis soon find the ship of state beset on all sides by a sea of angry humanity. Apparently, the Chinese regime is doing the best anyone could ask for, for its own people at least (although one wishes the political wing would use its influence in Burma to kick the Myanamar generals' ass up around their ears). In Chengdu, the complaints and anger have been directed at lax building codes and local corruption that led to collapses, while the government in Beijing is still very much in charge.

Beijing says it wants to rebuild in two years, and probably means it, which would be rather ironic, considering the clusterfuck that the ideology of laissez-faire capitalism visited on Louisiana and the Gulf Coast after a couple of hurricanes. Here's a prayer for Sichaun Province, and keep a prayerful eye on friends near San Francisco and Saint Louis on the San Andreas and New Madrid fault lines. There's enough old Baptist left in me to wonder if some worse thing, some greater sorrow, was avoided, but Portugal's prime minister probably said it best in 1755, and quieted the philosophers and the preachers: "We will bury the dead and take care of the living."