One of my favorite stories from the legend and lore of the Mississippi Delta concerns an extremely dark-skinned black man named Wash Jones who married an exceedingly light-skinned black woman. Many thought this was an ill-fated union from the outset because in that era especially, lighter skin was generally a marker of higher social status. Sure enough, after a few years, the wife announced that she and her equally light-skinned children could no longer abide the embarrassment of living with that “graveyard black” Wash and high-tailed it to parts unknown. It was not long, however, before word reached her that the husband she had so unceremoniously abandoned had come into a rather tidy inheritance courtesy of Wash’s recently-deceased white employer. At this point, she took pen in hand to advise Wash most earnestly of her undying love and let him know that the children were crying for him every night. In return mail, the errant spouse received a post card bearing the simple inscription, “I Ain’t Fade None.”
This poignant illustration of the old Brazilian adage, “Money Whitens,” came back to me as I made it a point to observe American press coverage of China leading up to and during the Olympics. I wouldn’t say that the byword in this case is exactly “Speak No Evil,” so much as “ If You Speak Evil, Do So Softly and Sparingly and Outside Prime Time.” Compared to the massive media blame dump taken on Atlanta for every sin, actual or rumored, that was ever committed in the South, and the daily litany of nitpicking about contemporary conditions, most of our major press people seem totally bullish on Beijing. For example, way back in July The South China Post and other papers throughout Asia and the world reported that Chinese police were forcing bar owners in areas likely to attract Olympic visitors to agree not to serve blacks or Mongolians. Fire up Google and see how much significant attention to this you can find in the American media. Then there’s the story of the adorable little girl whose singing we were supposed to believe was coming out the mouth of a lip-synching second little cutie whose photogeneity was deemed superior by Chinese officials. How about the faux fireworks aired by a gushing NBC with, shall we say, something pretty far short of full disclosure? I’ve hear a few commentators laud the air conditions after rainstorms, but everytime I see an outdoor shot it’s ten times as hazy as my recollection of the last sermon I heard. Finally, don’t even get me started on the supposedly sixteen year-old gymnasts who, in reality, are eager to be done with the Olympics and see if the fourth grade is all it's cracked up to be.
There are obviously many more serious media oversights and points of de-emphasis, dealing with brutal repression of human and civil rights and anything that even looks as though it has a remote possibility of qualifying as dissidence. The Chinese made a lot of up-front promises to cool it with this kind of stuff during the Games, but from what I read I wouldn’t want to be in Beijing right now looking the least bit pissed off about anything. To their credit, NBC did run a piece on how Chinese officials put a huge farming population on the brink of starvation by using their water to fill the dried-out stream bed that is the Olympic rowing venue. Meanwhile, despite China’s vaunted great economic leap forward, the World Bank estimates that 300 million of its people still live in poverty, i.e., on less than $1 per day. (By way of contrast, the compassionate souls who make China’s welfare policies think you can get by just fine on $.25 per day.) The plain and simple fact is that the explosive technological breakthroughs of the last half century have made it possible for countries to leapfrog ahead and grab the economic momentum from other nations that allowed themselves to get distracted occasionally along the way by concerns about developing their societies and institutions along with their economies. Back in the ‘50s when the Russkies were scaring the hell out of us with their nuclear missiles and bombs and beating our butts in the space race, a good chunk of their population was still standing in line all day to buy beets. China has gone them one better and then some, and they have had a lot of help from us very truly. The Chinese are the world’s largest holder of foreign financial reserves, and the value of their U.S. holdings is currently nudging up toward a trillion bucks. Much of that is in U.S. Treasury notes, and as James Fallows observes, it is as if every American in the past ten years or so has borrowed $4,000 from someone in China.
Asked about a potential boycott of the Opening Ceremonies to protest China’s human rights violations Barack Obama suggested that American reluctance to come down harder on this issue boiled down to “It’s very hard to tell your banker that he’s wrong.” Especially, I might add, when the banker’s investment in you hasn’t paid off all that well recently. So, what’s the big deal with a few tortured and slain dissidents or a few million people allowed to teeter on the brink of starvation when the responsible entity can pretty much pull the plug on your already dimming economic bulb? For that matter, anyone struck by seeing Bush yuck it up with his “great guy” buddy Vlad Putin while the former’s tanks rolled into Georgia (Quick Sonny, organize a prayer meetin!) need only think about whose feet are on our oil hose. One thing’s for sure, if ol’ Tom Sawyer had just had a little cash or a few oil wells, he’d have had an even bigger crowd of people eager to undertake whatever whitewashing project he had in mind.
