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Sunday, August 17. 2008
The World According to Gordon Gekko
Say it ain’t so …Brett Favre is a New York Jet. Yeah, it’s old news, but how could the Packers let him go? They promised Aaron Rodgers the start as quarterback. Maybe, just maybe, the Packer front office was feeling a little petulant that Favre retired, then unretired, making them look like the bride jilted at the alter and then asked to come back for more.
On the other hand, when the Pack replaced Don Majkowski as the starting QB back in 1992 with Brett Favre it seemed like the most idiot move in Packer history. Until Favre lit up the Wisconsin cow pastures with spectacular plays.
Still, Brett Favre was the face of Green Bay for 16 seasons. Effin Packers … effin Favre … effin Jets …
Michael Phelps got his eighth gold medal, breaking Mark Spitz’s record of seven in one Olympiad. Good for him, and marathon runner Constantina Tomescu of Romania who surprised everyone by pulling away from the rest of the field and winning the women’s marathon.
In the first half of Tomescu’s break away, the commentators were confident she would fall back eventually, overtaken by the herd behind her and one of the favorites would win the race. Indeed, the “experts” were nearly certain Britain’s Paula Radcliffe would win and if not Radcliffe, then Kenya’s Catherine Ndereba.
Shows you what “experts” know.
More interesting than who won was the where of the 26.2 mile race. It wove around Beijing’s Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. For the week that NBC has been broadcasting the games, there have been many references, complete with great video, to that famous square, most of them glorious pronouncements of its grandeur.
Tiananmen Square is known to most Americans — and most other nations — because of what happened there 19 years ago in April, May and June 1989. We all watched it on network TV and the only all news channel at the time, CNN had wall-to-wall coverage of the workers and students who gathered by the hundreds of thousands to demonstrate and demand an end to the Communist dictatorship. Some say it was a million people. Could have been.It seemed like a magical moment. The Soviet Union was crumbling as one Soviet satellite nation after another threw off the oppressive yoke of the Kremlin. The Berlin Wall had yet to come down, but people from Soviet satellite countries were free to travel anywhere and the nightly news had stories of East Germans going to Poland, so they could then get to West Germany.
Romania was still six months away from ousting Nicolae Ceausescu, but civil unrest was building. Ceausescu was one of the most egregious of communist dictators. He killed hundreds of thousands of his fellow Romanians and eventually, along with his wife, was condemned by a military tribunal and executed.All over the globe — with the notable exceptions of Cuba and North Korea — citizens of Communist countries were pushing off the yoke of oppression, none in more spectacular fashion than the citizens of China, especially those assembled in Tiananmen Square.
For nearly a month the Chinese government made threats to end the demonstrations with military force, even putting tanks around the protestors, but it appeared the protestors were winning as concessions were wrung from China’s leaders, led by Deng Xiaoping, who had been implementing economic reforms for several years. The protestors said his reforms didn’t go far enough.
They, the protestors, wanted a free and open society, one in which citizens could question the government openly. They even constructed a miniature Statue of Liberty that was prominently displayed during the demonstrations. It was a stirring sight and with every major news organization in the world there, with anchormen and cameras, the world was certain the Chinese government would capitulate. They wouldn’t dare forcibly disperse nearly a million people from the square with violence!Everyone guessed wrong. Late on June 3, 1989, the People’s Liberation Army began its attack on the square. By 5 a.m. June 4 it had been cleared, although protests continued outside the square. It was on June 5 when we saw “Tank Man,” the anonymous Chinese man who stopped a column of tanks by simply standing in their way. He was eventually taken away by Chinese secret police and, everyone presumes, executed.
We don’t know. The Chinese government has yet to produce him or even release his name. They claim “Tank Man” is still alive, but where is he?
His act of bravery remains, 19 years later, our most poignant symbol of defiance. He will be a world hero forever and when a photo or the video of his moment is shown on TV the Chinese will be reminded some do not forget June 4, 1989. But the government of China doesn’t have to worry about that during the Olympics. No one, not even Bob Costas, has mentioned it, nor will they mention it during the broadcast.
In the many times during the women’s marathon the overhead camera pictured Tiananmen Square and the commentators spewed out some bit of trivia about the place, not once was June 4, 1989 mentioned. Not that I can recall anyway. We know a new picture of Chairman Mao is put up on the Gate of Eternal Peace every day, but we don’t hear about “Tank Man.”The commentators are probably forbidden by contract from mentioning it. Not that they would. The Olympics are supposed to be free from politics and that is most assuredly a political topic of the most painful proportions. We, as a nation, have been complicit in China’s whitewash of Tiananmen Square, 1989. We buy the goods made in China, despite some of those goods being dangerous to our health and opening up that can of worms would be a real distraction from the games. Some might even say, inappropriate.
Commerce with China was made possible because our government leaders gave China “Most Favored Nation” status as a trading partner. In a 1992 letter to the House of Representatives, President George H.W. Bush explained why he rejected their call to place conditions on China’s status as a most favored nation: Our approach is one of targeting specific areas of concern with the appropriate policy instruments to produce the required results. HR 2212 would severely handicap US business in China, penalizing American workers and eliminating jobs in this country. Conditional MFN status would severely damage the Western-oriented, modernizing elements in China, weaken Hong Kong, and strengthen opposition to democracy and economic reform.
We are making a difference in China by remaining engaged. Because the Congress has attached conditions to China's MFN renewal that will jeopardize this policy, I am returning HR 2212 to the House of Representatives without my approval. Such action is needed to protect the economic and foreign policy interests of the United States.
The irony, 16 years later, is mind-blowing. American workers are losing jobs, China holds the lease on a significant portion of America and China remains one of the most repressive regimes on the planet. The spring of 1989 has been so whitewashed in the past 19 years, China can now host an Olympiad without fear of being made a spectacle for its human rights abuses.In 1980, we didn’t see the Olympics because President Jimmy Carter, right or wrong, banned U.S. participation in the Moscow Games. Carter took a principled stand on Human Rights after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.
No president, Republican or Democrat, has stood on any such principles with China. Money — greed — has been the only principle worth standing on for our government when it comes to China and we as citizens are accomplices because we encourage it with our headlong rush to buy cheaper goods. And we are paying a heavy price for that greed. I’m guilty. My Trusty Trek was assembled in China, as is much of my clothing.
So, I’ll cheer for the athletes in the 29th Olympiad, but the memory will always remain that China, it’s government, is the most vicious regime on the planet. Try not to forget that when you watch and ask yourself, and then your elected representatives, why is China so favored as an economic partner?
The character of Gordon Gekko, played so masterfully by Michael Douglas in the 1987 film, Wall Street, said it so well: “... greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much.”
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Wouldn’t you know it. I get back from the beach, put on NBC, catch the news and what is the lead story? Wang Dan, one of the more prominent leaders of the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro democracy movement. Dan is exiled in the United States, working on his PhD. in History at Harvard. Well, NBC hasn’t forgotten. Kudos.
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