It's the Evening of the Day; China Slits Its Own Throat; That's A Flop!
Here's some unsolicited advice for The Weekly Standard's office manager. Get rid of the Jolt Cola vending machine. How else to explain the overheated April 16 editorial by editor Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan that pummels President Bush and Colin Powell for their conduct to date in the current United States-China standoff? I'm a hawk on the increasingly dangerous crisis as well, and look forward to the rogue country receiving its due comeuppance, but in the meantime, Bush is hardly in Jimmy Carter territory for expressing "regret" that a Communist pilot lost his life in a reckless act of state-dictated aggression against an American surveillance plane. It's not humiliating to placate a grieving widow. Nor has he displayed the "weakness" or "fear" that the Standard so unconvincingly says he has.
Kristol and Kagan write: "The profound national humiliation that President Bush has brought upon the United States may be forgotten temporarily when the American aircrew, held captive in China as this magazine goes to press, return home. But when we finish celebrating, it will be time to assess the damage done, and the dangers invited, by the administration's behavior."
Given the Clinton administration's cynical approach to Chinese relations for eight years?cash for technology, broken pledges about addressing human rights violations, bombing its Belgrade embassy?Bush doesn't begin his own diplomatic agenda with an inside straight. So far, he hasn't at all sacrificed American integrity.
In fact, Bush inherited a basic problem. Was there an exact moment in the 1990s when Americans decided it was simply unacceptable for a U.S. soldier to perish in the line of duty? Maybe it was when the military's "Be All You Can Be" ads started appearing in Rolling Stone, which roughly dovetailed with Bill Clinton's squishy approach to incidents that couldn't be resolved by a bear hug and a few crocodile tears; body bags were just too icky for the first "rock 'n' roll president." It's not an occupation I'd choose, but the men and women who join the armed forces do so with the knowledge that should a war or international skirmish occur, they might die.
In a country where the death of a cop or fireman is commonplace, and often relegated to the back pages of daily newspapers, let one pilot?like Scott O'Grady in the Kosovo intervention?be shot down overseas and Washington's strategic goals are hampered by collective domestic horror. This is not normal, and it's compromised the ability of Bush and Powell to negotiate with the competing Chinese leaders. Nothing can really happen until the "detainees" are returned to the United States. Yellow ribbons, Tony Orlando and bottles of Bud all around.
This is unacceptable. I'm not saying Bush ought to pull an Ariel Sharon and start carpet bombing Beijing, but once the obstacle of the hostages is resolved, I believe a more aggressive, if not belligerent, stance will be taken. Whoever the real decision-maker in China is, he should be made aware that the opportunity of a graceful exit is fast expiring. (If, however, in the upcoming days, Bush capitulates in the war over words, then Kristol and Kagan will be on target.) It's galling to hear lefties sigh and plead that the U.S. cave in to the demand for an apology that isn't deserved?just words, they say, and we should be respectful of the Chinese culture?when there's absolutely nothing to apologize for. There's also silly criticism of Bush for calling the Chinese "competitors" instead of "partners." The United States should be worried about offending a government that jails American academics of Chinese heritage?
The U.S. is not dealing with a stable political regime, where any number of factions are struggling for power and telegraphing mixed messages. I'm a free-trader, and the (until now) burgeoning investments in China by American corporations don't bother me at all, but the CEOs know the risks entailed. It's quite possible that if the administration takes the proper steps toward China?which means fortifying Taiwan with arms, troops and monetary aid, blocking the communist country's entry into the WTO and nixing the 2008 Olympics there?Americans could find their businesses confiscated. Including, of course, the businesses of Rupert Murdoch, who happens to own The Weekly Standard.
But the return of the U.S. plane's crew can't easily erase from the record this flagrant example of Chinese perfidy. Bush has no choice but to ratchet up the confrontation if China is ever to be expected to deal honestly with the U.S. The mainstream media doesn't miss an opportunity to criticize Bush for his alleged arrogance on the world stage: he's too rough on South Korea, he's alienated European leaders about the Kyoto Protocol, he's not sufficiently feeling Russia's pain.
Editors and pundits at The New York Times, Boston Globe and Washington Post ought to consider the following words from an April 4 Chinese People's Daily editorial before continuing to chastise Bush and his foreign policy team for being too hotheaded.
An excerpt: "The gangster logic of hegemonism won't work before the Chinese people. You shouldn't be so arrogant on the strength of your might. You should know China's present position in the world is won through the struggle, work and efforts of the Chinese people, it is not bestowed by anyone. The way of Chinese making friends is 'when friends come we have good wine to treat them; but when and if a wolf comes, we have hunting guns to cope with it.' Arrogance and haughtiness can only court others' resentment, and is unhelpful to a solution of the matter and harmful to the international image of the United States... The present urgent task for the US side is to make a sincere, earnest, modest and polite apology to the Chinese people and compensate for their losses. Then, they should sit down calmly and sensibly to solve other problems through negotiation with the Chinese side. This is the common desire of the Chinese and American peoples and is where their common interests lie."
Rough and tough talk. But if any one of the 24 U.S. military men and women "gangsters" is kept hostage, put on trial or harmed, there's little doubt that China will have sacrificed the economic and diplomatic gains they've achieved in the last 30 years.
Can't Escape the Yanks
It was way too cold, with an occasional drizzle, but Junior and I were thrilled to watch our first ballgame of the year at Yankee Stadium last Saturday afternoon. April outings are always chancy; odds are, at least in the Northeast, that the temperature won't rise above 45 degrees, and that was the case this time around. Off-season pressure from my eight-year-old led me to buy a complete season ticket plan for four. It was an easy rationalization, since my New York Press colleague Alex Schweitzer?a star salesman, if an inordinately exuberant Bombers devotee?will make use of the many home dates we won't be able to attend. George Steinbrenner gets a new tenant, I won't have to fork over broker fees for sold-out games and Alex gets to be a bigshot with favored clients. Everybody wins. It's a "Don't Worry, Be Happy" moment all around.
After inspecting our seats?in the loge section, just to the left of the foul pole in right field?and flagging down a vendor for Cokes and dogs, Junior, wearing a Bosox jersey, dove right in by sending sourpuss Paul O'Neill a raspberry in the first inning. I cautioned the tyke that his youth makes him relatively immune to inebriated Yankee fans, even when he's decked out in Red Sox regalia, but in a few years, especially at night games, he'd better watch his mouth. An inning later, our friends Andrey Slivka and Tim Hall joined us, two cool guys with their shades, jeans and irreverent commentary. Junior was talking nonstop?about his favorite comic strip in New York Press, "Maakies," the upcoming Simpsons movies, Republican politics, That's My Bush! and Nintendo 64's new Conker's Bad Fur Day?pausing only to cheer when the Blue Jays scored. I was delighted that our first visit was a 3-2 Yankees defeat, although I'd have far preferred to see thick-as-a-brick Roger Clemens take the loss instead of El Duque, easily my favorite Yank.
I was also pleased that the Red Sox, after a lackluster series in Baltimore?aside from Hideo Nomo's no-hitter, the Sox's first since '65?exploded up at Fenway, with rookie Shea Hillenbrand (Boston's Great Multicultural Hope this year), Manny Ramirez, Paxton Crawford, Trot Nixon and Carl Everett in starring roles. My brother e-mailed from London late last week: "I guess your boy Nomo is the new Beantown hero. Pedro should take note." Sorry, Gar: Martinez, who got no offensive support on opening day, was masterful on Sunday against the Devil Rays, whiffing 16 in eight innings in a 3-0 win that closer Derek Lowe (one of baseball's most underrated pitchers) sealed up.
In Sunday's Boston Globe, I ignored Democratic batboy Thomas Oliphant's paint-by-numbers attack on President Bush's crimes against the environment and read Will McDonough's column, which led off with a bit about Yankee coach Don Zimmer's new book, Zim. The Gerbil, as Sox legend Bill Lee dubbed the thick Zimmer, is justifiably hated in Boston even more than Clemens: the difference is that Clemens is a former god who let his low IQ and greed get the better of him. Zimmer was the architect of the Sox's '78 disaster, which resulted in that damn Yankee Bucky Dent's unlikely homer in the one-game playoff at Fenway 23 years ago. Zimmer had the nerve to pop off about Sox GM Dan Duquette?who's taken a bad rap after a slow start with the team?saying: "[A]s long as Duquette is running the Red Sox, I hope they lose every game they play. As far as I'm concerned, he and Everett deserve each other."
Zimmer's pissed that Duquette and Sox manager Jimy Williams aren't getting along. Fair enough, but Williams, a lovable eccentric, can take care of himself without an idiot like Zimmer butting in. I'm sure Zim will zoom to the top of the bestseller list, even topping Jake Tapper's unreadable Down & Dirty: The Plot to Steal the Presidency.
One difficulty of our otherwise splendid loge box is that the location makes down-the-line rightfield plays invisible. I was thinking that I'd have missed seeing a slew of Roger Maris' blasts 40 years ago, although not all the losers who taunted him from the bleachers in the year that he topped Babe Ruth's record of 60 home runs. I run hot and cold on actor/producer Billy Crystal, but the HBO movie he made, 61* (premiering April 28 at 9 p.m.), about the Maris-Mickey Mantle pursuit of the ghost of Ruth that year, is the second-best baseball film I've ever seen, barely nosed out by John Sayles' Eight Men Out.
It's a stunning two-hour show. When Maris, in the heat of the competition?with Yankee fans and New York sportswriters all cheering for Mantle?opens a piece of hate-mail, which gives him the shakes, it poignantly depicts the stress the straight-arrow North Dakotan suffered that season. He lost clumps of hair as the days wore on; a buffoon threw a chair at him in rightfield; at home in Kansas City one night cops had to keep guard because of a death threat.
The mercurial Mantle is depicted as a mostly sympathetic friend to the one-beer-a-night Maris, spurring his lonely teammate on to keep hitting and ignore the media's creation of a feud between the two, and cheering him on when he's in the hospital, his season cut short in September at 54 home runs. The Babe's widow, played magnificently by Renee Taylor, is unapologetically pissed that someone might challenge her late husband. And Donald Moffat, portraying the film's real villain, the lost-in-time baseball commissioner Ford Frick (once a ghostwriter for Ruth), who insisted on the asterisk and cursed Maris every time he hit a homer, ought to win whatever goofy award goes to supporting actors for his role in 61*.
As for the main players, Barry Pepper (Maris) and Thomas Jane (Mantle) both turn in star performances, as does Anthony Michael Hall, who has a bit role as Whitey Ford.
Crystal doesn't glorify Mantle, and is arguably on Maris' side, perhaps the first time that that opinion's been captured on film: Mantle, an inveterate boozer and skirt-chaser, is given a warts-and-all treatment. It's fascinating to learn of his antipathy toward Joe DiMaggio, the man he replaced in centerfield, and the scenes where he barfs up the whiskey from the night before into a bucket while his legs and arms are being taped to get him in playing shape are pretty amazing. Mantle's alcoholism, which eventually killed him in 1995 (Maris died prematurely at 51, in '85, a lymphatic cancer victim), isn't news, and was first exposed in Jim Bouton's seminal Ball Four, but I don't think 61* will be playing nonstop at the restaurant that bears his name in Manhattan.
Leave it to a Slate writer to spread a Michael Kinsley-inspired pall over the baseball season. (Although praise is deserved for Hugo Lindgren, whose sports pieces for the webzine are about 100 times more interesting than Timothy Noah's dilettante "Chatterbox" meanderings about bestiality, the death tax's beauty and providing nicotine patches to high-schoolers.) David Plotz, in an article posted April 3, thinks President Bush's T-ball diamond on the White House lawn, for the benefit of local kids, is "sleazy," and "a conflict of interest," a payoff in the form of publicity for Major League Baseball, where Bush made a profit after selling his small share of the Texas Rangers.
Plotz must've been the last kid picked for softball games when he was in junior high, judging by his near-hysterical rant about Bush and baseball. (Although, to his credit, he apparently didn't knock off any of the popular kids with a purloined pistol; I'm sure he took the wiser course and let off steam by reading the collected works of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. instead.) There must be some reason for his weird essay; ridiculing T-ball as "notable for being the only American sport more tedious than baseball" is simply uncharitable, especially when there are so many other more serious sports infractions that might attract his attention. Like basketball or football players shepherded through a "college education" by agents; or Darryl Strawberry, the wife-beating coke addict given a free ride by the media while it pillories John Rocker for mere trash talk.
I won't go on any longer, but will leave you with this Plotzean gem: "The tee-ball scheme [risky, no doubt] reeks of banana republic politics. It's embarrassing to have the leader of the free world whiling away his days watching tot tee-ball and exhorting Manager/Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to put in a pinch-hitter. (It conjures up images of Idi Amin or some other tin-pot dictator ordering his ministers to wrestle for him.)"
It doesn't require much imagination to "conjure up" what Bill Clinton's downtime at the White House consisted of, although perhaps Democrat Plotz doesn't think it was "sleazy" of the ex-president to let his loyal aides incur huge legal fees because of his perjury.
That's A Flop!
Comedy Central has been running some slick print ads for its new show That's My Bush! One featured the headline "Since George W. Bush Took Office, We've Yet to Encounter Any Awkward Cuban Refugee Incidents," followed by the tag, "A Brilliant Man Deserves a Brilliant Sitcom."
Too bad that's where the "brilliance" ends. I had high hopes for That's My Bush!: With South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone in charge, the long-lost Timothy Bottoms (a dead-ringer for Bush) starring and, let's face it, enough material for at least a four-year run, this satire could've been the funniest presidential send-up since Vaughn Meader's hilarious First Family album about the Kennedys 39 years ago. (Meader, certainly the top presidential impersonator, was pop culture's most notable victim after JFK's assassination, disappearing into a cloud of flower power, drugs, divorce, religion and obscurity after his celebrity-ticket was snatched away.)
But the first two episodes of That's My Bush! are a surprisingly dull and obvious mishmash of fart, execution, abortion and sex jokes?plus tedious references to past sitcoms like The Honeymooners and Diff'rent Strokes. There's also the notion?surprise!?that Laura's really in charge. I did like Kurt Fuller playing Karl Rove?a deadpan performance that recalls Richard Deacon's role as the sadsack Mel Cooley in The Dick Van Dyke Show?but that's about it.
I'm also mystified by the better-than-middling reviews the show's received so far, from both sides of the political spectrum. Tom Shales (on the Blue Team) gushes in the April 4 Washington Post that the comedy is "a criminally insane new live-action sitcom" that "zooms around like a runaway rocket, quirky and berserk." National Review's Michael Potemra is a fan as well, writing on April 6: "There's something about this Bush guy that people like, and even TV gag writers can see it; he'll have a bright future no matter what happens to the show."
It was with horror that I agreed with Slate's left-wing film critic David Edelstein that the show's a bomb; although his political jibes are as dumb as That's My Bush! Edelstein writes on April 3 of his initial hopes for the Parker-Stone creation, seeing its potential as a perfect tonic for the Democrats' anger last fall. In Edelstein's perverse universe, Bush is "an unholy spawn of Bush Sr. and Dan Quayle, with the voice of Yogi Berra as reimagined by George Orwell." He sadly concludes: "Turning Bush into a lovable dolt might be the biggest gift to the GOP since thousands of Florida Jews cast their ballots for Pat Buchanan."
Oy.
But for nostalgia's sake, I was glad to see Timothy Bottoms resurface, despite the lousy material he's given. Bottoms made a stunning debut in Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show (1971), one of the top-tier classics of the last 30 years. Bottoms' interplay with Jeff Bridges, Cloris Leachman and especially Ben Johnson was spellbinding; it was at turns poignant, sardonic and mostly downright sad. I was 16 when I first saw the black-and-white film, and hadn't yet visited Texas, but the combination of tumbleweeds, Hank Williams, Dr Pepper, petty gossip and high school losers in a dying town left me so dazed that I saw it again the next day. Bottoms was also excellent in the forgotten Johnny Got His Gun, then uneven in The Paper Chase. After that he pretty much disappeared, consigned to crummy parts in even crummier films.
Bottoms, it seemed, was headed for leading-man stardom, but just fizzled out. In a March 25 New York Times interview, Bottoms says he's now trying to get any work he can, even if it's nonunion, since at times he couldn't even make his SAG payments. As for his lack of visibility, he tells John Leland: "I worked for a surveyor, sold cordwood. I worked horses for people. I've worked with my dad. I had a tree nursery for a while. Helped manage some apartments. I've moved boats for people. I worked as a sailor for many years, moved a lot of cargo."
Reading between the lines you detect a whiff of boomer burnout, and unfortunately I don't think That's My Bush! will revive Bottoms' career.
April 9
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