China Trade, Irish Eyes on Spain, & Fairway Lies
This Week — Trump goes to China — with Bill Kirby, Chas Freeman, Ian Johnson, Jiang Xueqin, Kaiser Kuo. Listen today at 2 pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.
The real power summit in China was last weekend, ahead of Donald Trump’s meeting next week with Chinese president Xi Jinping. The who’s who of American tech — Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and honchos from companies like Microsoft and Softbank met in Beijing with President Xi and biggies from Chinese tech. We didn’t need the hearings in Washington this week with Facebook, Google and Twitter to remind us where the power centers are in our lives and in our world.
Harvard’s Bill Kirby led our summitry punditry, along with Ambassador Chas Freeman, one of our all time favorite guests. He’s what my teenage daughter would call “a savage.” He know his stuff (Chas was Nixon’s translator in the 1970's); he’s independent, strong, and takes no prisoners. Chas described a chilling picture of the police state the Chinese are perfecting, using big data and artificial intelligence to connect facial recognition technology with cameras, credit card records, internet browsing records, government IDs, hospital analyses, and foreign travel. Add drones and you’ve got the most effective system of social and economic control the world has ever seen. And don’t think the people in the picture above aren’t part of the same master plan. Halloween is over, but if you still want to scare yourself silly, read Chas’ piece “Technology, Statecraft and Unrestricted Warfare.”
Ian Johnson talked about happiness in China (here’s a conversation with him and Chris from last spring); Kaiser Kuo talked about a culture of codependency between the U.S. and China: the world’s biggest saver and the world’s biggest spender. We helped fuel the creation of China’s middle class, Kaiser says, and they helped destroy ours. Jiang Xueqin talked about education in China.
Euro Report with Colm Toibin:
Zach Goldhammer: We also continued to track the story of the Catalonian independence movement this week. For a bird’s eye view of the struggle in Barcelona, we called up the Irish novelist, Colm Tóibín.
Tóibín, who’s been covering the debates over Catalan nationalism for The Guardian, moved from Dublin to Barcelona just after graduating from college in 1975, inspired by his reading of Hemingway. Since he’s moved back to Ireland, the influence of the Spanish region continues to color his work and inform his own sense of Irish identity. While we talked with Tóibín for nearly an hour about various aspects of Catalonian life and politics, the most interesting part of the conversation came at the very end, when Tóibín discussed what the Catalonian conflict means for the future of European identity and the broader European project. We’ve excerpted and transcribed that section of the conversation below.
Colm Tóibín: I think the real importance of this is that nothing is settled in Europe. It isn’t as though we all feel fully settled in being European, living under the European Union. Even though the borders have been taken down, it isn’t as though the old, 19th century questions of identity have disappeared. And we can call them irrational if we want to, but they are the terms by which people live. In other words in a city like London, in Paris, in Barcelona, people can have a hyphen in their identity, people can be both Pakistani and Catalan. People in London can be both Irish and English, but no one is talking about being fully European. The European Union remains a sort of dream, a way in which capital can move easily, the flow of workers can move easily, but isn’t an identity. All we should look at is Scotland, Brexit, what’s happening in Hungary, what’s happening in Poland, what’s happening in Austria … it isn’t as though liberalism, or pan-Europeanism, or full European identityism is going to catch on, and we’re all going to become civilized Europeans facing towards the future in a fully globalized world. The questions of identity are much more narrow and strange than that.
So, this particular argument that Catalonia is having with Spain is a real good example of this, where people’s allegiances are narrow and have their roots in the 19th century, or indeed earlier. And the deeper those roots are, the deeper the allegiance is to a nation that may not be a state. Even though we’re all in the umbrella of the European Union, it doesn’t mean that those old atavistic businesses of feeling exclusively Catalan, or not feeling comfortable as a Catalan with a Spanish passport… those are things that will not go away and are likely to emerge in other countries. And liberalism, European liberalism—the dream that we would all elect centrists or center-left governments, and that we would all work towards an equality agenda, and take in refugees from, you know, Hungary, over to Poland, down to Germany, and over to Spain, and we’d all agree on our European identity—I think we now understand just how fragile that is.
The Catalan argument in Spain, and the way Spain has been concerned to use coercion rather than argument, and the way Catalans in turn have been able to use nationalistic determination, and a sense of separateness—all of that is something Europe really has to come to terms with. This is a fundamental part of Europe; it’s not something strange, it is who we are.
We’ll put out a longer audio excerpt and transcript from this interview next week.
Watch: Faces Places
One of the best movies I’ve seen this year — documentary filmmaker Agnes Varda and French photographer JR in a roadie pic. They go places and film faces. It’s delightful. And beautiful. And deep.
For the Record…
Zach will approve of Peggy Noonan’s column this week. About Black Ocotber for sexual harassment, she writes:
It must be noted that what has happened the last month regarding sexual harassment in the workplace is epochal, a true watershed and long overdue. The revelations will have a huge impact, not because men now understand that sexual abuse and bullying are wrong — they always knew, and for many the wrongness would have been part of the enjoyment — but because they now know, really for the first time, that they will pay a terrible price if their misbehavior is revealed. And from here on in, there’s a greater chance it will be revealed, and believed. The price to be paid was the real lesson of the past few weeks of resignations and firings. Celebrity accusers understand the first paragraph of their obit will now include something like, “…but fell from his position of power in the sexual-abuse scandals of the 2010s.”
Also from yesterdays’ WSJ, an important nugget about President Trump’s propensity for stretching the truth. According to the Golf Handicap and Information Network, which is the handicap network maintained by the U.S. Golf Association, Trump posted his lowest golf score ever — 68 — sometime in October. For a dude of 71 who’s not in the best shape, it’s just not believable. Golf sleuths say the date isn’t listed, and nor is the course. White House officials won’t comment on whether Mr. Trump did or did not shoot at 68 in October. This score is not the lowest ever posted by a head of state. North Korea’s chief hacker, Kim Jong Il tried golf for the first time at a course in Pyongyang in 1994. Reports say he shot a 38-under-par 34 that included multiple holes in one.
Our beloved Potter sends along this terrific piece in The Nation from Bill Greider, a great political reporter back in the day. Greider writes about the scathing autopsy report some left-leaning activists have written about the Dems: The Democratic Party in Crisis. It’s all true! And speaking of hacks, Donna Brazile says in her book, out on Tuesday, “that she seriously contemplated setting in motion a process to replace Hillary Clinton as the party’s 2016 presidential nominee with then-Vice President Biden in the aftermath of Clinton’s fainting spell, in part because Clinton’s campaign was ‘anemic’ and had taken on ‘the odor of failure.’” (via WaPo)
Becca and Zach cheered us up this week with some Simpsons fun. Two twitter accounts worth following: Simpsons Albums (scenes from the Simpsons that remind me of albums I love) and Simpsons Screens (tweeting a random frame from The Simpsons 1987–1998 every 30 min).
Come one and all…
Monday, November 27th at First Parish Church in Harvard Square. Tickets on sale this week!
Til next week,
The OS Globetrotters
