2001-04-05 - 9:21 a.m.
why such a fuss over a plane and its crew?
honestly, there is no fuss. just spin. the current administration knows we'd do exactly the same thing as the Chinese gov't given similar circumstances. and they know that we are the bigger threat. that we are perhaps the biggest threat to the world. given our military power, we could overtly exert global dominance without very much trouble from anyone. not even our old sparring partners in the Russian federation.
i hate the spin. dubya and all his cold war throwbacks are simply trying to ensure that whatever they do in this matter, they have the people behind them. this was not an act for the people, but now that they've been caught red-handed, they need the people standing there with them.
one thing i have to give the press credit for is their coverage of the Chinese side of things. i don't know how it is in the rest of the country, but last night's coverage included interviews with Chinese officials and local scholars... and they made sure to elucidate that we'd be doing the same if the tables were turned.
it has to be infuriating for the Chinese at this point though. during the bombing in Serbia, we destroyed their embassy saying oops we had the wrong map out (yeah right. we've got spy cameras in space that can read the newspaper over your shoulder. wrong map my ass). we made them out to be thieves in our nuclear labs when any of the information lee was caught with could have been freely taken by anyone: technician or civilian. the Chinese have been made our scapegoat. we always need a scapegoat... and we always need a devil. during the cold war, these two were the same (the USSR), but now things are different... now we spin our battles on two fronts... the political threat (more and more China, less and less Russia), and the terrorist/dictator threat (Saddam, bin Laden, Milosevic... less and less so Castro, Qaddafi, and the PLO)... one used to justify stregthening domestic security, the other used to justify global militarization... in either case, both are used to spin the "american" people towards supporting a stronger military.
all the while, whoever happens to be of the ethnicity of the target nations... well, we are alienated in our own country. newspapers constantly refer to asian americans as "Asians." for instance, an article on this very symptom was published a few months ago in the SF Chronicle titles "Asians Seen as Aliens in America". Well DUH. Anyone who's not "american" in "america" IS an alien (legal, resident, illegal...)... but oh wait... they're not talking about Asians... they're talking about Asian Americans. I wonder why we feel like aliens in our own country... could one of the reasons be that even when talking about the phenomenon, the newspapers refer to us AS aliens? you'd never catch them saying something like Africans Incarcerated Disproportionately to Europeans... why? because the discourse on race in this country is literally Black and White. there is very little room for variation... and if the rhetoric doesn't change soon, we won't be a melting pot... we won't be a multicultural society... we'll be a nation of aliens... alienated from white society... alienated from eachother... alienated from our own nationality.
we need a new american revolution.
read whatever you want into that statement. any way you look at it, it's true.
solidarity,
cde. emiliano lee