Author: Josh Philip Ross

So I watched the president’s speech this morning, downloaded from C-SPAN. Ick. Tepid applause for his various plans for the poor, a giant roar of approval for tax reform (i.e., elimination of tax on capital, shifting the whole burden onto labor), a giant roar for tort reform. A reiteration of the misquote that John Kerry believes the heart and soul of America is found in Hollywood (in fact, he said that a group of entertainers gathered in Radio City Music Hall in New York City “conveyed the heart and soul of our country” [emphasis added]). Lots of bullshit about making America safer and the world more free.

Probably the weirdest aspect of the speech was Bush’s pronunciation of “rather.” He used the word twice, each time pronouncing it “rohther” with a fine New England prep-school cadence that a young John Kerry might have adopted in his Kennedy-conscious youth. It seemed like a last trace of the elitist background that Dubya has tried to bury under an adopted Texas twang. Someone should tell him that real Texans don’t say “rohther.”

But they’ve gone home now, right? We can have our city back? And then maybe next January we can have our country back?

On my lunch break today, I noticed that Third Avenue in the 40s was crawling with police, and that barricades lined the sidewalk. As I watched, police cars began blocking the cross-street traffic while officers on foot dragged additional barricades into place, preventing even pedestrians from crossing the avenue. Unhappy pedestrians caught on the wrong side asked the cops how long it would be until they could cross the street. “Maybe a half hour.” A woman next to me called her boss to explain that she’d be late from lunch because the president was blocking her way. Across the street, a man waved a sign that said something about Israel and the United States, but his precise political position remained inscrutable.

I suppose Clinton used to cause just as much of a mess, but at least we liked him. After a week of increasingly siege-like conditions, this wholesale shutdown of a major avenue, executed without prior warning, felt like a final insult.

When the president drives by, he doesn’t do it alone. After all of the marked and unmarked police cars and vans had pulled into place, the motorcade itself finally pulled into view, watched by helicopters hovering overhead. First came the contingent of motorcycle cops zooming in double file down either side of the avenue, which put into my mind the incongruous image of the Dykes on Bikes who always lead off the Gay Pride Parade. Then came more police cars, and finally a tight formation of two armored limos and a black SUV. And there he was, his waving hand and large head darkly visible through the blue-tinted glass of the limo on the left, furthest from me. It was the closest I have ever been to any president of the United States.

Having witnessed the driveby, I headed back over to the UN to get my lunch. In the plaza across the street from the Secretariat, about 25 people, mostly African but with a few white American supporters, held a demonstration demanding action in Darfur. The leader shouted phrases through a loudspeaker and the rest chanted after him, sounding weary: “Peace in Sudan! Justice in Sudan! Democracy in Sudan! Peace in Darfur! Freedom in Darfur!” No one paid much attention. Having nothing to say, nothing to add, I stood there dumbly until the light changed, then crossed the street and headed for the cafeteria.

As usual, the swirl of international voices and faces and costumes cheered me up immensely. At a table near mine, a man asked the fellow across from him, in heavily French-accented English, whether he was from a mission or an NGO; the second man ignored the question, staring off into the distance. The cafeteria was just redone — a new paint job, nicer chairs — and new blinds veiled the usual wide view of the East River. When they were suddenly raised mid-meal, several people applauded. There was Queens again, with the Pepsi-Cola sign and the Citicorp tower, as a tugboat slowly pushed a vast port-listing hulk of a ship toward the sea.

After I ate, I still had some time to kill (I have two-hour lunches), so I wandered across to the General Assembly Building and puttered around in the UN Bookstore. Toward the back is a computer where employees play MP3s of world music, and I stopped to listen to Caetano Veloso singing the Talking Heads’ “(Nothing But) Flowers”:

While France’s ban on religious symbols in state schools, including headscarves and turbans, takes effect today, the Victorinox company in neighboring Switzerland is rolling out a new product: the Swiss army Kirpan, a high-end version of the ritual knife that Sikhs are required to wear.

On my first trip to India, in 1996, I was startled by signs in banks banning weapons, but with an exception for “short knives for Sikhs.” (This was only one of the many things that startled me during that trip, and on balance was probably one of the least startling startling things, far less weird than, say, burning bodies bobbing in the Ganga or the monkey that leaped onto my dinner plate in Agra. But I digress.) There are those who argue that the kirpan is not a weapon, or at least is not intended as such, but I doubt they’ve convinced airlines and governments in these security-conscious times.

For more information on Sikh legal issues, including the wildly misguided discrimination they’ve faced in the US since 9/11, check out The Sikh Coalition, which includes a section of the USA Patriot Act specifically condemning anti-Sikh discrimination, as well as recommended guidelines for airport personnel dealing with Sikhs. (Should veiled women be required to show their faces to prove their identities? Yes, but a female security guard is preferable. Should Sikhs be permitted to wear the kirpan into the secure section of an airport? No, they should be required to place it in checked luggage.)

In this time of political division, as the Republicans strut their stuff in the hostile environs of New York City, Palaverist bravely steps in to answer the question that is burning in the hearts of all Americans:

What’s with the donkey and the elephant?

The Democratic Donkey began as an insult against populist Democrat Andrew Jackson, who was called a jackass. He decided to incorporate the symbol into his campaign, and later it came to represent his stubborn streak. But it was Harper’s Weekly cartoonist Thomas Nast, the famous opponent of Boss Tweed, who lodged the donkey symbol most firmly into the public imagination — probably with no prior knowledge of its earlier association with Jackson.

The Republican Elephant was also Thomas Nast’s creation. The story behind it is complicated, involving both accusations that President Grant was engaging in “Caesarism” and false reports of a mass breakout from the Central Park Zoo (you can’t make this stuff up, folks), and originally the elephant represented the Republican vote, as opposed to the party. But the image stuck.

Nepal is one of the poorest, least developed countries in the world, which is why many of its people seek opportunities in other lands. Among Nepalis I met, becoming a Gurkha — essentially a mercenary in the British military — was considered a fantastically good opportunity. Others take the more prosaic route of crossing into India in search of work, or sometimes get sold into prostitution there. In Seoul, we found two Nepali restaurants near the massive Dongdaemun market, catering to the growing population of Bangladeshis and Pakistanis who have come to South Korea to participate in the textile and garment trade.

More recently, Nepalis have been heading to Iraq to seek work in the reconstruction. According to ABCNEWS.com,

William Saletan has an excellent piece in Slate that asks what exactly Bush has done that can be called “heroic.” Definitely worth a read, even if you’re already anti-Bush.

Yesterday I stepped out of work and heard the sound of sirens — lots of them, and not the steady wail of emergency vehicles trying to cut through traffic in a hurry, but staccato whoops, as if no one was quite sure where the emergency was. Coming up to the corner of 45th Street and Second Avenue, I saw a line of police vans stretching down much of the north-south block to 44th, as well as one or two police trucks with penned-in flatbeds. It looked, I thought, like the sort of squad you send out to deal with a riot.

It turns out to have been an illegal protest march that began at the United Nations and cut across Midtown at rush hour to finish up at Madison Square Garden, where the Republican National Convention is being held. The protesters apparently negotiated on the spot with the police, who decided to let them march; sadly, things seem to have turned ugly at the end, with one protester attacking a plainclothes police officer and hurting him pretty badly, which I personally think sucks.

The city doesn’t feel right. There’s a negative charge in the air. Cops are everywhere, even out in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, which happens to be near a major Muslim community. Buildings are barricaded. The subways are weirdly empty, and while the week before Labor Day is always quiet, this year it feels like people have fled. I’m looking forward to this whole thing being over.

On Sunday, I took part in what the New York Times is calling “New York City’s biggest protest in decades, and the most emphatic at any national political convention since Democrats and demonstrators turned against each other in fury over Vietnam in Chicago in 1968.”

I really hope I don’t have to keep doing this sort of things for the next four years.

Sunday was hot. Stupid hot. The kind of hot where you try to put on sunscreen and you just end up smearing it around all the sweat. And it takes an awfully long time for 150,000, or 250,000, or 500,00 people to wend their way up Seventh Avenue. We started at Seventh and 18th Street at around 11:30 a.m. and finally made it past Madison Square Garden at 3.

On the way, we mingled with a wide range of protesters: out-of-towners, locals, old-timers (not only did I spot a McGovern pin, but I also marched past a contingent of veterans of the Lincoln Brigade, which fought in the Spanish Civil war[!]), kids, families. Lots of the signs were witty, some were incomprehensible. At one point a guy behind me broke out in a raucous chant of “Viva Chavez!” We walked past the giant papier-mache dragon float that was later set on fire, leading to some of the only arrests at the main protest. The incident took place not far behind us, and a man came up shouting, “People are being arrested behind you! Turn back if you care!” We thought about it, but figured that the other 100,000 people heading that way would do whatever needed to be done.

From my admittedly limited perspective, the police behaved themselves, and so did the protesters. No one attempted to pen the protesters in, so people could use the sidewalks and pop into local stores to buy drinks and snacks and film. The protest only became unnerving as we approached Madison Square Garden itself, flanked by a giant ad for the Nissan Titan SUV (“MASSIVE TRANSIT”) and a big Fox News sign that elicited chants of “Fox News sucks!” And it was strange and upsetting to see the public grounds of Penn Station so heavily barricaded and crawling with security guys in suits, who are much scarier than regular cops with identifying badges. I’m bothered that our government feels the need to wall off its nominating convention from its own citizens, and also bothered by having my public spaces occupied.

But I did come away reassured in many important ways. It was good to see that a couple hundred thousand people can gather in public to curse the sitting government without being shot; this is by no means the case in much of the world. Likewise, it was good to see that so many Americans consider the political disruptions of the last four years — which are, by world standards, relatively mild — are more than enough to generate tremendous anger and action. The Bush administration may be awful, but America still works, and no small credit is due to the Americans who work hard to make sure that stays true.

Whenever modern political powers start bringing up ancient history, look out. Whether it’s Greek claims to Macedonia, Serbian calls for revenge over 600-year-old defeats, or Israeli references to real estate deals mentioned in the Bible, it usually boils down to intellectual cover for a land grab.

So when I read that South Korea and China are in fierce dispute over the nature of the ancient Koguryo kingdom, which collapsed in 668 A.D., I suspected that there must be a more modern geographical issue at hand.

To summarize the dispute, South Korean scholars have long claimed, I believe accurately, that the borders of Koguryo extended well into modern China (and also failed to control the southern tip of the Korean peninsula). China has now erased Koguryo from its official recounting of Korean history, claiming instead that the kingdom was no more than a vassal state of the Chinese emperor. What makes this argument more complicated is that Chinese imperial power reached over enormous distances and brought an incredibly wide array of powers into its system of tribute-for-protection. If every power that ever submitted to imperial rule was to be considered part of China, we would have to include places like Vietnam and Japan. Nor has China been anything like a unified political or cultural entity throughout history. At times it fragmented into warring statelets, was taken over by Mongols, or otherwise fluctuated. (I’m not all that good on Chinese history, so I hope anyone out there with superior knowledge will correct any errors I’ve made here.)

China’s real concern, of course, has nothing to do with historical semantics about the nature of East Asian feudalism. What has Beijing worried is the large population of ethnic Koreans living north of the Yalu and Tumen rivers, which demarcate the contemporary boundary of North Korea.

I don’t think that China is worried about North Korean expansionism into Chinese territory. Indeed, North Korea relies on China for emergency aid, and the land North Korea really wants is to the south, across the DMZ. Instead, my read on this situation is that China is concerned about the potential expansionism of a reunified Korea.

Like many Korea watchers, the Chinese are probably convinced that reunification is fairly likely in the longer term, especially now that North Korea has begun to emulate China’s gradualist approach to economic liberalization. For now, the Chinese role as mediator and role model gives it great sway over North Korea, which considers Communist China a close ally. But these same processes may one day lead to a reunified Korea that would be both more powerful and more volatile than today’s South Korea. And let’s not forget that if North Korea keeps its nuclear weapons until reunification, then the new Korea will be a nuclear power. (I expect that this would push Japan into acquiring nuclear weapons, but that’s a different question.)

Already South Korea is working hard to gain more power in the region — they’re mounting a bid, for example, to get elected to the UN Security Council for 2007-2008. What China fears is that a unified Korea will demand that ethnically Korean regions currently in China be handed over to the new Korean nation. In a worst-case scenario, a unified Korea could sponsor separatist insurgents in northeastern China, creating a situation akin to Kashmir in which a large and a small power, both with nuclear weapons, are fighting a guerilla war for disputed territory. While I find this scenario unlikely, it just might be what the Chinese are afraid of. And with separatist movements in Xinkiang, Tibet, Taiwan and arguably Hong Kong, the Chinese have gotten a bit paranoid about fragmentation and collapse.

And so China has decided to be proactive in trying to erase any ancient Korean claims to territories north of the Yalu and Tumen. But the Chinese effort seems to have backfired. Rather than erasing ancient claims, it has suddenly made them a contemporary issue. If this dispute grows into a claim by a resurgent Korea for Koguryo’s territory, the Chinese may perhaps look back and discover that they themselves planted the seed.