China Syndrome

I admit I bought it.  The whole yard.  Bring China out of its seclusion and agricultural society and welcome it into the family of nations as a developing country.  Never mind that the Chinese financial and social infrastructure is still third world.  Never mind that the Chinese Communist Party is a little rough around the edges. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman praised China  Nobel Prize winner Eugene Fama asserted that as China got richer, a middle class would emerge, demand more freedoms and the CCP would have to grant more freedom (quite the opposite has occurred).  When I had lunch with libertarian economist Deirdre McCloskey (whose work I greatly admire) two summers ago, she strongly asserted that the tariffs were “stupid, just plain stupid.”

Now we see that we have been led down a primrose path.  

These people were all dead wrong.

But based on those faulty assumptions, we rolled merrily along.  Private equity did deals for years in which manufacturing companies were bought up, the manufacturing stripped out and the jobs shipped off to China, leaving whole swaths of industrial America denuded towns as Agent Orange denuded forests.  We were smarter.  Let China become the manufacturing floor of the world.  We will do more heady things like finance and internet network things.  You know, as Mike Bloomberg would say, things that take more gray matter. 

We overlooked things until they could no longer be overlooked.

The intellectual property theft was rampant and when Obama threatened to take them to the WTO, the Chinese resorted to coercion. They forced U.S. companies to transfer IP into entities controlled by China. Give us your IP or you can’t do business here.  I often remarked that if China pirated tangible goods on the high seas the way they pirate intellectual property, our response would be swift and immediate and would involve guns.  And the intellectual property is much more valuable.

China also stole intellectual property, data, and conducted corporate espionage through hacking and infiltration of academia.  Reports of actual hacks and hacking attempts from corporate America are legion.  The Chinese stealth fighter is modeled on plans for the F-35.  Most egregiously, during the Obama administration, Chinese hackers raided the Office of Personnel Management and swiped the human resources records of all government employees.  If there was a response from our government, I didn’t hear about it.   Recently, the head of the chemistry department at Harvard, and several other academics were arrested for failing to make required disclosures about their Chinese contracts.  The government now knows that the infiltration of Chinese spies in academia is rampant with agents transmitting data or running parallel labs duplicating cutting edge research. 

The bottom line is that good trading partners don’t steal each other’s stuff, and we now know without question that China is a kleptocracy and has been all along.

We suffer some 30,000 deaths a year from synthetic opiods, mostly fentanyl, and much of that comes from China.  Fox contributor Eric Bolling and cartoonist Scott Adams both received the horrible call that their sons were dead after an accidental fentanyl overdose.  The streets of Chicago are now littered with young homeless kids hooked on opiods.  It took Donald Trump much haranguing to get the Chinese to even make fentanyl a controlled substance and the Chinese know who is making this stuff and has done little to control it.  The CCP is literally killing our kids.

The official Chinese response to criticism over its handling of COVID-19 was to accuse the U.S. military as its cause, and to accuse the U.S. of racism in Trump’s labeling it the “Chinese virus” or others that labeled it the “Wuhan virus.”  These ludicrous statements echo of the Soviet statements in the initial aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster. The official statement from TASS was deliberately designed to combat what the Central Committee’s official spokesman called “bourgeois falsification…propaganda and inventions.”  Sound familiar?

I believe that COVID-19 and China’s handling of it is a watershed event in geopolitics.  It remains to be determined whether the virus emanated from its bioweapons plant or its wet markets, but the Chinese coverup is well documented, despite the expulsion of U.S. journalists and silencing of Chinese ones.  The pandemic is only a symptom of the real Chinese virus—the CCP’s desires to supplant the U.S. and the West as the pre-eminent global influencer.  It has now demonstrated beyond doubt that it is not a good trading partner, that all assumptions about its evolution were wrong.

Now that much of the wealth that accrued because of trade with China has been crushed out like a cigarette butt, it’s time to do a hard reassessment of what our relationship with the dragon should look line.

Last summer I read Graham Allison’s book, Destined for War: Are the U.S. and China headed for War in which Allison asserts that a military clash between an established power and a rising power is likely but not inevitable.

Has it already begun?  In my next post, I will put forward steps we should take now.

A Touch of Optimism: Viewing the Pandemic from Another Angle

This is real world.  The event that people warned us about has come to pass.  We have had a couple generations of relative peace but that has now ended.  The shots fired during the Cold War were fired on foreign soil.  Our wars since 1945 have been offshore and have been removed from day to day American life, and not materially affecting it, other than those of the families of the casualties.  Suddenly, we are all living like Londoners during the Blitz.  And that’s no hyperbole.  We know people will die.  We are hunkered down and disrupted.  We don’t know the outcome or when it is going to end.

Markets are crashing and stressing; retirement plans obliterated in weeks.  JP Morgan announced the closing of 1,000 branches.  Most of retail is closed.  Toilet paper is scarce. Courts are closed.  Lines at grocery stores are long.  Within a matter of weeks, we are all living like Venezuelans.  COVID-19 is touching every American.

Even though we are early in this maelstrom, I found some things that give me some measure of optimism and good things that will come out of this catastrophe.

·        China has been unmasked.  Contrary to what “experts” like Richard Haass are asserting, COVID-19 and the atrocious handling  of it by the CCP will NOT expand its world leadership.  The coverup of the outbreak was well documented.  What we do not yet know is whether the outbreak was an intentional bioweapon.  The market turmoil is in part a result of the realization that 25 years of developing China as a reliable business partner have come to an end.  I will have much more to say on this in future posts.  But after COVID-19 shrinks in the distance, the world will not look upon China in the same way again.  For all his faults, Trump saw this early, and was very Churchillian in that regard.

·        We have not yet heeded the warnings for catastrophes of this nature.  We will learn from it.  I read Laurie Garrett’s book, The Coming Plague which warned of an event like this almost 25 years ago.  Others have been warning of the dangers of an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) attack, which would fry the grid and all electronics.  Congress has done nothing about it.  We are learning how to coordinate between the federal and state governments.  We are learning about the soft spots in our systems.  The last official report estimated that 90% of Americans would perish in the months following an EMP attack.  This real world experience will cause us to take these warnings more seriously and engage in real upgrades and disaster planning.

·        Private industry and education are adapting and learning.  Businesses and schools are learning how to function remotely and still get things accomplished.  Restaurants are offering curbside service.  Millions are interconnected to their offices.  Museums and zoos are doing things online. The Met offered free streaming of its operas.  On St. Patrick’s Day, Dropkick Murphys streamed a concert with fans commenting the entire time.  It’s still a little awkward and we miss “real” presence and connections, but we are learning how to function in this world.

·        Yes, there has been some bad behavior.  Fights at Costco.  Kids refusing to stay away from large beach gatherings on spring break. The usual political sniping.  But we have also seen real episodes of the human spirit.  The Italians singing from their balconies.  Young Spanish men playing Battleship by yelling coordinates across the courtyard from where they are sequestered. Yo Yo Ma streaming a comforting performance.  People pitching in to shop for elderly people.  And even some of the political sniping has died down.  Gavin Newsom, Andrew Cuomo and, gasp, Ilhan Omar all complimented Trump on his leadership.  Expect to see more of this as people rise to the occasion.

COVID-19 gave us a forced time out.  I have talked to several people who see this as a blessing in disguise.  We are so stressed, rushing through our commute like so many cattle, eating out, delegating supervision and educating our children to a teacher or day care worker.  Speeding through the avalanche of emails, phone calls, memos that MUST BE DONE NOW, only to get to a weekend to watch an NBA or NHL game.   All of this is gone now.  Parents are forced to spend a lot of time with their children.  Restaurants and fast food joints are closed so we must develop a modicum of cooking and food preparation skills.  With no commute, there is more time for reading, reflection and other things that are more meaningful.  As one friend of mine put it, “We have to learn to live in 1850 again.”  And because of the dreaded uncertainty.  We simply do not know how this will end or weather one of us may become victims so we are forced to live in the moment.  All of our 2020 goals have been smashed to bits, the year not even ¼ way through and we don’t know enough to write new ones.  We are being forced to live in the moment because we simply do not yet know what tomorrow may look like.

We have a long way to go through this crisis.  There will be times of  cold, darkness and despair yet to come  We cannot avoid it. But early on, I see some green shoots that tell us that summer will be here eventually.

Death, Sex, and the Apocalypse

“We are always on the edge of catastrophe.  It is the human condition.”

Nathaniel Philbrick, speaking on the central themes of Moby-Dick, January, 2019, Newberry Library

Coronavirus has ravaged through markets more than the population so far, but it has disrupted our lives and cast a pall of fear upon us.  It is almost certain to sweep through the country and cause misery and death.  We just do not yet know just how bad it will be.  Coronavirus is the 3^rd horseman of the apocalypse.  9/11 exposed the fragility of our nation’s defenses.  The Great Recession exposed the fragility of our financial system.  Coronavirus will expose the fragility of our health care and financial systems.  As the great historian William H. McNeill chronicled in Plagues and Peoples, microbes have the power to change the course of history and civilizations.

These disruptions and upheavals, caused in part, by the rapid advancement of technology and globalization are putting forward some fundamental challenges to what it means to be human, and how to think about it.  My generation (tail end of the baby boomers) and later have largely been spared the wrenching and devastating events of WWII and the Great Depression.  The long, relatively tranquil period permitted us to develop a more casual attitude toward two of the most fundamental aspects of our humanity—death and sex, and peel away some of their meaning.  Now, more than ever, we need to think about those parts of our humanity.

In part, because I have gotten older and have begun to lose mentors and friends, I have begun to think about death and its meaning more.  Because we have been spared the great catastrophes of large scale wars and pandemics, lifespans have increased and child mortality has diminished,  it has become infrequent visitor.  But that is no longer guaranteed.  Coronavirus has stoked the fear that we will see death in widespread waves. 

Death is part of our humanity.  Yet we have attempted, somewhat successfully, to expunge all forms of it from our consciousness.   Even our recent wars have been so remote that we do not see the results or the consequences.   The slaughter of farm animals for food has been replaced by a distant, mechanized process.  Caitlin Doughty and Thomas Lynch have been two of the few voices to reacquaint us with death and its rituals. In her book, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes talks of death, rituals, the process and our attempt to remove distance ourselves from it in frank (and sometimes humorous) ways.  She observes, “As late as the beginning of the 20^th century, more than 85 percent of Americans died at home. The 1930’s brought what is known as the ‘medicalization’ of death. The rise of the hospital removed from view all of the gruesome sights, smells, and sounds of death.”  We have tried to deny, sanitize, and remove from our humanity.  Last week, psychologist Mary Pipher wrote a stunningly beautiful essay on her acceptance of death as she inevitably creeps toward it. (_https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/opinion/mortality-death.html).  With the grim prospect of widespread death to be visited upon us, we will need to face it squarely, as Pipher did.  We can deny it, but it will come looking for us.

We have started to do the same thing with sex, another aspect of our basic humanity, and in odd ways.  In some respects, we have pushed the boundaries of sexuality in sometimes unhealthy ways, often under the guise of “equal rights”  or correcting a social wrong. The LGTBQ movement legitimized gay marriage (through the courts and not through a democratic process) and immediately began pushing to get transgenders into women’s bathrooms and stomping on women’s sports by pushing to allow biological men to compete with them.  The LGBTQ movement also danced at the edge of normalizing pedophilia by pushing Drag Queen Story Hour across the country at local libraries, and glamorizing cross dressing 10 year old Desmond on Good Morning America.  Teen Vogue put out “how to” articles on anal sex.  Pornography became ubiquitous and more and more extreme and abusive.  The internet made it free and readily available for kids and teens.  AI and robotics are combining to make sexbots a reality in the near future, and will present another challenge to our humanness. 

While fringe and heretofore banned sexual practices were legitimized and glamorized, rigid rules were placed around the sexual behavior of those of us that comprise 95 percent of the population.  The MeToo movement began as a correction to stop (mostly) men from sexually exploiting women in the workplace.  Colleges shifted the definition and the burden of proof on matters of  “sexual assault” and made demands on what “consent” meant, wrecking young men’s lives without due process.  Under the new definitions,  Jimmy Stewart committed at least 3 acts of “sexual assault” against Donna Reed in his courtship of her in It’s A Wonderful Life.  The rigid rules (written and adopted by who?) put a chill on all relationships between men and women in the workplace and on campus.  The woke crowd was able to curtail normal pre-marital sexual relationships on campus more successfully than the Evangelical Christians could ever do.  Many, many long and happy marriages had their inception at the office (I know a couple that were bank examiners together—how erotic). Today, you simply don’t dare to make even the slightest comment that suggests that someone appeals to you at work, or you will be hauled up to HR.

Sex is an essential aspect of our humanity.  And we need to think about bringing it back to its essential function in our society.  As many issues as I have with the Catholic Church, it had it partially right.  Catholic doctrine views sex as part procreation and part human connection.  The problem it had is that it way overemphasized the procreation part and had too many rules around the connection aspect.  One woman wrote a beautifully worded letter to the editor (which I wish that I had kept) in which she took umbrage at the Church’s emphasis on procreation, while piling guilt and shame on the connection and pleasure aspect.  Her sexual compatibility with her husband was so acute, the pleasure so fulfilling, the connection so deep that it smoothed out the rough spots in their relationship, and neither could bear the thought of not having that intimacy, it was so sustaining.  And it had nothing to do with procreation.

As we confront this apocalyptic crisis, we would do well to spend some time thinking of the things that are part of our basic humanity, what they mean for us and where we have let them go off track.  We have shunned and denied death, but it threatens to now pay a visit in a large way.  We have normalized and freed up the fringes of sexual expression and at the same time contained and placed rigid rules around normal, heterosexual sexual expression.   It is time that we revisit some parts of the things that make us human.

Twin Stars

 I want to take you back, back to the early 70’s, to two figures that have always fascinated me and -  Janis Joplin and Bobby Fischer.  My love of music has roots in Janis and Bobby influenced my intellectual and sports life.  They have always captivated me because of their enormous talent, their stark individuality and rebelliousness, and complex personalities.  They led parallel lives and their apogee was oh, so brief. Both should still be with us. Janis would be 77 today, only a year older than Mick Jagger and he’s still touring. Fischer would be 76.   I still have distinct memories of watching each of their guest appearances on The Dick Cavett (who had a special thing for Janis) show, which are still available on YouTube.

I highly recommend Holly George-Warren’s meticulously documented biography, “Janis—Her Life and Music”  If you are a fan of her and her music. Janis has been gone now for a half century, dying at the tender age of 27, yet her work left an indelible mark on me.  Pearl was one of the first albums I acquired and to this day, I have never tired of it.  Why?  I think because no other musician has been able to express themselves through their music in such a passionate and authentic way.

Her character was so complex and fraught with contradictions.  Very smart and very artistic, she pushed boundaries early on in her conservative town of Port Arthur, Texas.  As a result, she found herself walled off from the in crowd in high school.  She ultimately found another, more intellectual crowd, but the mocking and exclusion cut her deeply.  Former Dallas Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson was part of the crowd that tormented her and his cruelty  certainly altered my view of him.

Like most artists, Janis had to endure long stretches of uncertainty and penury.  Part of her was bold, brash and tough.  She once bashed a beer bottle over someone’s head in a bar fight.  She was a woman in a man’s world, a white woman singing the blues and bisexual at a time when it was not accepted.  She was full of contradictions, brazen, yet vulnerable. Part of her liked the adoration and stardom, but part of her yearned for stability, domesticity and a house with a white picket fence.  Throughout her short life, she yearned for constant love and connection which she never really found.

Her internal discord manifests itself in her music.  You don’t just listen to Janis’s music, you feel it.  You can feel her deep emotional pain, loneliness and longing as her raspy voice belts out the first three songs on Pearl -- Move Over, Cry Baby, and A Woman Left Lonely.  She sang not with her voice but with the deepest parts of her soul, which always had an empty, unfulfilled place.  Janis tried to fill that hole with promiscuity and drugs and her demons eventually overtook her.  Perhaps the most incisive line in George-Warren’s book was from a friend and lover David Niehaus,  Janis “died because she was so sensitive to the world.  That’s what killed her.”

Just after Janis’s death, another superstar burst on to the popular culture scene.  A brash, gawky young chess nerd took the world by storm.  Bobby Fischer, a most unlikely superstar, became an overnight sensation, and vaulted chess from an obscure game of nerds to a national pastime and subject of conversation.  Today, few people could name the world chess champion (Magnus Carlsen), but in the early 1970’s, everyone knew Bobby Fischer.  At the time, Fischer spawned chess clubs and an enthusiastic interest in chess across the U.S.

Living with his single mom in the Brooklyn, Fischer became obsessed with chess at a very early age.  So consumed by the game was young Fischer that his mother sought professional help for him.  He played at the chess clubs with the strongest players in the country,  and became the youngest Junior Champion at 13 and US Chess Champion at 14.  Legend has it that he was so consumed by chess that when one of his mentors took him to a brothel for his first sexual experience at 19, he came out, shrugged his shoulders and said, “Chess is better.”   His rise in the chess world was meteoric but his eccentricities also manifested themselves early, as he accused the Russians of collusion during his trip there in 1962.  The Russians dominated world chess but Fischer began to beat Russian giants like Tigran Petrosian and  Mark Taimanov.

One cannot examine the Fischer phenomenon out of the context of the Cold War (captured in what I think is the best biography of him, Bobby Fischer Goes to War).  The proliferation of nuclear weapons made a hot war between the superpowers unthinkable.  The contest between the U.S. and the Soviets was fought in skirmishes on the turf of several third world countries, and in 1972, it was fought on a small 64 square slab.  Fischer embodied American individualism—the brash, solitary pioneer; Spassky, the product of the Soviet collective system.  So symbolically important was this match that when the temperamental Fischer threatened to pull out, Henry Kissinger called him to persuade him to show up.   We all know the results.  The petulant and eccentric Fischer blundered in the first game and forfeited the second over outlandish demands about the playing conditions.  Fischer clawed his way back and defeated Spassky to become World Champion and returned from Reykjavik to the sort of adulation usually reserved for returning warriors and astronauts.

But it was all short-lived.   Fischer’s eccentricities got the best of him and he lost his title when he refused to defend it, resigning the title in 1974.  He vanished into  seclusion for over two decades but surfaced again to play a rematch in Sarajevo which was under U.S. sanction at the time and he was eventually arrested for defying sanctions.  He became more anti-American as he aged and cheered on the 9/11 attackers.  He often went on strange, virulent antisemitic tirades (his mother was Jewish). Fischer died in 2008, known as much for his borderline psychotic behavior as an individualist that took on and defeated the Soviet empire by himself.  Like Janis, much of Fischer’s life was sad, tormented and lonely.  While Bobby had no formal diagnosis, several people have put forward theories his deeply troubled personality.  But for one brief shining moment, Fischer’s obsession made him a national hero.

The lives of Janis Joplin and Bobby Fischer ran in parallel paths.  Their time in the spotlight was so maddeningly brief, their genius and enormous talents derailed by their fatal flaws. Despite the brevity of their celebrity, and their early unraveling, nearly a half century later we still marvel at the gifts they brought us.  Half a century later, when we think of the blues, we think of Janis and when we think of chess, we think of Bobby. Each was truly sui generis.

Perhaps the great essayist H.L. Mencken was onto something 100 years ago when he wrote, “No moral man—that is, moral in the Y.M.C.A. sense—has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a  book worth reading, and it is highly improbable that the thing has ever  been done by a virtuous woman.”