As the U.S. dollar marinates in the world economy’s toilet and as we consider whether to elect a woman or a black man president, and our young people limit their political outrage to wearing ironic T-shirts, it’s a good thing that China is becoming the "evil-er" empire.
It might just give us a breather to re-brand America.
Last Saturday when I read a report that local authorities had tear-gassed a large group of Michigan State students I was at once shocked and inspired. After five years of war and 4000 American casualties, young people in America, I thought, had risen up in defiance.
As I read further, however, I discovered that the melee was not an anti-war protest, but was instead prompted by a group of rowdy frat boys with bellies full of Jägermeister, throwing bottles and trash at police officers. In fact, it was such a Mountain Dew rush for them to be attacking the police that at one point, they began chanting “TEAR GAS! TEAR GAS!” in the hopes that the cops would invent a new X-Treme Doritos flavor in their eyeballs.
This news broke in the same week that people in London and Paris caused international spectacles by disrupting the passage of the Olympic torch in protest of China’s human rights abuses. It also came less than a month after real riots exploded in Tibet, where businesses were burned and people killed. The amount of negative attention being paid to China right now gives me some hope that the United States can pass the torch of international scorn on to them.
China’s troubles continued throughout the week, specifically in San Francisco, as thousands gathered and protested the Olympic torch (while others gathered to support it, mostly Chinese) and others gathered just to take pix of well-protected Olympic torch runners.
For most of us, knowledge of Tibet is limited to obscure blips on the popular culture radar: Eddie Murphy in The Golden Child, cracking wise with Buddhist monks, Brad Pitt lost in the Himalayas, and the Beastie Boys’ habit of hosting epic concerts in the name of the struggle. I’m not saying any of this to degrade my generation or give the tired mockery of an ignorant American populace. I certainly don’t mean to undermine the nature of the Tibetan struggle, but it’s just so far removed from relevance when you put it in an American context. But the fact that China has become a nation on the verge of superpower status that has an even more atrocious reputation than the United States is a good thing for the United States.
I mean we get a break for a minute, with the focus on the other empire, and we should try and ride it out. While the world is distracted by an “evil-er evil,” we can use the time to focus on electing a president and answering questions like, “How can we not turn into a poverty-stricken nation of train hopping drunken hobos?” and “Why not have talks with Iran?”
If we do that, by the time the last eastern European growth-stunted teenaged gymnast has tossed her last hula-hoop and China is still beating the world off its back, we’ll have a new America to present to the world. All the kids with Obama stickers on their backpacks will do their homework and be able to explain an effective international intervention in Darfur, a two state solution for Israel and Palestine, a reasonable Iraq troop withdrawal timetable, a long term alternative energy plan, an economic stimulus package, heath care reform and a fair immigration policy.
After that mess is sorted, America’s young people can assemble a life from the rubble and adopt the post-empire lifestyle of Europe: drafting manifestos and drinking wine while passing harsh political judgment on those rich, arrogant, imperialist pigs with all the good movies: the Chinese.
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