James Fallows

Late in 2009, when President Obama was making his first trip to China, I did a running set of (increasingly amazed and and occasionally peeved) notes on how the traveling U.S. press corps was covering the whole thing as if it were an election-year campaign swing. Just as they had a year earlier, when candidate Obama was trying to close the sale against John McCain, many stories judged his success or failure by crowd size and enthusiasm, Obama's pep on the podium, his body language in public appearances, and so on. On those standards, overall they judged it a gigantic flop.

I argued at the time that the things that mattered -- for better or worse -- about the trip were not likely to be displayed in the public interactions between an American president and his Chinese counterparts. And looking back on the evolution of the administration's foreign policy, I contended in my long story about Obama early this year that U.S. positioning toward China was actually one of the more chessmaster-like features of Obama's overall policy. That is, love the current administration or hate it, you really should consider China-handling one of the more successful parts of its record. The China section of the article went on at considerable length, but these were the beginning and ending parts:

By the time Obama made his state visit to Shanghai and Beijing, in November 2009, the press in both countries and the rest of the world was primed to present his usual low-key demeanor as servility. The Washington Post and The New York Times contrasted Obama's supposed hat-in-hand manner with the bravado of Bill Clinton, who had mentioned the Tiananmen Square protests while standing next to President Jiang Zemin.

Yet even as Obama was politely listening to lectures about China's new superiority, members of his administration were executing an elaborate pincer movement to reestablish American influence, real and perceived, among the growing economies of Asia....

Two years after Obama's "humiliating" visit to Shanghai and Beijing, U.S. relations with China were a mix of cooperation and tension, as they had been through the post-Nixon years. But American relations with most other nations in the region were better than since before the Iraq War. In a visit to Australia late in 2011, Obama startled the Chinese leadership but won compliments elsewhere with the announcement of a new permanent U.S. Marine presence in Darwin, on Australia's northern coast.

The strategy was Sun Tzu-like in its patient pursuit of an objective: reestablishing American hard and soft power while presenting a smiling "We welcome your rise!" face to the Chinese. "It was as decisive a diplomatic victory as anyone is likely to see," Walter Russell Mead, of Bard College, often a critic of the administration, wrote about the announcement of the Australian base. "In the field of foreign policy, this was a coming of age of the Obama administration and it was conceived and executed about as flawlessly as these things ever can be."

Why do I bring this up? Because we've recently had another similar example, in the influential initial coverage of American "handling" of the Chen Guangcheng case.

Obviously the road ahead for Chen and his family is rocky and uncertain. Their prospects look a lot better than when family members were being beaten and he was under house arrest, but a new set of challenges and complications is ahead. And as Orville Schell very astutely argues, today's Chinese government has shown a kind of soft-power sophistication (and cynicism) in realizing that it was better to get Chen out of the country relatively quickly and let the international spotlight move away from him, as it inevitably will.

Still, this episode has so far turned out better than it easily might have. And the State Department and White House negotiators on the U.S. side, whatever mistakes or misjudgments they may have made, appear to have been something other than the feckless clowns portrayed in the first wave of press coverage, based on the question of whether they had sold Chen Guangcheng out.

Before you mention it: yes, some accounts posted by the Atlantic were as quick to leap to this conclusion as anyone else. As mentioned at the time, I thought headlines like those at right gave the wrong impression. Maybe therefore we're in a more sincere position to use this as a reminder of how hard it is to judge negotiations immediately, and on the basis of external stage business, and especially when dealing with governments not known for transparency. We naturally crave "what does it all mean?" "who screwed up?" "who won and lost?" certainty, but there are times when the immediately available answers to those questions are likely to be wrong. In our little part of our journo-sphere we will try to do our part by taking this lesson to heart.

My tech colleagues at the Atlantic have graciously set up a special standalone page for book-related info. (Thank you: Betsy, Clarissa, Sarah, Jennie.) As of tomorrow, I will have wrangled it sufficiently to move all further such info there.

For the moment, one last book installment:

1) Monday night DC: Politics & Prose. If you are in DC on May 21, I will be at this renowned bookstore at 7pm. Last night, I saw my friend Tim Noah discuss his excellent book, The Great Divergence, there.

2) Tuesday night NYC: If you are in New York on May 22, I'll be there in the evening, with my friend and mentor Orville Schell.

3) Last night, All Things Considered. I did an interview with Guy Raz about China's overall technological ambitions, as reflected by its aerospace drive.

4) Last week, Marginal Revolution. The economist (and Atlantic author!) Tyler Cowen had a very generous note about the book on his site. I am mainly delighted that he saw the central point.

After that, headed to Louisville -- and Shanghai! But more about that tomorrow, on the new page.

The Atlantic still laments the departure/graduation/loss of our friend and colleague Joshua Green (at right), who did great work here for many years and is now at Bloomberg Businessweek. But he still is doing great work, most recently with a column for the Boston Globe on -- wait for it -- how the boring-sounding filibuster really has become a first-order distorting problem.

I turn the microphone over to Josh:

An easy way to grasp [the filibuster's] importance, and why filibuster abuse has made Washington such an angry, dysfunctional place, is to imagine what the country would look like without it.

Let's take only the Obama presidency. Had the filibuster not applied, the United States would have a market-based system to control carbon emissions, which would limit the damage from global warming, vitalize the clean technology sector, and challenge other large polluters like China and India to do the same. The new health care law would have a public option. Children of undocumented immigrants who served two years in the military or went to college could become US citizens. Women paid less than their male colleagues because of their gender would have broader legal recourse against their employers. Billionaires would not be able to manipulate the political system from behind a veil of anonymity.

Dozens of vacant judgeships would have been filled. The Federal Reserve would have operated with a full slate of governors, including Nobel Prize-winning economist Peter Diamond. Elizabeth Warren would be director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, not a candidate for the Senate....

Each of these measures passed the House and received, or would have received, at least the 50 votes necessary to pass the Senate -- but lacked the 60 votes to break a filibuster.

And while of course these are all Democratic measures that have been impeded --"Let's take only the Obama presidency" -- he immediately goes on to point out that a comparable use of the filibuster when the Republicans are back in control will hog-tie them as well.

For another time, we'll go into the ways in which the filibuster and overall government dysfunction are not really symmetrical "extremists on each side make both sides suffer" situations. The Democrats overall have a greater stake in effective use of public programs -- from GI Bill and Medicare of yesteryear through financial-regulation bodies today, and even the Census Bureau, as explained in an important NYT story today. Thus a bias toward a minority-veto, paralyzed Senate has an overall right-wing effect. But any administration is hamstrung if it cannot fill judicial seats, get ambassadors in place, staff up the executive branch, etc.

For a change, here is some positive and even practical advice on what to do about a country whose private economy and culture are still highly resilient, but whose ability to address public problems is being destroyed. I have two books and one article to recommend.

1) Ten Steps to Repair American Democracy, a book by Steven Hill, with foreword by my old speechwriting comrade Hendrik Hertzberg. Practical suggestions for improving campaigns, elections, and the functioning of the legislature, without invoking the deus ex machina of a whole new Constitution.

2) The Gardens of Democracy, by Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer. Liu is another one-time speechwriter, in his case for the Clinton administration; Hanauer is the creator of the recent controversial censored-for-a-while TED speech on inequality. Their book is about the crucial role of "public stories" -- the way we talk to ourselves about the public and private life. All great political leaders, from Lincoln to FDR to Churchill to JFK and Reagan -- have understood that people respond much more powerfully to parables and narratives than to debater-style ten-point analytical briefs. From the time of FDR through Reagan, Frank Capra-style "we're all in this together" narratives dominated. Since Reagan's time, "get the goddamned bureaucrats off my back" narratives have prevailed, usually accompanied by a parallel "keep the government's hands off my Medicare" false-consciousness theme. Liu and Hanauer suggest a new narrative approach.

3) "Want to End Partisan Politics?" in the WaPo today by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein. Mann and Ornstein have received deserved acclaim for a recent article and book on the real sources of governmental failure. Today's article suggests some things that actually could be changed.  

Enjoy the rest of the weekend.

Thanks to the 100+ people who have written in to speculate on the economic rationale behind the oddball "Free Bulldog Puppies" scam email I mentioned a few days ago.

I'm sure I know what the answer is now. I am also sure -- and this will come as a relief to 20 or 30 people who wrote in -- that the real explanation has nothing to do with actual PETA-disapproved puppy mills, where dogs are mass-produced and mistreated. And as soon as I have the brainspace to organize sample responses, I'll lay out the different hypotheses and explain why the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of one of them rather than the others.

In the meantime, if you get a message like the one I received, you'd be better off not replying to it. Thanks to all for the crowdsourced results.

1) As everyone on the China beat has been discussing, the civil-rights activist Chen Guangcheng and his immediate family received permission to leave China and at this moment are en route to Newark. (No jokes, please.) Here is the Flight Aware track just now about an hour ago, when I had to leave the hotel for the latest airport.


Time for the next airplane. Good wishes to the Chen family.

[Update: please see this very useful explanatory piece by Brendan O'Kane in China, and a followup by me.]

This story is all over the China-hand blogosphere, and is so strange that at first I was sure it was a joke. But apparently it isn't. It involves the man below, shown in a WSJ screen shot, and here is the background to understand the fuss:



- CCTV-9 is the English-language channel of China's state-run TV network, and as such is a fascinating real-time window onto the face the government wants to present to the outside world. It is different from CCTV America, the relatively new network that, especially when covering happenings in any country other than China, has been doing a (surprisingly?) good job of presenting "real" news. When CCTV America switches back to taking feeds and programs from the mother ship in Beijing, the difference is noticeable and very interesting.

- A program called "DIALOGUE" is the high-end prestige jewel in the tiara of the CCTV-9 lineup. Its aspiration is to be seen as a combination of the Charlie Rose Show, the old William F. Buckley Firing Line, and Ted Koppel's Nightline, with perhaps a dash of the author-interview segment of The Daily Show. Each evening's half-hour program is about some worthy top-of-the-news topic, and two guests -- usually one Chinese and one foreign, sometimes with additional commentators -- are matched up to exchange views. If you watch CCTV-America in the US or CCTV-9 in China, you'll see round the clock ads for it, with lofty references to the crucial importance of open exchange of ideas.

- The hosts and moderators of the program, a man named YANG RUI and a woman named Tian Wei, are big fish in the China-hand media world. They run the show in English; they have traveled and (at least in Tian Wei's case) worked in the US and Europe; they pride themselves on their international contacts and views; they have many friends and acquaintances, including me, in the foreign-Sinophile community.

Now, the tricky part. Many foreigners who have been on the show know the experience I had during my few appearances, early in my time in China. When you're on the set before the show begins, there is a lot of light and non-dogmatic chat with the hosts and the other guest(s). But once the show begins, the tone often shifts, with an opening question from the host on the lines of: "To our guest James Fallows, I must ask: do you not agree that the United States is being unfair and unreasonable in the demands it is making of the Chinese government? Especially considering its many failures at home and its relative decline in standing in the world?" Then once the show is over, it's light, easy, non-agitprop chat again.

The first time this happened to me, I was startled. But as soon as I thought about it I realized:  this is the tightrope you walk inside a state-controlled news network. To the show's credit, it allows the foreigners to reply in kind and and to challenge the terms of the question. And often it broadcasts the show live, with limited real-time control on what a guest might say. (On the other hand, since it's in English, the audience inside China is limited.) I was on the show three or four times, usually during US-China meetings or controversies. I found the whole experience educational, as part of my ongoing "this is China" immersion, but eventually I decided this was not a sensible venue for me. I know that many foreigners in China have considered doing anthropological studies, or satiric novels, about the kind of "foreign experts" that CCTV is most comfortable having as frequent return visitors on the show.

This brings us to the recent news. On his Sina Weibo account, Dialogue host Yang Rui let loose with an anti-foreigner rant so extreme that on first reading I was sure it had to be a parody. Only it wasn't. It's as if you heard a Stephen Colbert "in character" riff on his show -- and then suddenly realized he wasn't kidding. To put it further in context, it's as if a well-known figure whose trademark was urbane earnestness -- again let's say Ted Koppel, or Charlie Rose -- let rip with a David Duke-style diatribe and evidently meant it.

The paragraph below was all one tweet from Yang Rui -- you can really say more in 140 Chinese characters than 140 English letters! -- as translated in a dispatch by the WSJ's Josh Chin:

The Public Security Bureau wants to clean out the foreign trash: To arrest foreign thugs and protect innocent girls, they need to concentrate on the disaster zones in [student district] Wudaokou and [drinking district] Sanlitun. Cut off the foreign snake heads. People who can't find jobs in the U.S. and Europe come to China to grab our money, engage in human trafficking and spread deceitful lies to encourage emigration. Foreign spies seek out Chinese girls to mask their espionage and pretend to be tourists while compiling maps and GPS data for Japan, Korea and the West. We kicked out that foreign bitch and closed Al-Jazeera's Beijing bureau. We should shut up those who demonize China and send them packing.

The "foreign bitch" he refers to is Melissa Chan, a U.S. citizen working for Al Jazeera, who did really impressive work from China over the past five years and then was expelled. Again, I thought at first this was an urbane Chinese cosmopolite, mocking nativist Chinese attitudes, Colbert-style. That it was serious is ... worth reflection. Among the reactions worth reading is Charlie Custer's, at China Geeks:

It's interesting that this outburst came from Yang Rui, who is in some ways one of the faces of China's soft power push. Dialogue is an English-language program, which means it is targeted at foreigners in China and abroad by default. The fact that its host (one of them, anyway) is apparently a racist xenophobe is probably indicative of how successful China's soft power push is likely to be.

And in keeping with the reality that China is a big, churning, diverse place, Custer points out that much of the reaction in the Chinese blogosphere has been mockery of Yang Rui for his xenophobia. For instance:

At first I thought that it was just Mr. Yang's English [abilities] that were disappointing, but now I see there are many disappointing things about him....

Isn't your daughter studying in the US?

Haha, so Yang Rui is really this big a dumbass. A dumbass pretending to be cool but actually a Boxer.

So this is the quality of CCTV? Anyway, where did you study your English? Do the people there think about you this way?

I want to ask, can you speak Chinese? How can someone so incoherent become a TV host...

More later. I will be interested to see the next few installments of Dialogue -- and which foreigners agree, now, to appear as guests. Hint: They shouldn't.

As promised, will move these to a standalone site when we eventually get one up and running, but until that occurs:

1) Silicon Valley Thanks to Jonathan Weber, long ago my boss at the Industry Standard and now west coast bureau chief for Reuters, for moderating an interesting session last night at the Commonwealth Club in Palo Alto. I believe a video of the speech and Q & A will be available online at some point.

2) Seattle Tonight I will be in yet another of my beloved former home cities, Seattle, in a session with Eric Liu at Town Hall. Hope to see you there.

3) Phoenix Tomorrow night, at another Zócalo event (after a very enjoyable one in Santa Monica on Monday) I will be at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.

4) Asia Sentinel A very thorough review yesterday in Asia Sentinel by John Berthelsen*, who has covered similar techo-nationalism developments in Asia over the decades for the Wall Street Journal and other publications. I'm grateful for the seriousness with which he takes the argument.
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* The Berthelsen and Fallows families share a strange small-world connection. In the fall of 1986, my wife and I had just arrived with our two young sons in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, with plans of spending the next two years based there while I traveled around the region doing reports for the Atlantic.

We had been staying for several weeks in the classic/seedy colonial hotel, the Merlin, while trying to find a permanent place to live. Eventually a wonderful possibility emerged: an old-style colonial rubber-planter's bungalow, complete with whitewashed walls and red-tiled roof, with mango and papaya trees is the spacious yard, and with windows that were open to the elements, so that birds flew right through during the daytime. It was on Lorong Kuda -- "Horse Lane" -- and was right on the edge of the colonial-relic turf horse-racing course then in the middle of town, so that on race days our sons and their friends could watch from a few yards' distance as a clot of racing horses thundered by. We loved that house and every minute of the years we spent there.

Why was it available? It was about to be rented - but the prospective tenants, one John Berthelsen and his wife, had not been able to begin their occupancy. The Malaysian government had just ordered Berthelsen expelled, out of pique at the forthright coverage that he and his fellow Wall Street Journal correspondent, Raphael "Rocky" Pura, had been doing on Malaysian politics. (In those days, the WSJ and International Herald Tribune would often not be delivered at all to newsstands and subscribers, or would show up with pages ripped out, if they displeased the government censors.) The Berthelsens' departure was a loss for them and their readers, but for my family there was a silver lining in strictly real-estate terms. We tried to enjoy the house vicariously on their account.

More about this house and its stormy history another time.

This is not exactly a page from the Glamorous Life of a Journalist chronicles. But it's similar in being a note sent to me in my capacity as guy who works at a magazine. The picture of baby bulldogs (from here) is my own bonus contribution, for your benefit in envisioning the email's offer. The original email was text-only and in its entirety said:

Hello,

I will like to place an advert about my puppies for adoption using the below details.

AD TEXT:  Family Pets M / F Akc Reg. English Bulldog & Terrier Yorkshires for adoption. Please email me at [xxxx]@yahoo.com contact asap if interested.


DURATION:2 weeks

Kindly get back to me with the total cost for the duration mentioned that's if you can run it for free. Once i read from you i will forward you my credit card details for the payment of the ad.

Regards,

The probability that this is legit seems very low. But what's the angle? Is it the first step in some Spanish Prisoner-style long con? Would merely replying to the mail address somehow compromise your computer? Or could this, against the odds, be what it purports to be, an innocent query from someone who loves little dogs? I may reveal the address later on if you want to take the next research step on your own.

[Please see update below.] After a 5 am airport checkin, my thoughts naturally turn to: Armageddon, despair, the bleak inevitabilities of life. Though on the brighter side, the TSA operation at San Diego turns out to have an metal-detector-only line, which for once I managed to sidle towards and make my way through without being intercepted for "random" extra screening.*

Back to the dark side: the Spring 2012 issue of Rand Review, from the Rand corporation, has published an article on the threats posed by Iran and the ways to deal with them. Please read the whole thing, which elaborates on this opening premise:

An Israeli or American attack on Iranian nuclear facilities would make it more, not less, likely that the Iranian regime would decide to produce and deploy nuclear weapons. Such an attack would also make it more, not less, difficult to contain Iranian influence.

As a reminder of the main point: a nuclear-armed Iran would be a very bad thing. A military strike on Iran in the name of averting that possibility would similarly be a very bad thing in itself, and in all likelihood would make the original problem even harder to solve. The reason the Iran situation is genuinely so difficult is that both these unpleasant realities apply. Serious proposals for dealing with Iran's ambitions, as opposed to the threats and bluster we have heard from many Israeli and American politicians (and very few military officials in either country), proceed from awareness of both truths.

Update Thomas P.M. Barnett has a recent item on the relative effectiveness of "hard-kill" and "soft-kill" approaches toward Iran:

While I have written that I think Israel will be hard-pressed not to attack in the end, I still maintain - as I have since 2005 - that the soft-kill on Iran will work.  To me, the soft-kill is the detente here, just like it was with the Sovs.  Open up ties, admit the regime is valid, blow off the nuke pursuit (which grants Iran nothing in terms of leverage with anybody - including already nuked-up Israel), and let the connectivity that results do the rest in terms of regime delegitimizing from within leading to eventual democratization.

Ultimately, this strategy - and not Star Wars - brought down the Sovs, and it can do the same on Iran - in far faster order.

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*Yes, I know it is actually random -- even though, for whatever reason, in the past 18 months it has never not happened to me at Dulles. More on screening status of different airports here.

Given that today is Official Publication Day for China Airborne, I am erring on the side of adding some updates. As promised, I will move these items off the "main" site and onto a standalone book-news page once we get that up and running:

1) An enjoyable session last night in at a Zócalo event in Santa Monica. Amazingly quick (and skillful) after-action wrapup provided a few minutes later by an unnamed Zócalo blogger. Find out who this person is, and recruit him or her.

2) Interesting pushback to my excerpt on "What is the Chinese Dream?" from Samuel Crane*  at the Useless Tree blog. Worth reading. *[Previously had name wrong; my apologies.]

3) Conversation with Damien Ma about the indicators to look for, in judging whether China is "changing," and in what direction, on Jennie Rothenberg Gritz's Atlantic video page. For instance: why the sheer bits-per-second difference between internet speed in mainland China versus the rest of Asia is significant in both technical and political terms. (My section on this in the book is called "Did the Brits Ban Steam?")

4) Very nice item by Evan Osnos on his New Yorker "Letter from China" site. I'm honored to be on this list.

5) A quirky list that I'm also honored to be on but which I offer mainly for its inside-baseball anthropological value.

6) And -- thanks for asking -- the bags did eventually arrive from United, 36 hours after we checked them in and about ten minutes before I left for the Zocalo.

Thanks all around; if you're in San Diego/La Jolla this evening, hope to see you at the Revelle Forum.

News has piled up fast about the filibuster in the past two weeks, and I am way behind in taking note of it. While I have ten minutes at a computer just now -- and am not in a taxi, in a security line, in a green room, or in some other fashion enjoying the delights of new-city-each-day travel -- here is a quick update on some relevant reading tips:

1) Ezra Klein on the lawsuit Common Cause is initiating, on grounds that abuse of the filibuster has risen to the level of unconstitutional offense. (More info from Common Cause here.) Klein's item also has this explaino-graph:


2) Greg Sargent on the blunt anti-false-equivalence article by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein last month (from their book), and the "move along here, nothing to notice" attitude of some of the media outlets who were most directly the objects of Mann and Ornstein's criticism.

3) Harry Reid seeing the light about what filibuster abuse has meant.

Lots more on this topic ahead; just wanting to point out some of the signs of progress, while also indicating that I have not entirely dozed off at the controls.

Other people's travel problems are not interesting™, and thus I will go easy on my latest misadventures* at the hands of United Airlines.

I will say, though, that if I see you either at a Zócalo event in Santa Monica this evening, at 7pm, or tomorrow evening at the Revelle Forum at UCSD, also at 7pm -- and I am wearing something other than the blue jeans and blue-checked shirt I am wearing right now, that will mean one of two things.

Either United Airlines has figured out how to give us back the bags (with a week's worth of clothes, notes, supplies, pills, presents, etc) that my wife and I so innocently entrusted to its care around 6:45am yesterday morning at Dulles airport; or I have found a time to re-outfit myself at one of the fine clothing establishments of greater LA. Stay tuned, or look for the blue-checked shirt.

On the substance front: Rob Cain, of the China Film Biz site, has a very interesting post about the pluses and minuses of the proposed acquisition of the AMC theater chain in America by the Chinese Wanda group. To me the most resonant part of the analysis is why China film makers may have trouble moving from simply throwing money at the international film market -- for instance, by buying up AMC -- to their real goal, which is to create a movie-making industry whose products people in the rest of the world willingly watch. Cain also goes into that topic here. This is parallel to the challenge I was discussing in "What Is the Chinese Dream?" and in my new book as a whole: what it will take for China to move from a "hard-power" economic success to a soft-power, sophisticated-product creator. I had thought briefly about the parallels to the movie industry but not as thoroughly as Cain does. Worth reading.
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* Ah, United. So many millions of miles invested in your "loyalty" program, so little feeling of actual loyalty in the relationship. At the beginning of each flight, passengers see the promo video from the current chairman, Jeff Smisek, saying how excited he is about the new United culture. Most airlines do without CEO-promo as part of the preflight drill; for me these appearances are a regular opportunity to reflect on the difference between the announced exciting new culture and the familiar set-jaw attitude of many (though of course not all) United ground, desk, and cabin crew members. But meanwhile, I have only the highest regard for their baggage crew, in hopes that they get our stuff to us, before we're off to the next place.

On a brighter side thanks to many of my friends involved with Zócalo, including the founding director Gregory Rodriguez; and to Peter Cowhey, my friend and a longtime dean and potentate at UCSD, with whom I'll be talking at the Revelle Forum.

Numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, graph from Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

I mentioned yesterday that picking on "sissies" seemed a familiar part of 1960s-era American high school life as I remembered it, while cutting off someone's hair did not. Many people have written in with contemporary observations. One reader from upstate New York says:

I'm a few months older than [Romney]. The son of a postman and stay-at-home mother, the oldest of eight children (7 boys, my sister in the middle). I attended Catholic grammar and high school, the high school being all boys, then on to a Catholic college...all male but with a "sister" college down the road.

In college, we had our share of 'hippies"...me being one..long hair, wire-rimmed glasses, protests on and off campus against the war and more. All now part of the era's myths, facts and folklore.

I remember an incident on that college campus similar to Romney's but with a different outcome.

Walking on campus one afternoon, I witnessed another long-hair desperately trying to elude a quartet of fellow students chasing him across a parking lot, yelling and laughing, scissors visible.

A funny sight in some ways as all were wearing the required suitcoat and tie. Yep...even in college, at least Catholic colleges.

Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, another student appeared from behind a car. He yelled and ran to step between the chasers and their prey which the group had now cornered. His crew-cut made him instantly recognizable to me as an acquaintance.  The chase ended. No haircut.

I later saw Mike (the crewcut) and asked him what happened. Mike, a military veteran (there were a number of vets on campus back from Nam and elsewhere) told me that he didn't care for "hippie values", but it was unAmerican to tolerate bullies of any kind....

Ganging up on someone reflects a certain cowardice, physical if not moral. Assault is not a "prank."

Several people sent links to this 2005 article by Lanny Davis, about a parallel episode involving George W. Bush at Yale:

George was not just a frat-house party boy. One of my most vivid memories is this: A few of us were in the common room one night. It was 1965, I believe -- my junior year, his sophomore. [And the same year as the reported Romney episode.] We were making our usual sarcastic commentaries on those who walked by us. A little nasty perhaps, but always with a touch of humor. On this occasion, however, someone we all believed to be gay walked by, although the word we used in those days was "queer." Someone, I'm sorry to say, snidely used that word as he walked by.

George heard it and, most uncharacteristically, snapped: "Shut up." Then he said, in words I can remember almost verbatim: "Why don't you try walking in his shoes for a while and see how it feels before you make a comment like that?"

Remember, this was the 1960s -- pre-Stonewall, before gay rights became a cause many of us (especially male college students) had thought much about. I remember thinking, "This guy is much deeper than I realized."

In light of that memory, I wondered last year why Bush chose to exploit the gay marriage issue in his campaign. I'm still not sure, but I think that's what politics sometimes does to a person.

A reader who is one year older than Romney says:

There were 'sissy' kids and, I think, it was generally assumed that they were 'homos' (who knows if they actually were homosexual).  I think the term gay would not have been used.  It is also true that kids can be quite cruel to one another and I'm sure that those who were 'sissies' got more than their share of nastiness directed at them...

So given the context Romney's behavior might have been more acceptable then that it would be now...

His 'apology' seemed genuine enough when I saw it on TV, but ... the 'I'm sorry if I offended anyone" bullshit is getting old.  You assaulted the kid, drove him to the ground and cut off his hair (which he obviously thought was important enough to dye).  What's with the "IF"?

Romney's claim that he didn't know the kid was gay is simply not believable.  With another boy on another occasion he said "atta girl" so this was on his mind and he apparently was offended by homosexuality and out to teach 'them' a lesson. In my public high school, I'm sure most of the kids with homosexual thoughts were well-closeted which made those who were effeminate or 'sissy-like' all the more unusual....

I also don't buy at all Romney's claim that he doesn't remember it.  It is credible that he doesn't remember all the stunts he pulled in high school, but this one involved a group, a physical confrontation and a boy in tears, screaming. (if others have got the story right).  It seems to me an incident like that would stick in one's mind....

It is germane, I think, to the election as it goes to the man's character.  His cruelty to the blind man he walked into the door (and laughed about) and this classmate and his casual attitude toward his now famous dog, bring into question what kind of person he is.  I think that's fair game.

And from a reader who is six years younger than Romney and went to the same public high school I did:

We all did pranks in those years. But we also remember them well. I can't think of a single episode that I witnessed, or perpetrated myself, that I do not recall vividly. These are the kinds of things in your past that stick with you. and by belittling the episode, it only makes things worse.

As it happens, this last reader is my younger brother, on whom I inflicted at least my share of the standard older-brother torments. As I remember and regret. 

As mentioned earlier, soon I'll have a standalone page on our site for info related to my new book China Airborne. For the moment, I'm putting it here.

1) Diane Rehm show podcast. I enjoyed being on Diane Rehm's show two days ago, and the podcast of that hour is here.

2) Economist review. Given my somewhat stormy relationship with the Economist over the decades, I was grateful for a very fair and generous-toned review in the magazine yesterday. Its one point of criticism may reflect a misunderstanding. The magazine's reviewer suggest that I go too far in using aerospace success as a proxy for China's larger maturity and sophistication. Eg:

After all, Switzerland and Costa Rica became robust democracies with flourishing economies without developing jet engines. And the Soviet Union managed a world-class space programme, yet was an economic and political basket case.

My point is a little different. Not every fully mature, high-value economy will have an important aerospace component. Reasons of scale, or history, or comparative advantage can make this unrealistic or undesirable. South Korea is better example of that point, or Australia, than Switzerland, since Switzerland in fact plays a significant role in world aerospace, as do many other European countries. Rather I was arguing the proposition from the other end: if a country decides, as China clearly has, that it wants to be a player in modern commercial aviation, success in that realm depends on a variety of traits that the Chinese economy has yet to display. (I also explain why a space program, like the old Soviet Union's, is "easier" for a country like China to pull off than entering the Boeing/Airbus league.)

Still, my thanks to whoever wrote the review.

3) Yesterday I did an hour-long "live chat" on the Atlantic's site. The transcript is here. Thanks to all for questions. My main discovery: typing as fast as you can for an hour wears out your fingers, and pretty much drains out your brain.

On Monday of this week, I sat next to Peter David, Washington bureau chief of the Economist, at a dinner at the Atlantic's headquarters, in which we heard the CEO of Boeing talk his industry's future and the prospects for American innovation more generally.

Just now I have seen the news that Peter David was killed last night in a car accident. This picture is from the Economist's site, which has that sad disclosure.

I don't have any more information nor any standing as a special friend of Peter David's over the years. [Update: More information from Politico.] But I liked him and respected him, even when sometimes disagreeing with him on political and other matters. My sympathies to his family and colleagues.
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Update Peter David's friend and colleague Clive Crook has a very eloquent tribute.

This is a for-the-record historical observation, since (alas!) I am about the only one on Team Atlantic in a position to offer it.

I am just a few years younger than Mitt Romney (also Bill Clinton and GW Bush -- the three of them all born within an eight-month stretch in the early Baby Boom). So I can remember the era, though not the prep-school atmospherics nor all-boys school dynamics, of the now-infamous Cranbrook haircut story. 

Part of what Mitt Romney has said rings entirely true to me, concerning those times. That "sissy" or "effeminate" kids would have been picked on, but that they wouldn't have been openly known as gay, is how it was. Teenagers were and are cruel, especially to those who seem "different." And in that era, homosexuality as a reason for different-ness wasn't something people talked about. (Skeptical? I give you the closeted art-director Sal, in Mad Men -- and he was in New York.) As I mentioned after Barack Obama's announcement that he had changed his mind on same-sex marriage, it is painful and embarrassing for me to remember the casual "faggot" taunts of those days, and what it must have been like for my friends and schoolmates who were gay but couldn't say so.

So I believe Romney when he says that he wasn't aware then that some of the objects of his "pranks and hijinks" might have been gay. And good for him for saying that he regrets any harm he caused.

But ganging up on someone, holding him down, and against his will cutting off his hair? Even for the time, that would have been unusually cruel.

I knew a lot of tough kids at my big public high school, and I kept my wary distance. They would get in fights and beat people up and generally make others afraid. But the worst you would hear is that someone had gotten stuffed in a locker, or "pantsed" and left in his underwear on the football field, or "pinkbellied" (held down, and slapped on his bare stomach), or, at worst, ganged-up on in the boys' room and dunked head-first in the toilet bowl. All this happened, and fortunately not to me. But the next day, no one would necessarily know about it -- not even the parents, if the kid didn't tell them when he went home. Cutting off someone's hair is different. It's a shaming ritual that is meant to last -- and that the victim must carry around on his person for weeks.

No doubt the dynamics were different, in ways I can't fully imagine, at an all-boys school, and with boarders rather than kids whose parents would say that night, "What happened to you? Who did this???" ["Umm, dad, it was the governor's son..."]

So to end this historical note: cruel teasing of "sissies" sounds unfortunately representative of the era. Cutting off a sissy's hair does not. And assuming it happened, as a number of Mitt Romney's classmates have attested by name, we are left with Romney's claim that he "doesn't remember" the episode. I think it's worse for him if he's telling the truth.

As mentioned yesterday, here is the first in a series of book-tour and book-promo announcements.

I will be on the Diane Rehm show, from WAMU in Washington, starting about 90 minutes from now, at 11am EDT.

This evening I will be in Philadelphia, my native city, at a Philadelphia Council on Foreign Relations event. Details on that, and on appearances around the country over the next two weeks are at this Random House page. In a day or two I expect to have a stand-alone book-info page on this site.

As prep, here are two Atlantic excerpts from the book -- an adventure story, and a policy essay -- and an environmental one in Popular Science. More as they appear.

... I am surprisingly moved by Barack Obama's discussion just now of his "evolved" position on same-sex marriage. I agree with Ta-Nehisi Coates's immediate reaction: that this was a particularly notable, humane, and leader-like stand for him to take on the day after North Carolina's landslide vote for Amendment One and against same-sex marriage. [Update. Also see Jonathan Rauch, who quotes Mark Twain via Harry Truman: "When in doubt, do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest." And Steve Clemons.]

This is a field where I understand the concept of "evolution." When I was a school kid, in the small-town America of the 1950s and 1960s, I had many gay friends -- but of course didn't know that, because it was undiscussable at the time. I am painfully embarrassed at thinking of the commonplace fag/queer jokes and schoolyard taunts of that time, but of course not as pained as my friends who had to laugh along with them. It was not until I was in college that I was aware of having gay friends -- and over the years, as my wife and I have celebrated their marriages (where that was legal) and their non-married partnerships (where it was not), I've come to understand that it is pointless, cruel, unfair, and wrong to deny them the satisfactions, and responsibilities, of committed married life. And as for the idea that same-sex marriage is a "threat" to the stability of marriage as a whole: Come on! I defy anyone to demonstrate that it cracks the top 100 list of forces eroding the institution of marriage.

I am aware that there are various slice-and-dice cynical assessments one could make of the president's comments today. (Why did he take so long? Why did he back off the support he'd expressed in the 1990s? Might this be useful as a wedge issue in the election? It doesn't have any immediate impact since it's still up to the states. And so on.) But the fact remains that five minutes before his announcement, no one could be sure that he would take the step of saying that his personal views had changed. He did -- and it was important, brave, potentially risky, and right. That should be noted. It's a significant day.

The proudly nationalist Global Times has reassuring news for those concerned about the denial of a visa for Melissa Chan, the (excellent) China correspondent for Al-Jazeera, who will soon be leaving Beijing and closing the Al-Jazeera bureau behind her: