Sheridan: Con-Law

MORAL PYGMY AWARD OF 2008 NOMINATIONS

With apologies to the entire African Pygmy community for having done nothing wrong to deserve the honor, yet having their name used to denote shortness of stature in other realms, the first two nominees for our Moral Pygmy Award of 2008 are:

1.   Pres. George W. Bush, for vetoing the Congressional anti-torture, anti-water-boarding bill;  he has single-handedly turned us from the good-guy of the world to the bad.  Thanks, W, we really needed that.

2.  Gov. Elliot Spitzer, the scourge of Wall Street, the man who brought morality to moguls, the man who took no prisoners when it came to moral impurity, the man who anticipated the Vatican in regarding it a sin to acquire waay-too-much money for one's own good, for consorting with a high-priced call girl, if you believe the federal wiretap that made him Client 9 in Room 871 of the Mayflower Hotel in D.C.  There's forgivable hypocrisy and unforgivable; Spitzer seems to have struck a nerve because his public posture before the fall lacked a certain humility that may have made a similar transgression in a less moralistic persona a bit more understandable in the French sense, quoted by Tolstoy in War and Peace,  "to understand all is to forgive all."
We dunno what demons impelled Gov. Spitzer to blow his career to smithereens, somewhat along the lines, almost, of Bill Clinton and Jack Kennedy.  We don't say this about Franklin D. Roosevelt because he led us out of a great depression and to victory in a terrible war that, for once, we didn't start, so he can have all the mistresses he wanted with no complaint from us.

Earlier I'd proposed to the S.F. Chronicle that it support this new award, but events have overtaken their slow-footedness and we've got it going here instead.

Now we need a trophy, or at least a t-shirt to send to the recipients.

Oh, for a logo for the Moral Pygmy awards, what shall it consist of, I wonder...

The late U.S. Representative, Tom Lantos, from San Mateo and San Francisco, inspired the award by calling Jerry Yang, founder of Yahoo, a moral pygmy for having provided the People's Republic of China with the means of identifying an anonymous dissident (from San Mateo) allowing him to be arrested and beaten.  I suppose the Anne Frank Award people might have wanted to recognize Yang as well, as they might the people who turned the Frank family of Amsterdam in to the Nazi authorities, sending them to their death in the gas chambers.  There is an Anne Frank Award that goes to squealers, isn't there, in the face of laws that beg to be violated? 

Which ones are those, I wonder.

The year is early, yet, as we have over nine months to go.  Think of all the opportunities to screw up that we still have coming, and so many people competing for the honor, usually without being conscious of it, which is even more remarkable.  It's not like they were out there trying to be recognized.

Reminds me of Sen. Proxmire's Golden Fleece Award for the most wasteful government spending.

Let's see, what other interesting awards are there?  The Darwin Award, that goes to people who succeed in killing themselves in new and ever stupider ways, hopefully before they have a chance to pass along their genes and contaminate the gene pool,   Jean Poule, French, I believe.

MORAL PYGMY AWARD PROPOSED

"History is going to judge us all," said Congressman Bill Delahunt (D-MA), commenting on the administration's painting of all opponents of its harsh measures as "soft on terrorism."  See the article on the continuation below.

I nominate Pres. George W. Bush as the first recipient of the Moral Pygmy Award.  This award is inspired by
the late U.S. Representative Tom Lantos's condemnation of Yahoo founder Jerry Yang's burning of an anonymous Chinese dissident by turning over information to the Chinese government necessary to locate him.

It would be nice if the S.F. Chronicle established such an award, provided that the Pygmies don't mind being associated with either Pres. Bush or an award that draws on their low physical stature as an indicator of moral unfitness.

So I've suggested to the Chron in an emailed letter to the editor last evening.

MORAL PYGMY

When internet search firm Yahoo provided the repressive nation of China, where it does profitable business to the tune of million$, with the means of tracking down resident on-line critics of the Communist regime, resulting in the prolonged detention and beating of at least one dissident, an American resident with family in his district, U.S. Congressman Tom Lantos (http://tinyurl.com/2tkeca), a Holocaust survivor, convened a congressional hearing during which he famously told Yahoo founder Jerry Yang that he was a "moral pygmy," for handing over the means to track down and persecute opponents of the way China is.

One could view Yahoo's behavior, with policies set by Yang and his board, as the moral equivalent of the person who gave up Anne Frank to the Nazis, and her death, along with the lives of her family, in a concentration camp.  The notoriety stemming from the charge, "moral pygmy" could not have been comfortable for Yang who later settled with the man's family.

Lantos, 89, a former teacher, who represented San Mateo county and parts of San Francisco, recently died of cancer.  His critique of Yang was repeated in Lantos's obituaries.

China, which is hosting the next summer Olympics in August, always one of the world's premier political events, has for years been investing heavily in Africa where grow oil and food.  However, China has been doing precious little to stem the genocide, lawlessness, and violence, occurring in Darfur, Sudan.

As a result, Stephen Spielberg, the reigning Hollywood producer and director, who has produced Jaws, ET, and Schindler's List, a film about the Holocaust, among many others, has resigned in protest from China's Olympic advisory committee. This resulted in considerable news coverage and commentary.  Had Spielberg not demonstrated his protest in a manner sure to attract widespread attention, he could justly have been accused himself of being a moral pygmy, a distinction he would have hated.  So he resigned, and the world took note. So, apparently, did China, whose controlled press began to attack Spielberg.

However, a few weeks after Spielberg's dramatic call to attention, I read that China was taking steps to help stem the genocide in Darfur, Sudan.

I was amazed, but not exactly surprised. 

As noted, China has the Olympics coming up soon.  It has just completed building the world's grandest airport terminal in Beijing to greet the visitors from all over the world to the economically resurgent country which has grown from coolies planting rice under a Communist umbrella, the kind that keeps the sun from shining on a country.  China has gone from rice grower to the world's largest manufacturer, with skyscrapers jutting up on former pig farms.

China has come a long way in the past several decades and wants to put its best face forward to the foreign visitors to the games and the whole world watching on TV.  Assuming a colonialist policy abroad in Africa, in which China invests money but withdraws all profit, with little or none going towards bringing its economic colony, essentially, into the modern world, will never do.  So China appears to have heard Spielberg's foul-whistle and realizes that the world watches to see its response.

The credit goes to Spielberg for so deftly calling attention to a blind spot among the people who had borrowed his prestige in order to aggrandize their authoritarian, undemocratic, rule.

Good for Spielberg, who, by his example, teaches what it's like to be an American who can make a difference in the world, and takes the chance confronted with a problem.  He could've ducked, dissembled, or hidden, but he stuck his neck out and sacrificed a prominent position with China, a position which could have been lucrative, as Spielberg probably sells a lot of movies in the People's Republic, population over a billion pairs of eyes.  The risk he took was in earning the disfavor of the governing authorities which have the power to control Spielberg's distribution network, and to police the counterfeiting and selling of his products.  Yet he took this risk and the result has been, not the destruction of Spielberg in China, but a change in China's human rights policy.

That's big.

Very big.

The S.F. Chronicle article on Lantos's death which contains the remark he made to Jerry Yang is at:

http://tinyurl.com/2v8u88

An article from Australia noting China's insistence that its foreign policy in Darfur is parallel to that of the West is at:

http://tinyurl.com/398r26

A S.F. Chronicle article noting that there has, in fact, been a backlash against Spielberg in China, is at:

http://tinyurl.com/2t6hgh

An article from the S.F. Chronicle dated Feb. 22, 2008 by Verne Kopytoff provides an overview of the Yang-Yahoo controversy in which the corporation burns the dissident and Lantos calls Yang and his corporate counsel moral pygmies, appears below.