Join Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Jack Fowler as they explore the removal of the former Chinese president from a CCP meeting, our border crisis and the late Cesar Chavez, and the unspeakable things in American culture.
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Victor, regarding your comment about the tone of surprise coming from US business entities doing business with the Chinese, when they discover that the Chinese do not always honor intellectual rights, business agreements, etc.: I’m an alum of Michigan Law School, which prides itself (or at least used to pride itself) as a leader in research and teaching international trade law. Over the past decades, their alum magazine would feature articles boasting of faculty and alum establishing trade ties and negotiating various agreements with the Chinese. There would seem to be occasional comments in these articles expressing dismay, surprise and wonder that the Chinese would not always live up to their commitments. The tone of the comments always mystified me. Were they really that gullible? Did greed blind them to the pitfalls? Or did they fashion their comments so as not to offend any Chinese readers and trigger more breaches of their agreements? I always wondered.
L.A. has always had a tendency to be Balkanized, but not not only by race but by culture and ethnicity. Not reported by the media was 3 days of riots at Roosevelt High School between Chicanos and Central Americans in 1979. It began when a soccer ball at the playing field where illegal alien kids played soccer during lunch went astray and hit some chollos at the school smoking area. My friend who is Japanese-American joined the chollos in beating up any “Binche Huey” they could find. Why I asked him? And his answer was because they were invaders and he had the obligation as a lifelong homeboy to protect East El Lay. Don’t you see, it’s fear of change because deep down humans think Democracy is a great concept but fall back on survival of the species like in prison when threatened. I am guilty as charged as I find myself in circle-the-wagon mode of many Conservative Catholics. I am not sure there is a way back to the pre-Obama days.
Black violence in the inner city is largely a “learned” behavior. Racial disciplinary quotas have been in place in the public schools since the early 1990s. I witnessed a 10th grader who was on the ground and being kicked by a group of 8 or 9 boys from the entering 9th grade class during the lunch break at the start of school year in the mid-1990s. Nothing happened to the boys in the gang. An administrator excused this negligence by explaining they had a quota for discipline, and the actions were so egregious that if the gang member were charged, the school would have exhausted their quota for the remainder of the year. As it was, no bones were broken nor teeth dislodged, so the victim was taken to the school nurse, band-aids applied and sent on his way. It only got worse as time passed. I stopped coaching at the school after the hydraulic brakes lines were unscrewed while I was helping coach the gymnastic team. I discovered the sabotage while driving home. The emergency brakes still worked, and my repair shop was half a block off the freeway. I subsequently coached a number of black kids from that school in a club my wife and I ran, and they were squared away. One received a college scholarship. Sadly, the younger brother of this boy was shot and killed at age 12 as he steppef of a metro bus. It was a case of mistaken identity. The black shooter, who was tried and convicted, is probably a free man by now. Nothing but tears for me now when I look back.
Dr. Hanson’s comment about prejudice against darker skinned blacks by other blacks reminded me of my shock, maybe 20 years ago, when actor Yaphet Kotto (Homicide: Life on the Street) bitterly complained about that very treatment against him. To flog an obvious dead horse, a trait of insecure people has always involved, “I may be an idiot that can’t get a job but YOU have freckles!”