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Times Watch for 05/07/03
Pro-Communist Bias…at the Movies!
Joseph Kahn’s Arts section story, “Filming the Dark Side of Capitalism in China,” profiles director Li Yang and his feature film debut, "Blind Shaft,” now being shown at a Manhattan film festival.
Set in a poor coal mining region of northwest China, Kahn writes that the film “offers an unleavened look at the underside of Chinese-style capitalism that was previously available only in print.…based on the misanthropic culture of China's coal mining industry, where death is so prosaic that it loses its power to shock. By official count more than 5,000 miners die every year in explosions, shaft collapses and floods. Many more deaths go unreported by private mine owners who operate without proper licenses or safety equipment.” As opposed to the prudent protective procedures in place during the Mao era.
Of course, back when the Maoist state owned the mines instead of those “private mine owners,” there were no reported deaths due to explosions, shaft collapses and floods—the state owners could never admit to such failures in the country’s crazed race to fill Mao’s nature-defying quotas. Increasing coal output was a major goal of the Communist dictator’s initial “Five-Year Plan,” damn the human cost.
“Mr. Li, 43, said the setting struck him as an ideal metaphor for what he viewed as the loss of values in today's China. He left his country in 1987 to study in Germany and was trained in Cologne as a documentary filmmaker. On his return trips, he said, he was impressed by the rapid pace of economic growth but dismayed by what he saw as China's increasing inhumanity…He said he had grown uncomfortable with the spread of bourgeois values among [Beijing’s] once thriving counterculture.”
Times Watch has never been to China and so can’t speak from experience—but it’s hard to imagine how “thriving” Beijing’s counterculture was in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. Plus, evidence of the warmth and humanity of life under Communism is lacking as well.
It’s quite easy for expatriate Li to criticize Chinese people for wanting a taste of the riches that Li enjoys in the free West. And it would have been easy for the Times Kahn, who’s done his share of economics reporting, to challenge Li on that very point--but Kahn didn’t.
For Joseph Kahn’s story on the Chinese movie “Blind Shaft” in full, click here.
Randy Cohen, who writes an ethics column for the New York Times Magazine, is taking unseemly delight in revelations of Bill Bennett’s gambling habit. On CNN’s “Live from the Headlines” with Paula Zahn Tuesday night, Cohen remarked: “The downfall of a pious scold….has been one of the happiest days of my life.”
When Zahn asks him to explain, he says: “It's delightful to see someone who makes a career out of hectoring other people, out of wagging his finger at them, be held up to the same standards he applies to others…. It's the fire-and-brimstone preacher caught doing exactly what he condemned us for doing. That's the sort of wonderful thing. How can you not enjoy that?” Actually, Bennett, the former education secretary and author of “The Book of Virtues,” has never condemned gambling, so Cohen’s hypocrisy angle doesn’t work.
In April 2002 Cohen revealed the political coloring behind his ethical pronouncements in the left-wing Nation: “Virtue, it turns out, is the exclusive property of the right. This was brought to my attention just a few months after I began writing ‘The Ethicist,’ a weekly column in The New York Times Magazine, when it was denounced by four periodicals, each more right-wing than the last.”
He also bashes “The Book of Virtues,” claiming “the values are Victorian and the tone is cranky nostalgia…To [Bennett] John Henry, the steel-drivin' man, is a story of courage and pride. But while it would have gladdened the heart of, say, Andrew Carnegie, if each of his employees saw it that way--choosing in the face of dreadful working conditions not to petition for improvements, but to work harder, even to work themselves to death--the United Mine Workers might read this story differently. But then, Bennett's heart is with the boss, not the worker (unless the worker is working himself to death); with the general, not the troops.”
Yet Another “Moderate” Liberal at the
Times
At the Times, it appears any white Southern Democrat is automatically a member of the “moderate” club. Yesterday, Times reporter Edmund Andrews lazily labeled liberal ex-Missouri Sen. Jean Carnahan a “centrist.” Today, reporter Adam Nagourney positions Florida Democratic senator (who officially launched his presidential campaign) Bob Graham as a “moderate,” writing: “He has many ingredients of a formidable candidate. He is a moderate Southerner with extensive foreign policy experience in the Senate and two terms as Florida governor.” In fact, Graham sports a lifetime rating of 18 (out of 100) from the American Conservative Union, a liberal record well outside the political mainstream.
For Adam Nagourney’s story on Sen. Bob Graham in full, click here.
E-mail Times Watch Director, Clay Waters, with Times Watch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org