Rice Stirs Chinese

A couple of days ago I was walking past the North Cathedral in Cork down towards Gerald Griffen Street where there used to be a Magdelen Laundry where women who got pregnant outside marriage were imprisoned. Today it’s a charity shop where you can probably get a second hand copy of the Da Vinci Code which suggests none too subtly that Mary Magdelen wasn’t a prostitute after all and may have given birth to the sons of the son of man.

Across the street is scrawled on one of the walls in green marker the words “all priests are pedophileses” (sic). As I was walking past this sign I saw a man of the cloth walk straight past it and not bat a an eyelid. Just 10 or 20 years ago he could have had the youth who was responsible for this mispelt half-truth sent to an industrial school like the one he’d just walked past.

Needless to mention, this made me think how bad George W Bush and all the people around him are.

If anybody wonders who I hate the Bush junta so much, it’s because they appear to me to be taking America to a place that Ireland has struggled to get away from, where the church had a virtual veto over government policy.


Bush owes his election as president to a number of factors; an accident of birth which made him the son of a former president, support from big business and the oil industry, but it appears to many that the tipping point may been support from the religious right.

In polls conducted after the election, around a quarter of the electorate cited “moral issues” as their reason for voting for Bush, as if they believed that only they knew what was right, which many of them certainly do. It’s not as if the rest of us want a government that does what’s morally wrong, just that we have a different set of values to them.

Bush’s intervention in the Terry Schiavo case has been described as “payback” to the religious right. Ted Kennedy used to say that “ya dance with them that brung ya” and it’s clear what the position of the moral majority on this issue is. Bush stated this position as follows: “err on the side of life”. It’s clear that life is sacred to him, particularly when it’s the life of a wealthy, white, American woman with health insurance. It matters less to him if people die in Iraq as a result of his foreign policy or die in Africa as a result of his trade policies, in Europe as a result of his environmental policies, or in the US because of his health care or gun law polices.

Though Bush has never been to the third world, he must know that there’s a lot of people there who go without food, yet he seems to see nothing amiss about force-feeding a woman who’s been brain-dead for many years when so many are hungry. Neither can he see the irony of the fact that so many fully conscious people die every year because so many of them can’t afford basic health care.

One ironic thing the euthanasia argument is that the man who’s been it’s biggest opponent over the last 25 years is a man who could surely do with having his life terminated soon, Karol Wojika. Yet it seems that we’re going to be greeted with the spectacle of the Pope’s slow, agonising death over a protacted period.
When I was “studying” religion in School, I was “taught” that euthanasia meant killing of disabled people as practiced by the Nazis. Oddly enough, my hysterical, hyperkinetic religion teacher insisted that we had an obligation to keep children on life support until she read in one of her religious doctrine books that this wasn’t the case. Until relatively recently, the official position of the catholic chuch was that anyone who killed himself would go to hell, though as hell is where most suicidal people are coming from, that probably wouldn’t have bothered them so much. What is that Hamlet says? “who would fardels bear,To grunt and sweat under a weary life,But that the dread of something after death,The undiscover'd country from whose bournNo traveller returns, puzzles the willAnd makes us rather bear those ills we haveThan fly to others that we know not of?"

I’m in favour of the right-to-die because I think human beings are rational, conscious beings that know when their quality of life is so poor that they feel their lives are no longer worth living. It seems odd to me that the people who oppose euthanasia are the same people who believe in an afterlife. As someone who doesn’t accept the Garden of Eden anthropocentic myth it seems bizarre that Bush is hell-bent on destroying the environment while promoting human population growth.

But here’s an ironic thing: it seems that when Bush was governor of Texas, he actually signed a bill into law that allowed doctors the right to terminate the lives of terminally ill patients. But I don’t expect this to be reported on Fox News.

Meanwhile other members of the Republican Party bid to out-do their leader for hypocrisy. Condoleeza Rice has been lecturing Europeans again, this time for selling arms to China. These are, of course, the same Europeans that Donald Rumsfeld was so dismissive of in the run-up to the Iraq war.

I don’t think that Europe should be selling arms to China either. I think arms dealers are the scum of the Earth, which is why so many of them donated money to Bush’s campaign. But just as John Kerry told Bush that being lectured by him about fiscal discipline was like being lectured by Tony Soprano on ethics, being warned by America not to sell arms to repressive regimes is like being told to behave by Bart Simpson.

Rice seems to be shocked by the notion that her cultural kin in Europe could sell arms to a country that might one day be at war with the United States. What war with China would that be, then? Obviously the one they’re preparing for by arming the governments of South Korea, Nepal, Krygistan and Uzbekistan.

What has she got against China? Fear of the so-called Red Peril runs deep in American society, as it has to a lesser extent in Europe, where we’ve hidden our fear that China has always had a more sophisticated civilisation than ours with petty rascism. Fear of China was probably a major factor in America’s descision to invade Vietnam.

So what are the issues today? Tibet is one, which is reasonable, as the US has never oppressed Indians or Blacks. Unfair trade practices is another, which is also reasonable, as they don’t subsidise their own industries to the hilt, do they?

Another is copyright issues. Here I have to take issue, as I’ve been to Vietnam and bought a crap-load of cheap CDs and DVDs which probably originate from China, and I’m not a bit ashamed of this. In fact I was kind of proud that I managed to see all those movies without giving a brass farthing to the likes of News Corp or AOL Time Warner.

Maybe the sanctimonious Ms Rice isn’t aware that the US didn’t introduce copyright protection for foreign authors until 1892, when it was already the world’s foremost economic power.

Maybe she’s unaware that Europeans became the foremost power in the world by stealing China’s invention of gunpowder.

Maybe she’s unaware that Rice comes from East Asia originally and that if she was consistent she’d change her name to “tobacco”

What the rest of us should be aware is that the US is trying to force Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) on the rest of the world which could lead to things like the human genome, the basis of life itself, being patented by private companies. If the EU really wants to stick it to the US, they should take China’s lead and cease their craven acceptance of these patent laws.

But I’m not going to hold my breath, which will soon be the property of Monsanto if the US gets it’s way.