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发帖数: 8087 | 1 From WikiChina
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/opinion/01friedman.html
While secrets from WikiLeaks were splashed all over the American newspapers,
I couldn’t help but wonder:
What if China had a WikiLeaker and we could see what its embassy in
Washington was reporting about
America? I suspect the cable would read like this:
Washington Embassy, People’s Republic of China, to Ministry of Foreign
Affairs Beijing, TOP SECRET/Subject:
America today.
Things are going well here for China. America remains a deeply politically
polarized country, which is
certainly helpful for our goal of overtaking the U.S. as the world’s most
powerful economy and nation. But
we’re particularly optimistic because the Americans are polarized over all
the wrong things.
There is a willful self-destructiveness in the air here as if America has
all the time and money in the world
for petty politics. They fight over things like — we are not making this up
— how and where an airport
security officer can touch them. They are fighting — we are happy to report
— over the latest nuclear arms
reduction treaty with Russia. It seems as if the Republicans are so
interested in weakening President Obama
that they are going to scuttle a treaty that would have fostered closer U.S.
-Russian cooperation on issues
like Iran. And since anything that brings Russia and America closer could
end up isolating us, we are
grateful to Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona for putting our interests ahead of
America’s and blocking Senate
ratification of the treaty. The ambassador has invited Senator Kyl and his
wife for dinner at Mr. Kao’s
Chinese restaurant to praise him for his steadfastness in protecting America
’s (read: our) interests.
Americans just had what they call an “election.” Best we could tell it
involved one congressman trying to
raise more money than the other (all from businesses they are supposed to be
regulating) so he could tell
bigger lies on TV more often about the other guy before the other guy could
do it to him. This leaves us
relieved. It means America will do nothing serious to fix its structural
problems: a ballooning deficit,
declining educational performance, crumbling infrastructure and diminished
immigration of new talent.
The ambassador recently took what the Americans call a fast train — the
Acela — from Washington to New
York City. Our bullet train from Beijing to Tianjin would have made the trip
in 90 minutes. His took three
hours — and it was on time! Along the way the ambassador used his cellphone
to call his embassy office,
and in one hour he experienced 12 dropped calls — again, we are not making
this up. We have a joke in the
embassy: “When someone calls you from China today it sounds like they are
next door. And when someone
calls you from next door in America, it sounds like they are calling from
China!” Those of us who worked in
China’s embassy in Zambia often note that Africa’s cellphone service was
better than America’s.
But the Americans are oblivious. They travel abroad so rarely that they don
’t see how far they are falling
behind. Which is why we at the embassy find it funny that Americans are now
fighting over how
“exceptional” they are. Once again, we are not making this up. On the
front page of The Washington Post on
Monday there was an article noting that Republicans Sarah Palin and Mike
Huckabee are denouncing Obama
for denying “American exceptionalism.” The Americans have replaced working
to be exceptional with talking
about how exceptional they still are. They don’t seem to understand that
you can’t declare yourself
“exceptional,” only others can bestow that adjective upon you.
In foreign policy, we see no chance of Obama extricating U.S. forces from
Afghanistan. He knows the
Republicans will call him a wimp if he does, so America will keep
hemorrhaging $190 million a day there.
Therefore, America will lack the military means to challenge us anywhere
else, particularly on North Korea,
where our lunatic friends continue to yank America’s chain every six months
so that the Americans have to
come and beg us to calm things down. By the time the Americans do get out of
Afghanistan, the Afghans
will surely hate them so much that China’s mining companies already
operating there should be able to buy
up the rest of Afghanistan’s rare minerals.
Most of the Republicans just elected to Congress do not believe what their
scientists tell them about man-
made climate change. America’s politicians are mostly lawyers — not
engineers or scientists like ours — so
they’ll just say crazy things about science and nobody calls them on it. It
’s good. It means they will not
support any bill to spur clean energy innovation, which is central to our
next five-year plan. And this
ensures that our efforts to dominate the wind, solar, nuclear and electric
car industries will not be
challenged by America.
Finally, record numbers of U.S. high school students are now studying
Chinese, which should guarantee us
a steady supply of cheap labor that speaks our language here, as we use our
$2.3 trillion in reserves to
quietly buy up U.S. factories. In sum, things are going well for China in
America.
Thank goodness the Americans can’t read our diplomatic cables.
Embassy Washington.
Maureen Dowd is off today. |
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