For weeks now, the rumor on the financial pages had been that the Disney Company was under pressure from Chinese government officials. Disney is the co-producer and the distributor of an upcoming film biography of the Dalai Lama being directed by Martin Scorsese.

As China looms on the horizon as the major economic force of the next century, Chinese officials are increasingly disdainful of American “cultural imperialism” — versions of history that might differ from Beijing’s. In sum, China regards its seizure of Tibet in the 1950s as an internal matter and sees any glorification of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled leader, as provocative in the extreme.

Before the controversy became public, the Disney Company, like many other American corporations, had been imagining a near-limitless future in China — Oh brave new world, Oh vast new market! (Forget Kansas, forget France. Imagine every Chinese kid with a stuffed mouse under her arm.) Michael Ovitz, Disney’s president, had even traveled to China to bestow America’s highest honor on the Chinese mainland: The promise of a Disney theme park.

It was bad enough for Disney that Martin Scorsese is directing the Dalai Lama film. Hollywood’s creative community regards Scorsese as nothing less than a national treasure. After all, this is the man who has brilliantly photographed Joe Pesci in various stages of sociopathic rage. In “Casino”, Scorsese’s recent film, we actually saw mobsters being buried alive.

The bigger problem for Disney is the saffron-robed, ever-smiling Dalai Lama. In Hollywood, you can make fun of religion of nearly every sort. You can make fun of nuns. Martin Scorsese can make a movie about Christ that is offensive to fundamentalist Christians. In Hollywood, you can laugh at the Pope or an orthodox rabbi. You can portray an Islamic fundamentalist as a crazed terrorist.

But the Dalai Lama is a different kind of religious presence in Hollywood. He is the pope of the New Age, and Richard Gere is his John the Baptist. Malibu Buddhism — chimes in the breeze — is one of those pieties, like Saint John Lennon or whales, that you dare not violate.

For all the talk this week about how the Mouse had saved artistic expression for America, Hollywood has a dismal record of artistic bravery. For decades, this is the industry that did not dare violate anti-black stereotypes popular in America. And when Senator Joe McCarthy started asking embarrassing questions in the ’50s, Hollywood quickly hoisted up the white flag.

Cynics in the industry this week suspected that, had the news about Chinese displeasure not come out in the open, Disney officials would have complied with Beijing’s will. Disney is a company that famously goes with the flow, casually rewrites classic fiction, even changes history to suit the perceived popular taste.

Think of “Pocahontas,” for example. In real life, as historians are wont to say, Pocahontas was an Indian woman who married a white man, was baptized into the Anglican faith and died in England. But the smart boys at Disney didn’t like that version. And it didn’t suit the orthodoxy of the multi-cultural ’90s when Indians are supposed to be separatists and inclined to die in the same house where they were born. So Disney’s Pocahontas leaves her blond boyfriend and returns to her people.

Disney is currently busy remaking earlier hits. But does anyone imagine that the Disney Company would attempt to remake “Davy Crockett,” its hit of the 1950s? Pollsters inside Disney, after all, must surely be aware of today’s vast and growing Hispanic audience and our “sensitivity” about the history of Texas.

Nonetheless, by mid-week, officials at the Disney Company cleared their corporate throats and insisted that “we have an agreement to distribute (the Dalai Lama film) and we intend to honor it.” Mickey Mouse is now in line to receive one of those humanitarian awards that Hollywood loves to give itself every few weeks at the Beverly Hilton. In the meanwhile, several real questions persist like: What will Disney do the next time? In corporate America, there is such a thing as self-censorship.

Several years ago for, example, Viking-Penguin published Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses,” provoking the ire of the Ayatollah Khomeini who found the novel blasphemous. Viking-Penguin tactfully passed on the chance to publish Rushdie’s book in paperback.

In the new global economy toward which we are all moving, there may be more languages for the Mouse to speak but less and less that the Mouse is willing to say.

Can anyone imagine the Disney Company taking on a difficult Chinese subject in the near future? Executives at Disney have doubtlessly learned their lesson: Stay away from sensitive issues when dealing with trading partners. Stay away from Davy Crockett. And certainly stay away from the Dalai Lama.

In a country dedicated to life, liberty and the pursuit of entertainment, Disney is our grandest wizard. This season, Disney is busy selling the children of America (and their unimaginative parents) stuffed Dalmatian dogs for Christmas. The company that rewrote “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” is, after all, in the business of happy endings.

As one producer friend of mine reminded me this week, “Entertainment companies are not about art; they are mostly about getting people into the dark.”

It was, in sum, quite a remarkable performance even by the standards of
today’s professional athletes, all too many of whom have proved to be thugs, wife-beaters and drug addicts.

Making matters worse was the slap on the wrist Alomar received from league officials and the Oriole management — a brief suspension at the beginning of next season, rather than an immediate one which would have taken him off the field during part of the playoffs, as the umpires had demanded. The affair became a major topic of conversation on talk radio; editorial writers lamented; ordinary people talked about the bad example both the crime and the punishment offered to America’s youth. During last week’s vice-presidential debate, moderator Jim Lehrer pointed to Alomar when he asked whether “something’s gone terribly wrong with the American soul, that we’ve become too mean, too selfish.” It was the only time that Al Gore waxed passionate. “I think (Alomar) should have been severely disciplined, suspended perhaps, immediately. I don’t understand why that action was not taken.”

But blaming Alomar and the crass response of baseball officials misses a larger
point. Baltimore’s fans were not noticeably offended by Mr. Alomar’s
behavior; some even displayed signs of support at subsequent games. If we want to know about incivility on the playing fields, the “American soul” and what’s wrong with our fallen sports heroes, perhaps we’d do better to look around the bleachers at ourselves.

Baseball used to be America’s number-one pastime. It is a game of rules, a ritual of close calls. Sentimentally, we say that we like the game for being slow, gloriously slow, and sweet as a summer day. In fact, we baseball fans have become a restless people, over-stimulated and capable of excitement only when a pitcher aims a ball at a batter and both teams race for the mound, fists flying, for a moment of mayhem.

Because of Alomar’s spectacular hitting and fielding, the Baltimore
Orioles made it to the American League playoffs, where he was roundly booed by ultimately victorious Yankees’ fans. But his was barely the story of the week. The hero turned out to be a 12-year-old kid named Jeff Maier, who reached over the fence and snagged a fly ball, preventing the Oriole’s fielder from possibly catching it and leading the umpire to erroneously rule it a home run. Maier’s action turned the game around. It was also a violation of the rules. But who, except Oriole crybabies, cared?

The kid is a hero. Fans in Yankee Stadium chanted his praise: MVP! The
kid who broke the rules was called “the angel in the outfield” by one New
York tabloid. He ended up on the morning talk shows and the front page of virtually every newspaper in the land. Thus the Alomar affair faded from the sports page and from talk radio.

Still we tell ourselves that Mr. Alomar is the jerk. And we tell ourselves that League officials and team owners are moral cowards. We wring our hands and lament the decline of role models and civility in American life, even as we cheer a 12-year-old kid who broke the rules.

We who sit in the bleachers do not ask embarrassing questions about our own role in the story. Roberto Alomar is us.

© Pacific News Service

Quotes of the day

Ripped pampers?

“We’re seeing this real trend of daddies and babies all through the romance genre right now. This is the sort of nesting version of the romance fantasy.”

– Kay Mussell, professor of literature and American studies at American University.” (From “Forget Macho: Today’s Heroes Love Kids and Rustle Up Dinner,” in
Tuesday Wall Street Journal)

The response has been deafening in its silence. No one complains, except for immigrant advocacy groups and some churchy types. At both the Democratic and Republican conventions, with their ad nauseam appeals to “family,” almost nothing was said about the outside world’s contribution to the American family. The difference between the two presidential candidates
comes down to this: One candidate invokes America’s
past, the other speaks of some sort of “bridge to the future.”
Neither one extols — or even acknowledges — the central role of immigrants in our national life. Such an omission cheapens the heroism of the American experience.

I had the misfortune of following the Democratic Party proceedings in Chicago while making my way through “Undaunted Courage,” Stephen Ambrose’s wonderful book about Thomas Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis and the opening of the American West. It’s unfair, of course, to compare either Bob Dole or Bill Clinton to Thomas Jefferson. But it is not unfair to compare America at the start of the 19th century with our nation at the close of the 20th century.

American pioneers in 1800 were the illegal immigrants of their time. They were rough and rude. But what brave lives! And what a visionary Jefferson was, buying the Louisiana Territory; dreaming of a place for the Indian in the new nation; sending the young Mr. Lewis to find the Pacific Ocean. These original immigrants, the early Americans, were unafraid of the horizon. They were moved (literally) by curiosity. Family values? Meriwether Lewis, as a teenager, abandoned his mother in Virginia to hack his way through the wilderness.

By the 1840s, Anglo-Protestant America was wrestling with the newer wave of immigrants — the northern Europeans, the Irish. Could they ever be good Americans? Could a Catholic or a Jew?
Ultimately, of course, America risked the future. And, thanks to the immigrants’ contributions, America won.

As the son of immigrants, I am not unaware of all that this country gives the newcomer — opportunity, freedom, safety. But I am struck by how much America still gets from the immigrant, especially the poor, all of them part of the American family, and still among the most optimistic. Turbaned cab drivers on the streets of New York, Korean grocers in the troubled neighborhoods of Los Angeles, Mexican teenagers on precarious scaffolding in San Francisco — these are the people driven by a lust for the future, who remind us of what America has always been, a place of new beginnings, a land of explorers.

Maybe we don’t have an “immigrant problem” but a native-born problem. We are frightened by these immigrants who are taking jobs all over our cities, out-working us, undercharging for their labor. All over the world — from Tijuana to Singapore — the poor are working, assembling our televisions and our jogging shoes. It is their industriousness that troubles us.

Perhaps we are entering a post-American America. After all, we are on average 33 years old. In the 19th century we were a teenage nation. And the Census Bureau notes that we are moving less, settling down. We have a mortgage and two kids who need to be taken to soccer practice. We have governors like Pete Wilson who speak our minds. Our teenagers are no longer exploring
the wilderness, they are taking acid.

Meanwhile, there is a new rush by immigrants to apply for citizenship. You see them on the evening news, standing in line. They sense, after the passage of the welfare bill, a new mood — a
disinterest? a hostility? — toward immigration, legal or illegal.
“I don’t feel persecuted,” one woman, a Russian Jew, was quoted as saying. “But there is a sense we’re not welcome.”

Richard Rodriguez is the author of “Days of Obligation: An
Argument with My Mexican Father” (Viking-Penguin). His essay, “True West: Relocating the horizon of the American frontier,” is in the September issue of
Harper’s Magazine.

© Pacific News Service

Quotes of the day

Citizens of the world

“Assume that we continue to ship entire industries overseas to other countries, then a major
war breaks out 10 years from now. We go to Puerto Rico and ask them politely if
they will give us medicines and pharmaceuticals for our troops who are wounded in combat.
Obviously, we have to manufacture these goods within our borders to defend this great
country.”

– Ross Perot, on the campaign trail in Salt Lake City, apparently unaware that Puerto Rico has been a U.S. territory since 1898. (From “Perot Accuses Clinton of Playing Politics in Iraq,” in Thursday’s New York Times)

More importantly, the Greek festivals that began in the eighth century B.C. deepened the animosity between city-states, were often marred by cheating athletes and no glory ever attached to the
loser; you got the gold or you got nothing but shame. There was some similarity when I was a kid and the local newspaper would put a box score of Soviet medals versus U.S. medals on the front page — the Olympics as the Cold War by other means.

Now we have various swimmers and track stars in magazines with not much more on their beautiful bodies than a Speedo. Once the gold gets distributed, the lucky winners’ beautiful sweat-soaked bodies will be plastered on billboards, courtesy of Evian bottled water. Meanwhile, we have million-dollar basketball players impersonating “amateur athletes” and monstrous prepubescent gymnasts with pitiless eyes competing to be the new Nadia.

Who will be the new Nadia?

Agents all over Atlanta are waiting to see. Become a winner (only
the gold standard matters) and you’ll get some sort of contract from Nike or Coke — the mythical gods of commerce. But it’s
all a human business. Nothing very noble about any of it. Yet the
Olympics gets clothed in fake pagan ideals, courtesy of Delta Airlines,
the official carrier. Torches; white pigeons flying over black Atlanta; Gloria Estefan singing this year’s official Olympic song.

“Let the games begin!” Please, God, let’s get it all over with.

) Pacific News Service

Quote of the day

Not a medal winner

“It’s an amazingly ambitious goal to provide all of this information in real time to the whole world. That said, dropping your shorts in front of the entire world is significantly more embarrassing than doing it privately.”

– Roger B. McNamee, principal of Integral Capital Partners, a California high-tech investment firm, on the failure of IBM’s computer systems to provide, as promised, complete and accurate Olympics information to the Internet and other media outlets.

Justice Scalia’s petulance came in reaction to the 6-3 Supreme Court decision that put the final nail in the coffin of a 1992 Colorado ballot initiative prohibiting anti-gay discrimination laws. As a homosexual man, I was relieved by the ruling, although I do not forget that the Colorado provision was passed by 53 percent of that state’s voters, or that similar provisions are pending in Idaho, Oregon and Washington, and are in effect locally in Florida.

Yet I’m also aware of a deep change going on in America, which is as widespread as it is surprising: Americans — men and women, married and not, young and old — are re-examining what it means to be sexual creatures. Mama’s decision to leave the kitchen, to be more than mother and wife, to work as an equal with men, may be the most revolutionary change of recent years. But the gay
movement is the most inflammatory evidence of the same sexual meltdown. Gays, therefore, must be punished for the sins of the wife.

Justice Scalia provocatively chose a German word to describe what is happening in this country: “Kulturkampf” — a culture war. What I see is an astonishing change. I meet homosexual men and women now in every corner of American life. Everywhere people are “out” and, more remarkably, they are being accepted by their families, their friends and their co-workers.

Yes, there are still cases of parents not talking to their gay son or daughter. But I am more impressed by the accommodation taking place throughout this country. I think of two Catholic families in California. They have been united in recent years by two men — lovers dying of AIDS. There they were, the families of both lovers — 50 smiling faces in a Christmas photograph, three or four generations, standing alongside the two thinning men. That is the way the sexual revolution is taking place — by the Christmas tree, within the very family that Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson invoke for their own purposes as unchanging and rigid.

It is, paradoxically, because so many Americans are growing unafraid of homosexuality that the counter-movement has grown. Homosexual activists tend to forget this. They incline to portray the gay movement as “counter-cultural.” I think, rather, that the politicians and religious leaders who parade under the banners of “Tradition” and “Family” have become the counter-culture — and they know it.

I am not being overly optimistic. I suspect that the great, perhaps even calamitous struggle in the next century will be cultural, pitting the secular against the fundamentalist. In America, the sense of being in a new minority has galvanized “traditionalists.” They got out the vote in Colorado. They did so because they feel under threat. Much of America is no longer compliant to their will.

Do I think there will be more anti-gay legislation passed? Yes. Do I think that there are still judges in America who remain preoccupied by what I do in the dark? Yes. But the other day I received a letter from my first-grade teacher, a Catholic nun now in her 80′s. “About your being gay,” she writes, “I don’t have any problem with it. I only pray that you will be a good man.”

Quote of the day

Fame is the spur

“I met (Richard) Dreyfuss, (Michelle) Pfeiffer, Jack Nicholson, Roseanne. (Carrie) Fisher was my celebrity trainer. She gave me good advice, and it worked. Roseanne helped too. There were things that were going on that I didn’t understand. I didn’t know how to deal with people.”

– Losing O.J. Simpson prosecutor and best-selling author, Christopher Darden, telling Buzz magazine what it’s like to rub shoulders with Hollywood’s in-crowd.