Oh, Those Chinese . . . How Could They?
August 14th, 2008
There’s been some talk about the Chinese government’s manipulation of the broadcast of the Olympics opening ceremonies, in particular the fact that they switched another girl, who was deemed prettier, for the 7-year-old girl who had been chosen to sing the opening anthem, and made the first girl lip-synch to the second-girl’s voice.
Jay Nordlinger, best known for putting stupid things to say in George W. Bush’s mouth, contributes his insights to The Corner
What a thing to do to a seven-year-old girl — tell her she’s too ugly to appear in public, though the party will be happy to use her voice. That’s one of the worst things about Communist and dictatorial regimes: They are cruel to little girls.
He goes out of his way to note that he’s not kidding about this, and has in fact made the same argument elsewhere. For some reason, he also draws a parallel between this outrage and the casting practices of US opera companies, after first working in a racist joke. I don’t understand the way his mind works, but he’s a senior editor at NR, which explains a lot.
What I want to know is, how is this different from the far creepier practices of pre-teen beauty pageants that are ubiquitous in the US? It’s not like ranking and selecting girls for a combination of both talent and looks is somehow peculiarly Chinese, or that, in the end, such vicious meat markets don’t always wind up dividing winners and losers by tiny, superficial criteria. And casting adult performers for roles based on their looks also goes without saying; things are a bit different in the opera world, but I never understood why anyone acted surprised by it.
Suddenly this cruel insult by the Chinese is an offense to womanhood worldwide. The Corner is taking a stance against tracking girls’ careers by superficial physical standards, while they also vociferously oppose Titles IX and X here at home. Their characteristic Red-baiting is literally reflexive: it bypasses the upper nervous system entirely and just spews out as an uncontrollable muscle spasm. As Obama said in a different context, but with universal relevance: “It’s as if they take pride in being ignorant.”
It’s oppressive, and sad, that Politburo members can pass personal judgment on who meets the attractiveness standards of the Chinese government, but I can’t imagine it’s in any way better - and on sheer volume alone it’s probably much worse - that we’ve farmed that out to a profit-making system that preys on every bit of the cynicism, celebrity-worship, and body-image pathology that our society pressure-cooks girls in from birth. The Miss America pageants are said to be the single largest source of college scholarship money for women in the US - a travesty in itself, that speaks volumes about how much we care about what aspects of women’s lives - but each pageant, at each level, has just one winner, chosen in pretty much exactly the same way the Olympics singer was chosen in China. At least that little girl won’t lose her chance at an education over this.
Categories: Culture, Education, General, How Capitalism Will Ruin You, News & Current Events, Olympics | 10 Comments
