Latest News Clips 2017.03.06

                  

1.      Analysis: Trump shocks Congress with a speech that stuck to script

The apocalyptic vision of ‘American carnage’ on show at the inauguration was replaced with the kind of broad, sunny platitudes Trump has rarely indulged in

The Guardian  1 March 2017

The most shocking part of Donald Trump’s speech on Tuesday was that there was nothing shocking at all.

Speaking before a joint session of Congress to an audience of senators, congressmen and women, Supreme Court justices and generals, Trump mostly stayed on script. He did not really brag about the size of his electoral victory (except to declare that in 2016 “the earth shifted beneath our feet”). He did not attack the media or go on any of his frequent verbal detours.

President declares ‘the time for trivial fights is behind us’ in an attempt to offer an optimistic vision to all Americans

Trump – with only a few slips into “lawless chaos” – even mostly managed to avoid the dark, apocalyptic tones that punctuated his acceptance speech at the Republican convention and his inaugural. There were no references to American carnage or claims that illegal drugs are now cheaper than candy bars.

Instead, he spoke in the broad sunny platitudes typical of most politicians but that he, the anti-politician, has rarely indulged in. Trump talked of a future where “our children will grow up in a nation of miracles” and when “we just need the courage to share the dreams that fill our hearts”.

Trump did occasionally escape from the text. The most notable example was when the President said of Ryan Owens, the Navy Seal killed in a recent raid in Yemen whom he mentioned in his speech, was in heaven, pleased with the amount of applause he received. “And Ryan is looking down, right now, you know that? And he’s very happy, because I think he just broke a record,” said Trump. It was undeniably awkward by standards of presidential addresses but would have barely been a footnote in most Trump rally speeches.

The mood in the chamber was entirely unlike a Trump rally. There was little hooting and almost no hollering. No one chanted “lock her up” or “build that wall” and no hecklers were forcibly ejected by security.

Democrats had warned members to avoid booing or heckling the president, and for the most part they did. There were audible guffaws when Trump bragged about “draining the swamp” and groans when he discussed a newly created federal office that serves to advocate for victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants.

But no one shouted “you lie” or audibly disrupted the speech. The most gauche displays where when two Democratic members gave thumbs down signs when Trump called for the repeal and replacement of Obamacare and when New York congressman Joe Crowley shook his hand in the air after Trump said “the time for trivial fights is over”. It was apparently a reference to the many trivial fights that Trump has engaged in, including debates over the size of his hands and the number of people who attended his inauguration.

Many Democratic women notably wore white, the color of suffrage and symbolic of protest and across the chamber, Democrats rarely applauded even for things where they agreed with Trump. In contrast to past speeches to Congress, where presidents received bipartisan applause for noncontroversial platitudes, many Democrats sat on their hands, refusing to acknowledge even the most anodyne statement from the president.

The only Democrat to stand with any frequency was Senator Joe Manchin, a moderate who is running for re-election in 2018 in West Virginia, a state where Trump had his strongest performance, winning nearly 70% of the vote.

Many Democrats did not even stand for a call for a major increase in infrastructure spending, something where Trump has long diverged with many in his own party. One Democrat urged others to stand as many Republicans sat awkwardly, eventually, tentatively, standing in support of their party’s leader.

Trump’s speech is not likely to change the political landscape. We have been here before, where he has seemed presidential on one day and launched a 6am tweet storm the next, making any gains in gravitas temporary. But the occasion did show how divided the country and this Congress is. When Democrats won’t even stand or clap when Trump is talking about a fallen soldier, it’s not likely that they will be willing to make deals on infrastructure, let alone controversial topics like immigration reform.

It does not matter what Trump says or how formal the setting within which he speaks. No matter what words come out of Trump’s mouth, Democrats are only going to ever hear the echoes of “lock her up”.

2.      The empress of reality television China’s transgender Oprah

As an army colonel who became a woman, she exemplifies a society in flux

The Economist   February 2017

CHINA’S favourite chat-show host has had an extraordinary career. Jin Xing was the country’s most successful dancer before becoming a colonel in an army entertainment troupe. He won fame in America, where the New York Times called him “a Chinese genius”. He trained dancers in Brussels and Rome, before returning to China for a sex-change operation. As a woman, she resumed her career as a ballerina, set up the country’s first private ballet company, ran a bar in Beijing and married a German businessman. 

In a conservative society where even homosexuality is frowned upon, let alone sex-reassignment, her life would seem to place Ms. Jin well outside the stodgy mainstream of Chinese broadcasting (she is pictured at her home in Shanghai). Yet Ms Jin, who is 49, is the country’s most popular television judge. She began with a local version of “So You Think You Can Dance” and hit the jackpot with “The Jin Xing Show”, a variety and chat programme with an audience of around 100m. She has appeared with her husband on the Chinese version of “The Amazing Race”, in which couples race each other around the world. Her latest venture, “Chinese Dating”, is in its first season.

Ms Jin’s story reflects remarkable changes in Chinese society since her childhood. She joined the army at the age of nine and endured a training regime that, as she puts it, would count as child abuse in the West. During her surgery, an oxygen shortage damaged her left leg so badly that doctors thought she would be lucky to walk again. Gruelling retraining enabled her to resume dancing within a year.

Those struggles with adversity have helped Ms Jin win favour among older Chinese, a more conservative cohort that is also, surprisingly, her biggest fan base. Many of them, too, have suffered enormous hardship—during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, and the famine that followed the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s, in which tens of millions died. Even those born after 1980—roughly half the population—know well what their elders endured.

Identity crises

The tension between Ms Jin’s persona as a patriotic Chinese, and the one she displays as a globetrotter with a foreign husband (in January she joined the global elite at the World Economic Forum in Davos), is one that is widely understood among her compatriots. They have become the world’s great travellers. Over 100m got visas for holidays abroad last year, more than the citizens of any other country. Ms Jin describes herself as having been “a little Chinese boy thirsting for the West”. She writes of dreaming about Coca-Cola and freedom in Paris, or surreptitiously reading porn magazines and cruising gay bars in Greenwich Village. In her memoir, “Shanghai Tango”, she says that in the gay communities of New York, she feels herself to be “a traveller in a foreign land twice over”—as a woman in a man’s body and as a Chinese person abroad (who happens to be, she might have added, ethnic Korean).

In Belgium she feels haunted by the Chinese words she sees on signs in the streets; their calls, she writes, “get louder and louder”. She looks at a Ming vase at a market in Brussels and feels “ashamed” of Chinese who live abroad and have “only contempt” for their ancestral heritage.

China has several cultural figures who are better known in the West than at home. Ms Jin could have been another. But she chose to return home for her sex-change surgery, at some personal risk since the procedure was almost unknown there. “I was born in China,” she says. “It is in China I must be reborn as a woman.”

Xi Jinping, China’s president, presents himself as a staunch defender of “traditional” Chinese culture, and warns of the danger of Western “infiltration”. His preferences were clear in a recent official directive, which calls for the protection of China’s “cultural security”. But like most of her compatriots, Ms Jin is happy to take what she wants from both China and the West.

On the face of it, she embodies everything that is untraditional. Her rejection of being a man flies in the face of Confucian culture. The television manner for which she is famous—a blunt, cut-the-crap sassiness—is the opposite of stereotypical feminine deference. Yet her life as a woman has not been a simple rebellion against convention. By adopting three children and marrying (albeit a foreigner), she created around herself what she calls “a real Chinese family”. The values she espouses are old-fashioned even in China. In her new dating game, the contestants may not choose a match without their families’ permission; indeed, it is the families who interview the contestants’ prospective partners—resulting in rampant sexism, with women being asked about children and men about money. This has been too much for some viewers; online commentators have slammed the format as chauvinist and “retro”. But Ms Jin’s popularity suggests many young people believe that tradition should not be discarded.

3.       Presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron presents himself as an energetic outsider.

The Guardian   3 February 2017 

What’s the basic biography?

Emmanuel Macron, 39, is the son of a doctor and a neurology professor. Raised in the Picardy town of Amiens, he studied philosophy (you can tell from his speeches), then followed the classic postgrad route of France’s political and business elite, through Sciences Po and the École Nationale d’Administration.

Briefly a rising star in the civil service, he bought himself out of his government contract and joined Rothschild & Co – reportedly making around €2m (£1.7m) as a thrusting young investment banker – before being appointed a senior adviser by François Hollande in 2012 and, two years later, economy minister. Macron resigned last summer and launched his campaign in November.

Unknown to the public barely two years ago, never elected, no longer a member of a political party and defining himself as “neither left nor right”, he is now – according to polls – the favourite to become France’s next president. Oh, and his wife, Brigitte Trogneux, used to be his French teacher, and is 20-odd years his senior.

What are his politics?

Macron presents himself as the energetic outsider, determined to break what he calls the “complacency and vacuity” of the French political system. At the head of a youthful movement, En Marche! (Let’s Go!), he wants to “re-forge France’s politics, culture and ideology”.

So he’s a radical?

He says he is “of the left”, but keen to unite people from across the spectrum, including the right. Economically liberal and pro-business, Macron was tasked by Hollande with opening up France’s sclerotic economy; the loi Macronreforms that bear his name were so unpopular they had to be forced through by decree. But he is also fiercely progressive on social issues – eager to stimulate growth and free up business while protecting the country’s strong social safety net.

In the hands of a political establishment interested only in self-preservation, he has said, the system “has ceased to protect those it should protect”. In a country where stubborn unemployment, entrenched inequalities, increasing opposition to globalisation and the ongoing terror threat have robbed many of all confidence in mainstream politics, it is a message that resonates. Macron’s rallies are huge: 12,000 people in Paris, 4,000 in Lille.