Gallup releases its poll, and aside from the aberration of Ronald Reagan (mainly due, I suspect, to the media face-lift he received after he left office), it helps restore my faith in the judgment of most Americans, at least a little bit.

(Though, on second thought, I don’t think JFK should be on there, but as the piece says, most of the respondents opted for relatively recent presidents. I do think George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were a bit more important and contributed more to America than JFK.)

The relationship between history and memory is a funny thing and it’s something I think about a lot. Why is that what we remember is often more important than what actually happened? Is something less significant when we learn that it’s been embellished a little? In this week’s New Yorker is a review by Louis Menand. (“Notable Quotables“) Menand looks at those immortal quotations and turns of a phrase that nobody ever said…even if we all remember it otherwise:

Sherlock Holmes never said ‘Elementary, my dear Watson.’ Neither Ingrid Bergman nor anyone else in “Casablanca” says ‘Play it again, Sam’; Leo Durocher did not say ‘Nice guys finish last’; Vince Lombardi did say ‘Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing’ quite often, but he got the line from someone else. Patrick Henry almost certainly did not say ‘Give me liberty, or give me death!’; William Tecumseh Sherman never wrote the words ‘War is hell’; and there is no evidence that Horace Greeley said ‘Go west, young man.’ Marie Antoinette did not say ‘Let them eat cake’; Hermann Goring did not say ‘When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun’; and Muhammad Ali did not say ‘No Vietcong ever called me n—-r.’ Gordon Gekko, the character played by Michael Douglas in Wall Street, does not say ‘Greed is good’; James Cagney never says ‘You dirty rat’ in any of his films; and no movie actor, including Charles Boyer, ever said ‘Come with me to the Casbah.’ Many of the phrases for which Winston Churchill is famous he adapted from the phrases of other people, and when Yogi Berra said ‘I didn’t really say everything I said’ he was correct.

Menand’s argues that sometimes a little creative editing (or outright fabrication) is all it takes to turn an ordinary sentence–or life–into something or someone of lasting historical significance. A fascinating and fun piece.

UPDATE: It always pays to look up a quote:

During floor debate on the Iraq war yesterday, Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) quoted Abraham Lincoln as advocating the hanging of lawmakers who undermine military morale during wartime.

“Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exiled or hanged,” Young declared.

One problem: Lincoln never said such a thing.

The quote actually came from conservative scholar Michael J. Waller, who blamed the error on a copy editor. The misquote has been used nearly 18,000 times by those who typically support the Iraq War.

After he left the House floor yesterday, Young found out that — whoops — he had mistakenly put words in Abe’s mouth. His spokeswoman, Meredith Kenny, says the congressman took the quote from an article he read in the Washington Times on Tuesday.

“Now that he’s been informed these are not the actual words of Lincoln, he will discontinue attributing the words to Lincoln. However, he continues to totally agree with the message of the statement,” Kenny said. “Americans, especially America’s elected leaders, should not take actions during a time of war that damage the morale of our soldiers and military — and that is exactly what this nonbinding resolution does.”

And no, Kenny said, Young was “not advocating the hanging of Democrats.”

It reminds me of a an episode of The Office where Steve Carell intones: “As Abraham Lincoln once said: If you are a racist, I will invade you with the north.” I don’t think Abe said that either…
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Via Arts & Letters Daily

And apparently the efforts of Hillary Clinton helped. (The article is behind a firewall, so I can only see the headline and lead). Let’s hope it’s true.

Chinese officials signaled Friday they will allow a prominent AIDS activist who had been confined to her home to visit the U.S. next month, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said.

Gao Yaojie, 80 years old, was confined to her home, worrying fellow activists who said the measure was aimed at keeping her from making the trip to the U.S. to accept an award from a non-profit group.

Ms. Clinton had pressed Chinese officials to let Ms. Gao travel to accept the reward …

Presuming it is accurate, I can’t offer any particularly warm words to the government or praise their enlightenment. After all, she never should have been placed under house arrest. It’s not like they’re performing some kind of good deed now, but merely undoing the stupid and flagrantly wrong deed they performed earlier. Well, at least that’s a positive, or a non-negative, so I’ll toss them a few crumbs. But why they insist on making themselves look like paranoid thugs in the eyes of the world is an utter mystery to me. Just let the old lady get her award; why force the world to see you as schmucks?

A well-known high-level Merrill Lynch analyst fisks Bernanke’s embarrassingly optimistic report to Congress earlier this week on the US economy (low inflation, more jobs, blah blah), demolishing it point by point. PDF File. A must for those interested in what’s really behind all those positive numbers Bernanke cited.

Well, I just did it – I enrolled in a six-hour-a-day Chinese immersion program for five days of CNY. I figure it’ll force me to do something productive, and keep me from staying up too late.

It’s ironic that since I arrived in China my Chinese has gone straight to hell. I had much more time to study and write characters and attend after-work classes in Taipei. Here, my schedule is too erratic and intense; weekends are my only chance to study, and honestly, I just don’t feel up to it after working so hard during the week. I won’t give it up, but I am sad to have to resize my aspirations to fit reality.

Meanwhile, we all know another 30 hours or so won’t make a huge difference, but it’s way better than nothing, especially when I’ve got nothing better to do.

My friend was visibly shaken. He had just learned that he had lost one of his clients to Chinese competitors. “it’s amazing,” he told me. “The Chinese have completely priced us out of the market. We can’t compete with what they’re able to offer.”

There’s nothing surprising about that, of course; manufacturing jobs are lost to China every day. But my friend is not in manufacturing. He works in foreign aid.

Moises Naim, editor of Foreign Policy magazine, has an op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times on the increasing amounts of aid being given by countries, such as China, at the expense of Western aid programs. He argues that such deals in the long-run hurt recipient nations.

In recent years, wealthy nondemocratic regimes have begun to undermine development policy through their own activist aid programs. Call it rogue aid. It is development assistance that is nondemocratic in origin and nontransparent in practice, and its effect is typically to stifle real progress while hurting ordinary citizens.

China is actively backing such deals throughout Africa; its financing of roads, electrical plants, ports and the like boomed from $700 million in 2003 to nearly $3 billion for each of the past two years. Indeed, it is a worldwide strategy. Beijing has agreed to expand Indonesia’s electrical grid in a matter of months. Too bad the deal calls for building several plants that use a highly polluting, coal-based Chinese technology. No international agency would have signed off on such an environmentally unfriendly deal.

In the Philippines, the Asian Development Bank, which lends money at low interest rates to poor countries, had agreed to finance Manila’s new aqueduct. It, too, was suddenly told that its money was no longer needed. China was offering cheaper rates, faster approval and fewer questions.

What’s behind this sudden Chinese drive to do good around the world? The three short answers are money, international politics and access to raw materials. China’s central bank has the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves, totaling $1.06 trillion. Beijing is increasingly leveraging this cash to ensure its access to raw materials and to advance China’s growing global influence. What better than a generous foreign-aid program to ensure the good will of a petro-power like Nigeria or a natural-resource-rich neighbor like Indonesia?

Chinese leaders argue that such aid, coming with ‘no strings attached’, represents a true form of aid, free of the neo-imperialist agenda of Western agencies and is protective of the sovereignty of states such as Sudan. In a speech on February 7 in Pretoria, South Africa, Hu said:

“For more than 100 years in China’s modern history, the Chinese people were subjected to colonial aggression and oppression by foreign powers and went through similar suffering and agony that the majority of African countries endured,” Hu said according to a transcript released by South African officials. He added: “China has never imposed its will or unequal practices on other countries and will never do so in the future.”

Ben Landy, in the fabulous new blog, China Redux, wrote about Hu’s speech:

Whether we believe it or not is a separate question…I’m inclined to agree that China will not likely develop into an imperial power. But the Hu Doctrine leaves a lot of wiggle room. What does it mean that China will not ‘impose its will’ on other countries? And what exactly are ‘unequal practices’? Isn’t undervaluing currency an unequal practice? What about severely restricting foreign investment in domestic markets? The list of nebulous practices could go on and on.

I suppose it also depends on your definition of an ‘imperial power.’ China’s actions on the African continent might not be ‘colonization,’ but they are far from benign. Over time, African nations like Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Sudan might find China’s help to be even “stringier” than Western aid and investment.
——————-
UPDATE:
Commenters might wish to look at the NYT Op-Ed page for February 19, “Patron of African Misgovernment” as well as Ben Landy’s follow-up piece on the China Redux blog.

——————–
Via CDT

And if the feng shui experts and tea-leaf readers don’t know, who does? The first paragraph sounds pretty on-the-money to me.

The world can expect a roller-coaster ride of conflict and unrest, natural disasters and a plunge in global stock markets once the Year of the Pig begins, Chinese soothsayers say.

As the world farewells the Year of the Dog on Sunday, believers in Chinese superstitions have been busy consulting fortune tellers, feng shui geomancers and a wealth of new books for the year’s fortunes. Chinese fortunes are based on a belief that events are dictated by the different balances in the elements that make up the earth — gold, wood, water, fire and earth.

Feng shui expert Raymond Lo said that according to ancient Chinese belief, the Year of the Pig is symbolised by two elements — fire sitting on top of water.

“Fire sitting on water is a symbol of conflict and skirmish, and this may bring a relatively less peaceful year with more international conflicts and struggles,” he said.

Lo said the last time such an arrangement appeared was in 2002, the year that followed the September 11 terrorist attacks.

“It is anticipated that there will be more international conflicts and disharmony, which will even lead to regional warfare, uprising and unrest, or the overthrow of governments in certain countries,” he said.

The elemental arrangement for 2007, with fire standing on top, could represent openness, optimism and warmth, but it can also bring fire disasters and huge explosions, Lo said.

In other words, anything goes. Many other interesting predictions follow, including huge earthquakes, more wars and the best time to give birth to new infants.

This is slick. First they harass her and put her under house arrest, and then they concoct a photo-opp to prove she’s free and happy as a clam.

The photograph and article in Tuesday’s Henan Daily could have been headlined ‘Happy Holidays.’ Three highranking Henan Province officials, beaming and clapping as if presenting a lottery check, were making an early Lunar New Year visit to the apartment of a renowned AIDS doctor, Gao Yaojie.

They gave her flowers. Dr. Gao, 80, squinted toward the camera, surely understanding that pictures can lie. She was under house arrest to prevent her from getting a visa to accept an honor in Washington. Her detention attracted international attention, and the photo op was a sham, apparently intended to say, ‘Look, she’s fine and free as a bird.’

On Thursday, Dr. Gao said in a telephone interview, a handful of police officers remained stationed outside her apartment building in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou.

‘I just can’t simply swallow it all,’ she said. ‘I want to know two things. First, who has made the decision? I am an 80-year-old lady, and what crimes have I committed to deserve this? Second, they must find out who has been slandering my name on the Internet.’

…. International pressure seemed to have weighed on the Henan officials who had visited Dr. Gao since her detention. She said one official visited three times a day, urging her to write a letter blaming poor health as a reason for not attending the Washington ceremony. Dr. Gao said she finally relented Wednesday.

‘After negotiation, we agreed that I will just say I am preoccupied and won’t be able to leave for the award,’ she said. ‘The letter I wrote only had two lines.’

It is unclear what the Henan authorities intend to do with the letter. Dr. Gao said she had written it to relieve political pressure on the local health department and her family.

She was also upset with entries on a blog she recently started in which she posts AIDS cases to give them public attention. ‘Various posts accused me of lying and making these cases up,’ she said. ‘Personal insults were posted. These posts were then rebutted by victims. My blog then became a battlefield.’

Jeremiah posted about this earlier, and one of the commenters took the same path as those who are insulting Dr. Gao on the Internet, insinuating that there is some dark, malevolent side to her or that she is being propped up by the CIA. This is another sad indictment of the rampant nationalism we talk about a lot here – you would think those with 5,000 years of glorious civilization behind them would be more confident and secure, so that the slightest questioning of their government didn’t send them into breathless conniptions that result in unfounded accusations and slander against a true patriot, someone going so far out of her way for the good of all China.

You simply have to see this to believe it. Jaw-dropping. And dig that canned laughter in the video. I’ve never seen such embarrassing drivel, not even on Fox News. At least O’Reilly and Hannity are entertaining, in a grotesque, perverted sort of way. This is pure racist, tasteless, revoltingly unfunny garbage.

Even now, on a weeknight after 11 p.m. Is this going to go on all week?