Flags, Gay Marriage, Prejudice, & Preference

On the occasion of the Supreme Court’s legal mainstreaming of gay marriage, and the decision by US corporate, political, and media arbiters that yes, maybe, the official presentation of the Confederate flag by the State of South Carolina and its symbolism in the institutionalization and celebration of racism and rebellion against the federal government (as well as good ol’ regional pride!) should no longer be condoned or overlooked, I was reminded how malleable opinions can be.

Stuff that used to be OK is now abhorrent.  And vice versa.

If you’re as old as I am, you might remember this riddle:

“A boy is injured in a car accident.  His father rushes him to the hospital.  The doctor comes into the emergency room and says, “I can’t operate on him.  He’s my son.”

Today, I imagine the reaction is WTF? What’s the riddle?  It’s his mom, right?

 Well, back in the 1970s, when we rode dinosaurs to school, that was a real puzzler for me and my teen peers.  The idea that “doctors” were “men” was deeply ingrained, so that the “it’s his mother” reveal was a blinding insight that converted me into a committed feminist!

Well, anyway, it convinced me my conscious and subconscious were a grab-bag of tangled prejudices and received opinions.

And it’s made me more careful about regarding stuff that jars me as “wrong”, “abnormal”, “ridiculous”, etc.

 And more careful about regarding stuff that pleases me as “right”, “normal”, “reasonable”, etc.

We all live in a world of manufactured attitudes, people.

Another example is attitudes toward female beauty, as I was reminded by On With the Show: The First Century of Show Business in America, by Robert C. Toll (New York, Oxford University Press, 1976) and its chapter on the evolution of American burlesque.  (I've already written about Toll's documentation of the 150-year run of minstrel shows as acceptable and indeed paradigmatic American entertainment).  

Toll writes:

“The first burlesque star to be crowned a “Queen,” May Howard [headed her own revue in the 1880s which was] “a leg show pure and simple,” explained the chunky star, who boasted that she would employ no woman who weighed less than one hundred fifty pounds.  The stocky woman with large thighs—some performers were even charged with wearing hip and thigh padding under their tights—continued to be the ideal until the turn of the century.

Here’s a picture—I guess a cigarette card—depicting May Howard.

A sea change in popular attitudes was marked by the rage for the “Floradora” girls in the early 1900s.

“Floradora” was a popular piece of musical comedy piffle that racked up lengthy runs in London and New York.  It featured a sextette of beauties dubbed “the Floradora girls”, who had their own weight—and height—requirements, as Toll tells us:

…Whereas May Howard in the 1880s featured short, hefty women, the six Floradora Girls, who created a public sensation in 1901 as ideal women, were each 5’4” and 130 pounds…”

The Floradora girls, it should be said, were charged with looking fetching while fully clothed in a demure musical number, and didn’t have to do any burlesque-related heavy lifting.  Supposedly every one of the original Floradora girls married a millionaire, back when a million meant something.

Their type of lithe silhouette presented in various stages of dress and undress became a staple of the American musical theater, thanks largely to Florenz Ziegfeld & his “Ziegfeld Girls”, as documented in the public and secret work of Ziegfeld’s contracted photographer, Alfred Cheney Johnston.  

I suppose you can analyze American aesthetic choices in aggregate and say “As the focus of work shifted from rural to urban, the sturdy farm girl was supplanted by the [malnourished] seamstress”.  

But I think it’s more accurate to say that different body types and different body type preferences always existed and continue to exist, and it’s more of a question of what gets emphasized, endorsed, and advertised.

On the issue of “chunky” women, Ohio State University had an exhibit on burlesque and the curators had this to say about “beauty”:

The popular image of the burlesque performer was a large, tall woman, so powerfully-built that she was practically Amazonian.  Publicity for burlesque shows took advantage of this association, with posters depicting voluptuous, statuesque performers in the roles of military officers, charioteers, or even literal Amazon warriors.  This dominant female figure was fascinating and tantalizing, but like most aspects of burlesque, also a bit threatening.  Men loved to watch burlesque performers, but at the same time, they were afraid that her feminine power was too dynamic to stay safely confined to the stage.   In an era when women all over America were actively agitating for increased freedoms and legal rights, this was a very relevant concern.

Again, for Americans of a certain age, references to Amazonian women automatically elicit images of the women depicted by R. Crumb, the celebrated graphic artist and “underground comic” auteur:

 

 R. Crumb’s sexual inclinations, indeed anybody’s, is too unique to generalize about.  But I don’t think he’s alone in his preferences.  As a matter of personal practice and artistic necessity, he’s just more up front about them.

So I would say that there is a broad spectrum of preferences and prejudices are innate both within individuals and society, and they are mutable and malleable, indeed more malleable than we would care to acknowledge.  They are shaped, expressed, and can apparently be changed permanently both by personal circumstance, and as a result of what society and state characterize as “good” and “bad” and “acceptable” and “unacceptable”.  And that’s a good thing…sometimes…and a bad thing…sometimes.

Just for the record, I think it's a good thing that the US population is apparently becoming more tolerant of gay marriage and less enamored of the Confederate flag.   But...

...as to whether any attitudes are intrinsically “bad” or “good”, I guess I’ll leave that subject to the moral philosophers.  As a matter of human behavior, I think I’ve learned enough to be cautious about how and why I—and society—choose to label things…

Johnston's archive is on deposit at the Library of Congress.  Portrait of Hazel Forbes.

R Crumb image from http://victorianvisualculture.com/2011/11/15/robert-crumb-the-modern-mundy/

 

It's Official: America Has a China-Containment Policy

Actually, that was a title of a post I wrote in July 2010, before island-building, before the Senkaku crises, before the rare earths brouhaha, even before Hillary Clinton declared that the US had a “national interest” in freedom of navigation at the 2010 ASEAN foreign ministers’ conference in Hanoi and formally kicked off the “pivot”.

I offer it as a reminder to the indignant commentators who declare we’re just out in the South China Sea responding to the PRC threat, a theme serendipitously sounded in an op-ed in The Australian by the Lowy Institute’s Alan Dupont after I thought I had finished this piece, but not too late some last-minute cut and paste:

Fairfax columnist Hugh White, for example, believes US policy makers have long believed that the territorial disputes in the South China Sea are a strategic opportunity rather than a problem for the US, allowing them to “cast Beijing as a bullying and aggressive rising power and themselves as the indispensable guardians of regional order and international law”.

These portrayals misrepresent the main causes of the rising tensions in the South China Sea and the issues at stake for Australia and the region.

The genesis of the current imbroglio was Beijing’s 2012 decision to prioritise the South China Sea and initiate an extensive, unprecedented land reclamation program on disputed islands that it occupied or planned to occupy.

That’s leaving out a big chunk of history, including all the stuff Hillary Clinton was involved in before she left office. 

I cover the current efforts in wishful historiography in a piece at Asia Times.  It is keyed to more alarming piece of opinion management than Dupont’s measured op-ed, a Japanese contribution courtesy of Yomiuri Shimbun that included this map illustrating the assertion that US intervention in the South China Sea is necessary to bottle up the PRC’s strategic nuclear submarine fleet: 

It’s a pretty brazen showing of the containment hoof and involves a leapfrog from the previous “freedom of navigation” nonsense to a more straightforward (but in its implications for a nuclear arms race and the problem of trying to achieve first-strike supremacy over a nuclear adversary wary and armed to the teeth much riskier) military containment strategy.

I conclude:

[I]sn’t it interesting how the US has converted a PRC “core interest” in its vital near beyond sea lanes in the South China Sea into a US “core interest” in securing the South China Sea 8000 miles away against unrestricted PRC submarine traffic? 

…

Now, of course, the DoD has a new boss—Secretary of Defense Ash Carter; and PACCOM has a new commander—Admiral Harry Harris, and the general consensus is that the muscular defense sector has wrestled China policy away from the milquetoastian White House.  Interestingly, Admiral Harris was previously the Pentagon’s liaison to to the State Department under Hillary Clinton as well as John Kerry, which reinforces my impression that Hillary Clinton and her foreign policy advisors have pre-loaded China policy with her supporters, and I expect things to get ugly quickly so that the nasty and awkward business of starting the confrontation can be done under Obama before Clinton enters office.

As I put it elsewhere: Hillary wants to inherit her China crisis from Obama, not foment it herself.

It may give heartache to the “Chinese aggression is the root of all evil” crowd but anybody who doesn’t see a crash US program to escalate  what the PRC would like to limit to a contained and manageable local friction in the SCS simply isn’t paying attention.

My apparently distinctly marginal view is that this policy is not going to work very well (though its difficulties will be the source of much occupation and profit for the milsec fixer-uppers and explainers).

As I see the problem, America is not striving for the goal of regional security; it is chasing the chimera of continued American leadership even as the strength of all the Asian powers—Vietnam, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines as well as the PRC—grow, and US relative strength declines.

In other words, China will spend the next ten years grabbing what it can; and the United States will be struggling to keep what it can’t.

READ THE WHOLE THING. 

Below the fold I’m providing the mother of all South China Sea ‘splainers as background.  It floats, for the first time, I think, the theory that Chuck Hagel was forced out as Secretary of Defense by the China hawks at the Pentagon.

7500 words give or take.  You have been warned.  If this piece is reposted by some bot, the two long blog post block quotes will undoubtedly get screwed up to the confusion of all.  Refer to the original post at China Matters for proper formatting.

US Getting Better at Cyber Blaming, Not Cyber Security

Color me skeptical about the Sunday Times report that Edward Snowden’s archive got cracked.  Not saying it couldn’t happen despite 256 bit encryption, accidents do happen, but the story as presented reeks of psyops bullshit unloaded by the NSA-GCHQ team with the help of obliging media in the UK.

What I think is happening is that the United States is upping its game…in public cyberattribution.


Honestly parsing and presenting a cyberattribution dossier is a thankless job.  Remember how the Obama administration looked foolish on the Sony hack?

Sure you don’t.  That was so…four months ago.

Here’s what I wrote back then on the occasion of the rollout of the US government’s Cyber Threats Intelligence Integration Center:

According to AP (actually, according to AP’s Ken Dilanian, the notoriously obliging amanuensis  to the US security establishment ):

White House cybersecurity coordinator Michael Daniel has concluded that cyberintelligence at the moment is bedeviled by the same shortcomings that afflicted terrorism intelligence before 9/11 — bureaucracy, competing interests, and no streamlined way to combine analysis from various agencies, the official said.

The hack on Sony's movie subsidiary, for example, resulted in a variety of different analytical papers from various agencies. Each one pointed to North Korea, but with varying degrees of confidence.


…

As I argued in various venues recently with reference to the Sony hack, for purposes of semiotics (clear messaging, positioning, blame avoidance, and signaling of US government intentions) if not forensics (proving whodunit), painting a convincing, action-worthy cyberbullseye on the back of some foreign enemy is a major challenge for governments these days.

When some high-profile outrage like Sony occurs, the US government has to make a prompt show of control, capability, and resolve.  Letting a bunch of data nerds chew over the data for a few weeks and spit up an equivocal conclusion like “It looks like the same guys who did this did that, and maybe the guys who did that were…” doesn’t quite fill the bill. 

Which is pretty much what happened on Sony.  Various private sector and government actors all stuck their oar in, contradictory opinions emerged, messaging was all over the map. 

…  By establishing a central clearing house for relevant information, the US government is on the right side of the information symmetry equation.  “You say you think this, but you don’t know this, this, and this, or the stuff we can’t tell you because it’s classified above your clearance.” 

And even if the real takeaway from the investigatory process still is “It looks like the same guys who did this did that, and maybe the guys who did that were…” it comes out as “The Cyber Threats Intelligence Integration Center has attributed this cyberattack to North Korea with a high degree of confidence.  By Executive Order, the President has already commanded CyberCommand to make a proportional response.”

You get the picture.

So I expect jobs one and two and three for CTIIC will be to generate persuasive dossiers for backgrounding, leaking, whatever on the PRC, North Korea, and the Russian Federation, to be deployed when some mysterious alchemy of evidence, circumstance, and strategy dictate that one of them has to get tagged as The Bad Guy for some cyberoutrage.

Fast-forward, to employ a quaint VHS-era term, to June 5.  Ellen Nakashima lays out the administration position on the OPM hack in a Washington Post article remarkable for its completely categorical no-two-ways-about-it statement that “China” had dunnit:

With a series of major hacks, Chinabuilds a database on Americans

China is building massive databases of Americans’ personal information by hacking government agencies and U.S. health-care companies, using a high-tech tactic to achieve an age-old goal of espionage: recruiting spies or gaining more information on an adversary, U.S. officials and analysts say.

Groups of hackers working for the Chinese government have compromised the networks of the Office of Personnel Management…

 [caption]

China hacked into the federal government’s network, compromising four million current and former employees' information. The Post's Ellen Nakashima talks about what kind of national security risk this poses and why China wants this information. (Alice Li/The Washington Post)

…

U.S. officials privately said China was behind it.

…

“This is an intelligence operation designed to help the Chinese government,” the China expert said.

Emphasis added, natch.

Either the US has spectacularly upped its forensics game since Michael Daniel’s rueful reflections in February or (my theory)…

The great minds were sitting around a table in Washington and concluded:

“We can’t prove this was a Chinese hack, but let’s turn this around.  Nobody can disprove this was a Chinese hack, so nobody can prove us wrong when if we declare without qualification it was a Chinese hack.  So let’s just go for it.”

Parenthetically, I might point out that one problem I see is, If with categorically and openly identifying the PRC as source of the hack is that we should immediately and openly retaliate at a commensurate level.  Otherwise, where’s our national credibility & deterrence?  Still waiting for the shoe to drop on that one.

The tip-off for me that the WaPo was carrying Obama administration water with this totally backgrounded mostly anonymous scoop was this:

The big-data approach being taken by the Chinese might seem to mirror techniques used abroad by the NSA, which has come under scrutiny for its data-gathering practices under executive authority. But in China, the authorities do not tolerate public debate over the proper limits of large-scale spying in the digital age.

The piece was written June 5, three days after the Obama administration had put the Snowden unpleasantness behind it and totally regained the moral high ground, in its own mind if nobody else’s, by replacing the Patriot Act with the USA Freedom Act a.k.a. "Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet-collection and Online Monitoring Act."

Now, with the legalities of the US cyberprograms re-established, it was time to stop playing defense and go on offense against those public-debate-intolerant Chinese!

And that means relaunching the China cyberoutlaw product!  With the story of a hack that had, if I understand Nakashima’s account correctly, had occurred in December 2014!

Again, it is perhaps little remembered except by me that a key US objective for the Xi Jinping—Barack Obama summit in Sunnylands in June 2013 was to cap an eighteen month public opinion campaign against PRC cyberoffenses with a personal rebuke by President Obama and the presentation of an embarrassing dossier to Xi Jinping.

If, as I did, one googled “Xi Jinping cyberwarfare” on June 3, 2013, the first four pages of results included hits like these, indicating that the Western press was energetically singing from the same cyberwar hymnal:

China Doesn't Care if Its 'Digitalized' Military Cyberwar Drill Scares You

Atlanticwire

China Is Winning the Cyber War Because They Hacked U.S. Plans for Real War

Atlanticwire

Krauthammer to Obama: Launch cyber war on China

Fox News

China Is Our Number One National Security Threat

International Business Journal

House Intelligence Chairman: US “Losing” Cyber-War

Wall Street Journal

US Says China Is Stepping Up Cyber War

Financial Times

U.S. China Cyberbattle Intensifies

Politico

Just a reminder; these headlines are from June 2013, not June 2015.

In this case, the China Matters serendipity engine was firing on all cylinders; three days later the Washington Post and Guardian newspapers published their first revelations from Edward Snowden, fundamentally skewing the frame of the Chinese cyberwarfare story.

I’ve always wondered if the timing of Snowden’s revelations had something to do with the hypocrisy of the world’s biggest cybersnoop trying to stick that label on the PRC.

Anyway, the Obama administration has had two years to lick its wounds, do damage control, and reboot the program.

And guess what!  Xi Jinping’s coming to the United States again in September!  This time we’ll be ready for him fer sure!  Snowden discredited!  NSA on top! PRC in doghouse!

I must state here that I believe that PRC cyberespionage program is massive, government-backed, full spectrum, and actively exploring offensive capabilities.  But I also think that the US tactics are destabilizing and escalatory & have more to do with maintaining the US cyberadvantage as part of the burgeoning and profitable China-threat milsec business than they do with diminishing the threat to the American people from PRC cybermisbehavior.

And I take the current spate of news stories as part of an effort to get us used to perpetual cyberwar, just as we were bombarded with stories about malevolent Muslims in the last decade to reconcile us the the Global War on Terror, the erosion of civil liberties, and expensive and perpetual conflicts.

At this time, a trip down memory lane is warranted for people who have forgotten how the Obama administration methodically rolled out PRC Cyberthreat v. 1.0, the buggy pre-Snowden product, and are perhaps not connecting the dots on the rollout of PRC Cyberthreat v. 2.0, Now Bigger and Scarier! and how this might be a factor in the headlines blaring out of their newspapers & TVs & tablets.

Below the fold, for the sake of posterity, a lengthy recap on the first abortive US salvo in the China cyberthreat propaganda war.

Mdme. Tsai Goes to Washington

Mdme. Tsai Ing-wen, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate for president in the 2016 Taiwan elections, came to Washington and appeared at the Center for Strategic and International Studies a.k.a. Pivot Central to make some remarks, chat with Kurt Campbell (proud pivot pappy), and do some Q&A moderated by the indefatigable pivot sherpa Bonnie Glaser (more on that later).

Tsai gave a good account of herself in her prepared remarks: competent, appealing, moderate, etc.  She also provided a look at what a DPP wanted to do, wouldn’t do—and might be unable to do—if it gained control of the presidency, a pretty good bet given the comatose nature of the KMT’s presidential campaign.

For US audiences, perhaps the key statement was her reaffirmation of “the status quo” a.k.a. “no Taiwan independence” (go to the 17 minute mark).

Subsequently, Campbell did ask an interesting question about the cohesion of Taiwan society given its significant divisions, a sign to me that US policymakers are interested in the possibility that gridlock in Taiwan political institutions will lead to escalating “Sunflower” style street action—or perhaps a DPP gambit to piggyback on student unrest and declare that the unambiguous will of the Taiwan people expressed in mass demonstration compels an independence referendum pronto, sorry about that--and a messy opposing reaction.  Tsai responded with the generic “democratic dialogue” kumbaya optimism which, I should say, I don’t quite share.

Campbell elicited Tsai’s statement on the South China Sea issue, very much CSIS’s obsession de jour.  Tsai obligingly ticked off the talking points: peaceful, international law, UN conventions, & “as you said, freedom of navigation”.

Getting East Asian democracies to nut up and back the US SCS play is, post Shangri La, a diplomatic priority.  On June 4, Danny Russel openly called on the Republic of Korea to support the US position, apparently as part of the public frontloading of expectations for ally fealty that has become an inseparable element of pivot promotion.

Per Yonhap:

"The fact that, like the United States, the Republic of Korea is not a claimant, in my view, gives Seoul all the more reason to speak out because it is speaking not in self-interest, but speaking in support of universal principles and the rule of law," [Russel] said.

It was the first time that a senior American official has publicly asked South Korea to play a role in the territorial dispute. The remark came ahead of a visit to Washington by South Korean President Park Geun-hye later this month.

Parenthetically, I find the look for “disinterested” supporters interesting.  It is nice to get everybody to make approving noises in favor of nice things that they have no “interest” in expending blood & treasure to defend while the dominant regional power has made it clear it regards the same issue as an existential “core interest”.

Although I serially excoriate the media for falling for the “freedom of navigation in the South China Sea” canard (since the term has zero significance in terms of economic security or unhindered commercial passage that everybody is supposedly caring about), “military freedom of navigation” does have a genuine attraction to militaries that want to operate in the South China Sea. (I will cover the history of military freedom of navigation in the SCS in a subsequent post.  Consider yourself warned!)

Taiwan has its own claim in the South China Sea, indeed the largest island claim (Itu Aba), which has the largest airfield in the Spratlys (for now), and its own fresh water.  The ROC occasionally sends a submarine to Itu Aba, so it has an interest in military FoN in the SCS.

In fact, Itu Aba is in the throes of a $100 million construction project, something that Campbell obligingly forebore to mention despite the US demand that “everybody” cease island reclamation, and which Tsai naturally didn’t bring up.  The ROC even had to hire a PRC ship to haul some caissons down to Itu Aba for the construction ! The port construction is supposed to be completed in a few months and then Taiwan will be able to dock vessels, military & otherwise, there as well, and further inject itself into the SCS mix. 

An interesting element of the Philippine UNCLOS arbitration case against the PRC is that if the Philippines wins, it will also weaken Itu Aba’s presumptive claim to a 200 mile EEZ (an impassioned legal eagle in the Philippines heatedly accused a Philippine judge of treason for neglecting, perhaps for sound reasons of diplomatic calculation, to attack the Taiwan claim in the arbitration filing).  

The DPP, as befits its Taiwan indigene roots, is relatively blase about Taiwan’s island claims (Kinmen, Matsu, Tiaoyutai, and, I would guess, Itu Aba), which it regards as excess baggage Chiang Kai-shek carried to Taiwan in 1949.  So if the DPP wins, it will probably be relatively unconcerned if Itu Aba is collateral damage in the Philippine assault on the Nine-Dash-Line.  Another matter for the KMT, of course, and I wonder if the KMT will try to play the “holy ground of the motherland” card in the election.

Mdme. Tsai’s Q&A didn’t go so smoothly.  She had to field a question on the “1992 consensus”, a term the DPP detests, from a mainland journo.

The “1992 consensus” was basically an intentional and necessary muddling of the One China issue during meetings by the (KMT-controlled) Taiwan administration and the PRC in Hong Kong that enabled the development of cross-strait ties.  As befits its Taiwan independence inclinations, the DPP scorns the idea that any successor government should consider itself bound to uphold that mush-mouthed whatever it is (there was no joint declaration; heck, there weren’t even parallel unilateral statements; something was stated verbally, sometime, somewhere: "On November 3 [1992], a responsible person of the Communist Chinese ARATS said that it is willing to “respect and accept” SEF’s proposal that each side “verbally states” its respective principles on “one China.").

The DPP would apparently like to consign the One China assumption of the 1992 consensus to the dustbin of history as a steppingstone toward independence, something that becomes politically easier with every passing year as more people identify themselves as “Taiwanese” and “Chinese” identifiers become more of an eccentric niche group.

However, p*ssing off the dominant regional power & biggest trading partner ($29 billion of a $140 billion total pie) is not the most obvious path to security, prosperity, & overall happiness. 

Therefore, Tsai was quite energetic in her remarks about the unsatisfactory results of the current mainland-centric Taiwan economic model, the undesirability of further interdependence, and the need to “diversify” the Taiwan economy & shift it to “innovation” instead of manufacturing, and presumably toward the United States & Japan and away from the mainland.  She also talked about Taiwan businessmen having to learn to handle failure, perhaps a backhanded warning that the mainland-manufacturing-linked sector should brace itself for some creative destruction if/when the DPP tries to implement its diversification strategy.  Good luck with that.  

Obviously the DPP is not quite ready to talk about unambiguously dumping the 1992 consensus and with it the economic relationship with the PRC.

So for the mainland, it’s red line time and “do you affirm the 1992 consensus” has become a tactic to put the DPP on the spot and force it either to alienate the middle-of-the-road segment of the electorate (and the US) with a prematurely provocative stance or, well, revel in the spectacle of its own weakness and hypocrisy in the eyes of its base.

So Mdme. Tsai threw some serious shade on the questioner, replying coolly that she had covered that issue in her remarks.  Since she hadn’t really addressed the issue, this drew a chuckle from the audience. 

But the next two questions were on the same topic & Tsai had to repeat her “already covered this” line more and more stiffly and by the end nobody was laughing.

And the last guy also asked some PRC-friendly question about Tsai’s plans to increase Taiwan military spending.

By my count, Tsai got one softball question, and four awkward questions from PRC journos and pundits who had apparently salted the room.

Unless Bonnie Glaser intentionally called on four pro-PRC questioners to put Tsai on her mettle, which I kinda doubt, she’s going to have to hit the books and figure out the names and faces of the friendlies and the not-so-friendlies before her next hosting gig. 

My personal opinion: the PRC should be relieved, not dismayed if Tsai becomes president.  

If the KMT stays in power, activists will feed the narrative that rad street activism is needed to save Taiwan from getting sold out, the DPP will endorse and exploit the demonstrations as a matter of sound political calculation, and the ineluctable polarization of Taiwan (and the increasing marginalization of pro-mainland opinion) will accelerate.  

If Tsai is in power, on the other hand, she’ll have her hands full pushing her agenda while wrestling with the demands of the younger activists and coping with KMT obstructionism—and distracted from the vital task of trying to pull the island’s economy out of the mainland’s enormous gravitational field.