The White Peril 白禍

It's this sort of story that makes me glad I live in a country in which people will just say straight out that they believe Koreans are congenitally lazy and stupid and Chinese people are treacherous. You can then disagree, with reason and example, and actually get somewhere.

But where...how do you...is it even...WTF can you possibly say to this?

The city of Chicago will continue to set aside a portion of its construction contracts for firms owned by blacks, Hispanics and women -- but not Asian-Americans.

The revised ordinance, approved Wednesday night by the City Council, lists the groups that statistical evidence shows are socially disadvantaged.

Under the law, Asian-Americans can still apply for city work if they do so as individuals and document that they have been discriminated against.

The changes upset Asian-American leaders as well as some aldermen who said the city was opening itself up to a return to discriminatory practices.

The City of Chicago is "opening itself up to a return to discriminatory practices," by airily judging who's downtrodden enough to compete for clubby set-aside municipal contracts? Good Lord. Imagine what might happen if they pull out all the stops and start discriminating for real.

It gets better. There seem to have been warning signs from a few months ago on that Asian-Americans would be excluded. At least one affected party is clearly not one to let anything so trivial as self-respect get in the way of a good gravy train:

Nakachi is concerned that Asian business owners are being defined too narrowly. He noted one line in Moran's decision about the disparity of people eligible under the program: "A third-generation Japanese-American from a wealthy family, and with a graduate degree from MIT, qualifies."

"We have polled our membership and we can't find any MIT graduates," Nakachi said. "It's kind of a stereotype that all Asians are highly educated and highly successful."

I know that's what I look for in people in charge of public works projects: the conviction that they and their kind are as capable of being mediocre as anyone else is.

Okay, fine--he didn't say they were stupid or incompetent, only that their degrees might not have brand value and they might not have achieved prominent reputations. And I realize that I'm falling into the Gotcha! routine that Camille Paglia complained about in discussing blogs with Salon. (Well, she didn't elaborate, but I assume she was referring to the practice of linking to an article, quoting its dumbest paragraph, appending some snarky put-down, and signing off.) But I find few things more infuriating than encountering people who are frankly anti-aspirational.

I know that at least one of you has guns in the house. Do me a favor, please? If I ever, ever, ever put a time-honored metaphor through the wringer like this, shoot me dead?

"He planted the seeds of war. He harvested a whirlwind," Gore added. "And now the corrupt tree of a war waged on false premises has brought us the evil fruit of Americans torturing and sexually humiliating prisoners who are helpless in their care."

After 9-11, then after the Bali bombing, then after the Madrid bombing, I've thought, like everyone else, about what would happen if I were blown up or taken hostage. I can't say that I might not panic in the end, of course, and obviously I lead a good life and don't want it cut short. But I've been free to seek my own definition of happiness, I've had plenty of all-American joy, I keep up with my responsibilities. I figure that if my last minutes or days are painful, it doesn't alter the three decades, courtesy of the American way of life, that led up to them. I hope Nicholas Berg, with his start-up business and nice family in West Chester, had a chance to think those thoughts.