The White Peril 白禍

Phooey (phoois, phooit...). I saw this FoxNews story on a recent Michael Jackson conference at Yale, but I was still munching over a way to say something useful and funny about it. As always, Alice in Texas proves the simplest ideas are the best:

FoxNews: panelists discussed how pedophilia allegations have fed into false stereotypes about gays.

Alice B: Do people no longer have phone directories to read?

It's a shame that the people studying pop culture in the academy do such a horrible job at it, because in my experience in college, it was really valuable. In a modern poetry class I took sophomore year, I asked the professor about including Madonna (Erotica had just come out) in my final paper, and his response was, "You may include a section on Madonna, as long as--I don't know how you anticipate doing this with the work of such a thoroughgoing vulgarian, but I wait with interest to see--you really think you've found a way to ground her in the traditions of American poetry."

And he meant it. Whenever we conferred about the paper, he took pains to make sure I was focused on the old stuff of proven, lasting value (Dickinson and Eliot) and showing how I thought it illuminated what Madonna was doing. For that matter, we also, in tenth grade, took a break from reading Chaucer and Beowulf and Pepys's diary to do one of our assigned five-paragraph themes on a work of contemporary fiction. "Good junk," our teacher called it--Updike, or whatever. The idea was to take the principles we were learning to apply to the foundational or great works and see how talented authors right now were still using them in a lesser but meaningful way. But we did it once, and then it was back to...I don't know, Party Patches, or wherever we were. On most educational issues, I'm slightly to the right of the average convent school nun, but I do think that it's good to work artifacts of popular culture into lessons sparingly. The continuity of Western civilization is probably the most valuable lesson of the humanities/social science part of education.

But of course, that's not the way researchers approach it. Most of the pop culture studies material you see involves closed readings, with only other pop culture or current events for context. The interpretive framework is almost invariably based in cultural studies, the poison seeds of which were germinating when I was in college. The idea seems to be to reassure students that they can just kind of glance at what's around them and see everything they need to know to understand art and the mysteries of life. Because, you know, if there's anything kids in their late teens and early twenties won't do without being shown how, it's navel-gazing.

Just one thing from the article that did make me chuckle:

Jackson "in many ways is the black male crossover artist of the 20th century," said Seth Clark Silberman, who teaches about race and gender at Yale. "He has grown up in front of us, so we have a great investment in him, even though some people today may find his image disturbing."

Some people may find his image disturbing? Sheesh. You know, if anyone out there has a list of people who are not disturbed by Jackson's current image, please do me the kindness of forwarding it to me so I can stay the hell away from them.

I've done enough ragging on John Kerry that it's only fair to point out that I was mostly impressed with what he said in this interview with The Washington Blade. His response to this question strikes me as sounding genuine rather than evasive:

Blade: OK, last question. I�m curious: If you had been born gay [SRK rolls eyes], how different do you think your life would be?

Kerry: I can�t tell you the answer to that question because I don�t know what my � you know, I just can�t tell you how I would have responded to it. Would I have been at the forefront of the crusade in the 1960s or would I still be, as some people are, living a double life or something, I don�t know.

And his last word on the marriage debate is also one of the clearest statements I've heard from him yet about anything:

I think, you know, and I�ve said this before, I think marriage raises a different issue in the minds of a lot of people because of its deep religious foundations and institutional structure as the oldest institution in the world.

It is the oldest institution in the world � older than country, older than our form of government, older than most forms of government. And people view it differently.

What�s important to me is not the terminology or the status; what�s important to me are the rights. The rights. That you shouldn�t be discriminated against in your right to visit a partner in the hospital. You shouldn�t be discriminated against in your right to leave property to somebody, if that�s what you want. You shouldn�t be discriminated against if you have a civil union relationship that affords you the same rights.

Now I think that�s a huge step. There�s never been a candidate for president who has stood up and said I think we should fight for those things. And you�ve got to progress. Even that, I take huge hits for.

And you know, I stood up on the floor of the Senate and voted against DOMA because I thought it was gay bashing on the floor of the United States Senate. I was one of 14 votes. The only person running for reelection who did that.

If only he addressed every issue, including how he plans to keep terrorists from incinerating us all, as clearly.

Dale Carpenter's most recent article makes, as usual, a lot of good points. His discussion of the continuum of attitudes among gays in the Log Cabin Republicans is one of those things that are puzzling at first but sound obvious once explained to you.

Something he doesn't really address, though, is why "Republican-first gays" would join an organization with "gay-first Republicans" agenda. You don't need a formal group to be able to socialize and exchange ideas, right? And if you seriously believe that Republican principles are universally correct and thus more important than gay advocacy, wouldn't you be driving that point home most effectively by being just an active party member whose homosexuality only comes out organically, in the course of interacting with people?

Maybe that's one of the reasons that, despite my disaffection with the Democratic Party and frequent votes for GOP candidates, my encounters with gay Republicans have not moved me to change my registration. I understand what people are trying to get across when they say things like, "We should be Americans first and gays second," but to me that involves falsely isolating gay issues from everything else in life--less shrilly than leftist queer activists do, to be sure, but just as perniciously.

All real-life political decisions involve prioritizing, and gay issues are just like everything else in that we sometimes have to put other values ahead of them. I don't see why we deserve congratulations for doing so like everyone else. Well, okay, that's a bit harsh. I empathize completely with gestures of the I'm-queer-but-I-still-love-America type, and I've been tempted to make them myself. But I think that in the end, they just encourage people to believe that our sexuality is something that everything we believe is somehow oriented by. In that sense, if LCR is going to be useful, it's probably better for it to focus on frankly evaluating candidates and platforms through the single-issue lens of gay advocacy, leaving it to be understood that other, potentially more important reference points exist but are outside its ken.

Sometimes Amritas is too nice. He quotes a book by one Marie Nishimori called Warning! Never Imitate Him: A Collection of Bushie's English, which is--how's this for a novel idea that'll have you rolling in the aisles?--a collection of the President's solecisms with pointers on how to avoid them.

Amritas chivalrously refrained from pointing out what's on the lady's homepage, but if you look at the header, you can get a sense of her (unsurprising) politics. (Given Japan's notorious environmental policies--what one can only hope are the most destructive in the developed world--she's got her work cut out for her at home. Be that as it may, Nishimori wants the Japanese reading public to know that Bush sucks.) Her way of selling her book is this:

ブッシュの school yard bully「学校のいじめっ子」的政治にムカついてる方も
テッド・ニュージェントが日本人を Japs と呼んでることを知り怒ってる方も
単に英語をお勉強したい方も
この本を読んで背筋が寒くなりながら爆笑しましょう！

For those who are sick of Bush's schoolyard bully approach to politics...
For those who were angered when Ted Nugent called the Japanese "Japs"...
For those who simply want to study English...
Read this book, and you'll simultaneously laugh out loud and get the chills!

Ted Nugent? I haven't read the book, so it's possible that Ms. Nishimori pads out the Bush part with an excursus into anti-Japanese, anti-Gaia talk of all kinds. But taking things at face value, WTF does something Nugent said on some radio program a few years ago have to do with Bush? Yes, he's backed Bush for reelection. And Kim Jong-il hopes Kerry wins. So what? There are only two real choices in a US Presidential election; each candidate is going to have legions of supporters who did things he did not endorse. Unless we know that Bush heard of the incident and reacted along the lines of, "Japs? Heh-heh, that's a good one. Have to use that some time," it's irrelevant. And please tell me Ms. Nishimori and other lefties would be wringing their hands over Nugent's Lenny Bruce-like litany of racial slurs if he'd come out in favor of Kerry.

Sometimes, I simultaneously laugh out loud and get the chills myself when I think of my political position these days. I'm not really one of those people whose politics changed dramatically after 9/11. It's not that I was a fount of wisdom about terrorist threats before then, mark you; but I was a Reason-reading guy who believed (living in Asia has a funny way of doing this to you) entitlement programs were sucking energy away from the federal government's core responsibilities, including strong national defense. And of course, I'm "socially liberal," which isn't a term I'm fond of but gets the point across.

I've supported Bush in the WOT, and I think he's a sincere and likable person. But I'm not a fan. I'm from a working-class family and got into an Ivy League school on my brain; I studied hard to learn an Asian language and majored in comparative literature. Legacy kids like Bush push all my buttons, trust me. And no, the fact that he overcame his typical rich-kid problems with drink and dissolution doesn't get me all aquiver with admiration at how well he's redeemed himself.

Still and all, I was brought up to recognize when I'm being childish, and I know that my feelings about Bush's background don't necessarily say anything about his performance as President. There's plenty to criticize--he's offered to spend so much federal money that I sometimes wonder why he doesn't just go the whole way and order the USAF to drop silver dollars from helicopters over all US population centers--but to get to the point of criticizing it usefully, you have to stop foaming at the mouth and start paying attention to the policies. Or not even always policies, exactly: There are potentially troubling questions about the way the Bush family exercises its influence, even if you accept that influence-peddling is how old rich families operate. But you have to look at facts and tease out their implications dispassionately if you expect people to trust your interpretations, and almost no one on the left seems capable of that anymore. And then, of course, you eventually have to confront the question of why Kerry is a better alternative, which is not a task I would wish on my worst enemy at this stage. It's not surprising that some enviro-nut (if her name is pronounced ma-ree and not ma-ri-eh, as it appears from the way she spells it in Japanese, she may be a foreigner or half-Japanese, BTW) can't make a coherent case against Bush, and it's not her responsibility to push effectively for Kerry.

But I wish someone could. While I plan to vote for Bush, I'd prefer to do so knowing that I've had access to a variety of the best opposing arguments and have dealt squarely with them. I don't mind making a choice I'm not 100% enthusiastic about as long I know what trade-offs I'm making. Unfortunately, "He speaks ungrammatically, and Ted Nugent likes him!" appears to be about as good as the opposition is going to get.

Damn. Never published this last week. The Australian Embassy bombing in Jakarta doesn't seem to be getting much play in the American press. Thankfully, there were only 9 deaths--multiple times fewer than in the Bali bombing--but there were nearly 200 people injured. Simon World makes the following point:

What matters is what the American people themselves believe. Using the major media and the blogosphere as (an admittedly imperfect) proxy, there has been some expressions of sympathy and interest, but far broader indifference and ignorance. Instead there's much concern over whether George Bush dodged a medical 30 years ago and whether the proof was faked. I agree it is an issue. So is John Kerry's Vietnam record. But there are nowhere near as important an issue as what does need talking about. Where are Bush and Kerry planning to take America in the next 4 years? What are they planning to do in the war on terror? On Iraq? On helping allies like Australia? On defeating al Qaeda, JI and their ilk? There seems to be a major case of not seeing the forest for the trees at the moment in American polity. The losers are not just Americans, but the world.

I think it's dangerous to take the blogosphere as representative of the American public, which was probably paying as little attention to the Dan Rather memo story as it was to the Jakarta bombing. I suspect that for a lot of people, the attention-grabbing issue was the 9/11 anniversary, which was impending last week and happening Saturday.

I generally only post on something if I think I have commentary to add, and I don't conceive of myself as a news source (though I'll occasionally give translations of key parts of Japanese articles). But Simon is right: Australia is an ally, it was targeted, and we should be showing support. So though it's late, let me say that we're with Australia.

In a veiled way, I've tried to indicate when I think the Koizumi administration deserves more expressions of solidarity from Americans for its support in the WOT, too, since much of it--especially the deployment of SDF personnel in Iraq--comes in the face of a good deal of opposition. (Thankfully, while Japan has been named as a target by al Qaeda, there have been no attacks here, and the Japanese taken hostage in Iraq have been released.)

Unfortunately, underappreciation of our allies' loyalty isn't the only problem; I wish Americans also had a better sense of what those allies are up against, in practical terms. The sheer number of people and shipped items that travel daily through Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Shanghai and Singapore is mind-blowing. The populations of most East Asian countries are huge, too. There was talk a few months ago that al Qaeda was setting up a cell here, probably for money laundering, and the Algerian-French man in question wasn't caught despite being wanted by Interpol. This is in Japan, a country with Westernized infrastructure, in which non-natives are very visible and the law enforcement systems highly developed. Most other Asian countries are far less organized, and those with home-grown terrorists cannot rely on better border patrols to help screen them out. I can understand why Iraq tends to absorb people's attention, since our own men and women are over there, but the world is a big place. Asia is probably the best place on Earth if you want to move yourself and your stuff undetected, and the evidence is that Islamist terrorists know it. Thanks to our friends here for doing what they can.

Glenn Reynolds has decided to take a break from posting about contentious things like the election and tackle gay marriage. It's an uncharacteristically long post, and I agreed with most of it. I especially liked this passage:

Now, of course, any question beginning "what is John Kerry's position. . ." is a tough one. But — correct me if I'm wrong here — the only real difference between Kerry and Bush is that Bush has offered vague support to the certain-to-fail Federal Marriage Amendment. But it's, er, certain to fail. Now that's a difference, I guess. But it's not a huge one, and to me it doesn't seem to be a big enough difference to justify the vitriol. (Kerry's been, maybe, more supportive on civil unions, but I wouldn't take that to the bank.)

I support gay marriage, of course, though I'd be lying if I said it was as important to me as it is to, say, Andrew Sullivan. But if you look at the polls, it's opposed about 2-1 by voters. What that means is that you're not likely to see much difference between the parties until somebody thinks they can pick up enough votes to make a difference.

I think that gay marriage is good for everyone. Marriage is a good thing, and I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be just as good a thing for gay people as for straight people. Judging from the gay couples I know, it would be a good thing — and I'm entirely at a loss to understand why people think gay marriage somehow undermines straight marriage. But to get there, you need to make that case, not just accuse opponents of being closedminded-biblethumping-bigotsoftheredneckreligiousright. (Andrew Sullivan made some of these positive arguments quite well in Virtually Normal, but I don't think the tone on his blog has been as constructive of late.)

That last sentence is tact of the most delicate. Somehow over the last few years, gay marriage went from being something to work toward, as current gay life recovered from its origins in the social upheavals of the '60's and '70's, to being something that the government has to provide right now if we're to stop being "second-class citizens." And, of course, it's not just Andrew Sullivan.

Stephen Miller has posted his own non-endorsement of Bush on the IGF Culture Watch blog:

I wish I could support Bush, since I'm in his camp on a wide range of issues (the War on Terror, entitlement and tort reform, pro-investment tax cuts). But I can't. He's sold my vote to the religious right.

Yet I won't be voting for Kerry, with whom I disagree on most foreign and domestic policies, not to mention his wishy-washy position on topic G (he opposes gay marriage and supports state amendments to ban 'em, but claims he also opposes the Federal Marriage Amendment � just not enough to vote against it).

That's nice, but who does it leave? Lyndon LaRouche? Also, as Reynolds pointed out, the fact that the FMA looks pretty certain not to pass should be factored in, but few people do so. Whether it changes the character of Bush's election-year endorsement of the amendment is an open question, but a question that has to be given due consideration. (Many gays, of course, twist themselves Tantric trying to excuse Kerry's endorsement of the Massachusetts amendment and failure to vote on bringing the FMA to the table.)

And then there's the fact that the religious right is not the only constituency that opposes gay marriage. I know a number of married people who have personally, and in public, treated Atsushi and me as a perfectly "legitimate" couple but don't believe all the implications of gay marriage have been thrashed out sufficiently.

If I keep going, I'm in danger of producing yet another anagram of my usual gay marriage rant. That would be a dull old thing for everyone, so I'll cut it out and just hope once more that people can stop talking past each other sooner rather than later.

[pause]

Well, okay, I would like to point out just one more tangentially related thing that's been bothering me lately. Last week, I left a rather intemperate comment on this post at Classical Values, and immediately thought I'd been out of line and kind of panicked. Rereading it, I suppose it fortunately wasn't as belligerent as I was feeling. But the issue (of anonymity, not of outing) came back this afternoon when I received an e-mail from Janis Gore pointing out this story, which mentions short-fused lawyer John Rawls in connection with the proposed SSM ban in Louisiana. There's a picture of a gay couple in their living room, addressing envelopes for a drive to oppose the ban.

You know, when I see people from little regional cities--and I want to make it clear that I'm not tarring the South here; there's just as much busybodying in the Mid-Atlantic--who are willing to have their names and faces put in the paper in relation to gay issues, I think of these anonymous website commenters who bitch about gay marriage and the ineptitude of the HRC and hostile politicians and the meanies on the religious right and blah blah blah, and I want to backhand them.

There are plenty of honorable reasons not to use your full name on-line--from fear of identity theft to the trade-offs you might be making to work in an environment that's not gay-friendly. The fact remains, though, that our gains are mostly made by people who are willing to be unsecretive and take whatever sacrifices go along with that.* It's they who are going to make things better for the gays of the future, assuming our pushy activists don't spoil it all by issuing straight folk a new ultimatum every five minutes. For that matter, even the activists, tiresome as they can be, are putting themselves out there for what they believe, using their real identities. I don't think there's any ethical obligation for people posting under a pseudonym to absent themselves from discussions of gay issues. I do wish they'd show some respect and stop griping that other people aren't doing enough to make their lives easier.

* Especially if they aren't among those of us who live in super-big cities where there's already a lot of pressure on people to appear hip and gay-positive, which is why I say "they" rather than "we"

I was going to wait to post this until I get home from the office tonight. But the date has been 11 September here in Tokyo for 11 hours now, and something about the way all the folks back home in the States are getting ready for bed, the way they did on 10 September three years ago, makes me want to say it now.

On 9/11, I came to Atsushi's apartment to watch what was happening on CNN. The whole night, while I sat staring at the television, shaking in anger, he came out to keep making me tea. He had to wake up at 6:30 as always, but he must have gotten up six or seven times overnight to boil water and change the leaves and express relief that the attacks had stopped. Over the next few days, messages from friends kept coming to my cell phone: "So sorry to hear about what happened in America. I hope your friends in NY and family in PA are safe. You must be white-hot mad--here's to a quick retaliation by your government." And last year, when I took Atsushi to meet my parents, his mother (who was a child during the War and married into a family whose property and holdings were wiped out by the bombing of Tokyo) asked him to offer a flower at Ground Zero while we were in New York.

Sixty years ago, Japan and America were in a war that made a disaster area of the Pacific Rim. By 2001, I could be an American man living in a gloriously rebuilt Tokyo, in a relationship with a Japanese man, with Japanese friends who expressed fellow-feeling with America when we were attacked. The Japanese Prime Minister has been one of our staunchest allies; the Japanese Self-Defense Forces have been sent on non-combat missions in Iraq. Japan's relationship with America and the rest of the West will always be complicated, but it is undeniable.

This is possible because our civilization is the real deal; the things we value are the things that are worth valuing. Our people are free. We feel a sense of control over our own destiny. We have hope and can-do resilience, which make it unnecessary to cling like death to grievances and turn them into inheritable grudges. Yes, America and Japan and the UK and the rest of the democracies sometimes do bad--seriously bad--things in our relations with the great wide world. We don't always live up to our ideals. We have plenty of individual resenters in our midst, too. But resentment and destructiveness aren't what characterize us. Indeed, we're even nice when we're vengeful: Since 9/11, we've spent our energy debating how to protect ourselves without having to be too hurtful to other people and peoples in the process. And we're still getting on passenger jets and taking elevators up skyscrapers.

I can't think of what to say about those who died without feeling as if I were exploiting them for symbolism, so I will just say that they aren't forgotten in the two languages I love, today those of allies rather than enemies:

Rest in peace.
安らかに眠って下さい。

Added at 23:00: Minutes after the moment of silence to mark the attack by the first plane, Atsushi sent me a cell-phone message: "CNNを見ていた？9・11から3年だね。悲劇を乗り越えるアメリカに敬服します。 [Were you watching CNN? 3 years since 9/11. I really admire America for so triumphing over tragedy.]" At the end of that sentence was a graphic of a star. I think I'm done crying now.

Virginia Postrel reports on a design-contest entry that envisions a hospital people might not find off-putting. She then notes:

You have to be pretty obtuse to define hospital "function" without paying any attention to how the environment makes patients feel--but that's exactly how hospitals have historically viewed the problem. Aside from the sheer ugliness of most health care environments, lots of them are also extremely confusing to navigate, adding that extra dollop of stress that patients and their loved ones so need and want.

But of course, that's only true of first-world hospitals, and only very recently. I'd wager it used to be that mere antisepsis and standardized-looking equipment carried a reassuring feeling of safety, standard practices, and quality control. (The layouts, I can't think of a defense for, though hospitals are no worse than government offices, airline terminals, and all manner of other public facilities in that regard.) Louis Pasteur made his discoveries about germs only a century and a half ago, after all. And hospitals in less-developed countries still can make you yearn for ugly vinyl tile and the acrid smell of disinfectant. It's a measure of how advanced our health care systems are that we think of sterilization as a given, something we can guarantee and work around in the process of making the environment more psychologically restful.

I am seriously going to go bonkers if I hear this locution out of some fag'n'dyke activist's trap one more time before Election Day:

"I don't think any self-respecting gay individual can vote for George W. Bush and I think that Republican leaders like Washington DC council member David Catania have made it clear that Bush has given the LGBT community no reason to reelect him this fall," Stonewall Democrats' Marble told 365Gay.com.

You know, I can see someone making the case that public opinion will not allow Kerry to skedaddle out of Iraq and soften up on the WOT even if he wants to, and that therefore it's okay not to be a single-issue war voter, and that therefore gays should vote Kerry-Edwards because (despite their no-show on the vote to bring it to the floor) they don't support the FMA. I'd be hard to convince, but it's an argument that could be made respectably. Or you could talk about the Bush administration's inconsistent approach to securing our borders and entry points. And on and on. However, to say that we all vote, or should vote, solely on the basis of whose policies are gay-friendly--to say this less than a week before the 9/11 anniversary--what the hell are these people thinking?

And for one homo to inform others what constitutes their self-respect as gay people is just...I mean, excuse me, Marianne? I didn't let my parents, my pastor, my gym teacher, or the Book of Leviticus define my self-respect for me, and now I'm supposed to let you do it? And that would be because...you look hot in Brooks Brothers, maybe? I have no problem with lobbyists' saying they think a vote for so-and-so will be damaging to the rights of gays in the long-term, or what have you. That's presumably what their job is, or part of it. Say that a lot of LGBT voters aren't thinking analytically enough about the issues--fine. Argue. Make your case contentiously. Make it passionately if you're fired up about it. Push the handful of issues your organization works on. But don't play the self-respect card every time someone in the Family weighs making a trade-off you don't understand. All that does is reinforce the idea that some ideological laundry list goes along with being out, which has to be one of the very most pernicious ideas floating around gay activism (and the competition is fierce). And yes, I know it's the Stonewall Democrats, and no, I don't expect anything more. It'd be nice to be able to, is all.

Land o' Goshen, isn't it November yet?

The Daily Yomiuri has a dual interview with former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone and US Ambassador to Japan (and White House Chief of Staff toward the end of the Reagan administration) Howard Baker. The English version focuses mostly on their impressions of Reagan and, against that backdrop, what leadership is. But in the Japanese (I'm assuming Baker spoke in English and Nakasone in Japanese, but I'm not sure whether to call it the "original"), there's more about Japan's role in the WOT and on current issues along the Pacific Rim:

The Japan-US relationship is one of amity. Japan sent SDF personnel to Iraq, but that was on its own behalf. It was not just predicated on the Japan-US friendship. Of course, America applauded the deployment, but the SDF was sent in the national interests of Japan. [Yes, it's that repetitious in the Japanese version.--SRK]

We are well aware that Japan has a pacifist constitution. We acknowledge fully that there are restrictions on the SDF. Howvever, the world perceives Japan as a superpower. Japan has begun to take on the responsibilities of a major nation. The deployment of peacekeeping forces (PKO) to the Golan Heights and East Timor is such a role of a superpower. And I think that the deployment of the SDF to Iraq was also in that vein.

For Japan, the chief threat now is not North Korea. The very biggest issue is Japan's China policy. China wields gargantuan economic and military power, and it is looking to expand it. For the sake of the world, and not just the Pacific Rim, it is extremely important for Japan and China to build an amicable relationship.

All of which makes me wonder--what exactly is in the RNC platform about China and Japan? Baker is an ambassador now, after all; you expect smooth talk from him. I still can't seem to get to the text. Maybe I'm just using harebrained search terms. It's clearly toned down from 2000, but I wonder whether it sounds like what I surmise from my slapdash back-translation from the Nikkei.

Added at 3 a.m. (don't ask): Nathan says that things in China are not as 1984-ish as they're often made out to be. He seems to be talking mostly about daily life for the people. I'd have no trouble believing that. Japan is a way more accessible country than China, and Western journalists still insist on doing that whole Mysterious Ways of Japan routine whenever they can. At the same time, the fact that police brutality may be less common than the press makes out doesn't mean that the PRC's foreign policy and designs on superpower-dom are any less troubling. Even if we agree that the Kuomintang was not populated by angels.