Tannishblog

To All Readers:

Tomorrow morning my family and I fly to Israel, in part a celebration of our twentieth wedding anniversary and our daughter’s graduation into High School. Paid for by Bube (grandma), this trip also is a cultural pilgrimage common to American Jews. To see the land that started so much culture and strife, to view the history and to breathe in the centuries. This is part of the experience of the Diaspora as expressed in the new world.

I’m not Jewish. I came from a Lutheran family that – although they never said as much – didn’t approve of my marrying out of faith. But I’m not very Christian either, as my three readers can attest to. So for me to fly to the holy land, the Promised Land, whatever, is a strange twist of life: A Buddhist in the Holy Land. This sounds like a novel title; but Heinlein already penned a “Stranger in a Strange Land” – any derivative thereof seems trite by comparison.

Still, I plan to approach this next fortnight with an open mind, an observant eye and a critical stance. Critiquing not others as much as my own viewpoint (I hope, at least) as I have an experience of a lifetime. To go to the same locations that spawned three of the world’s most prolific religions while not believing any of them will likely be a life-changing experience. Surely, it will be interesting.

I look forward to this change of perspective; perhaps it will strengthen my religious convictions, perhaps it will shake them. Perhaps I’ll finally “Grok” this whole theism thing - who knows? Whatever may come, I’ll have my journal and a fresh Dr. Grip to chronicle the experience. We’ve decided not to pack the laptop for freight concerns, so I’ll scribble what I see and translate it to digits later. Look for our return after August 9th.

Until then, take care.
Tannish

While we’re playing soldiers in the sand lot that is the Middle East, the crouching Tiger is stalking our shores. America needs to be vigilant. While I believe that China’s entry into our western-styled economic trade community is good for the emerging global economy and good for the Chinese people in the long term, it will come with some risks of losing economic ground for America. I’m no expert, far from it, but it seems to me that economies are by nature limited in their capacity to create wealth. Some of the limiting factors cannot be controlled directly, but result from other factors and their interactions.

This said - China (or anyone in their position of a monolithic newcomer trading partner) must wrest at least part of their growing trade clout from the other players. America is surely first on the short list of potentials. Just as China played a long-viewed game in the middle of last century to politically annex Tibet, a move that cannot be unmade, so too will this un-Western like long-term strategy give advantage to China in the world markets. Unhindered by political pluralism common to Western Democracies, they can afford to sacrifice a certain level of civil discomfiture within to maximize economic potential without.

China can play the game of global Monopoly, but it won’t play with the same cultural assumptions in place; it will see the game differently and its moves will seem cryptic to others. Just as we are foiled by Islamic ignorance and denunciation of accepted Geneva Conventions during war, so, too will China foil us at our own economic game. They don’t know all the theory, and some theories don’t apply to a nation that can force its will on its own businessmen at the expense of certain civil liberties.

While attention is garnered over China’s attempt to buy a US oil interest, look for more subtle movements to have greater long-term impact. Our nation’s failure to look past the next fiscal quarter will harm us greatly in dealing with the patient tiger. American policy-makers have a history of being blind to the fact that other cultures see things differently and act accordingly. So arrogant is America that it knows the right way to do things, that it is hobbled by its own hubris. We’ll pay the price for that with China – mark my words.