CROCODILE TEARS FOR TIBET

China slouches towards the Olympics with one hand behind its back, fingers crossed. The other hand is busier—fisting the face of tortured Tibet … again.

Darfur was bad enough. Hollywood types and even some athletes were getting queasy about attending China’s coming out party while Darfur bled white—or should I say black, because copping the crude is all the Beijing crowd cares about—and the glorious games were in trouble.

But Darfur was manageable. Hu Jintao and his CPC apparatchiks have all the muscle they need to make sure the world never sees kids from Beijing Polytechnic chanting “No Badminton for Oil!” on NBC’s Olympic feed.

China controls the news like a dominatrix controls her slave; I doubt many Chinese have ever heard the phrase, “genocide Olympics.” And for those few who know how to hack the no-no sites on the Chinese Internet, there are two magic words that keep them quiet as cold death.

“Tiananmen Square.”

But now this. Tibet in flames. And while the Party has locked out the media from that tortured place so effectively we don’t know if the official 22 have died, or the unofficial hundred plus (well, I guess we do know) enough news has leaked out to splash Egg Foo Young on their faces for everyone to see, if anyone cares enough to look.

As all the China experts and stereotyping racists will tell you, “face” is a big deal to the Chinese. That’s why the goon squads are pouring into Tibet by the truckload, squashing dissent—and more to the point, dissenters—as we speak. The Chinese Communist Party can’t afford to lose face; it’s how they keep their chokehold on power. Lose face and lose the Mandate of Heaven, lose face and people start to ask embarrassing questions, lose face and your ass will follow. Face must be maintained at all costs.

Tibet is paying that cost in blood. To save face, faceless Tibetans are being slaughtered by the dozens, or hundreds, or more. If this keeps up—and it will—soon there will be no face of Tibet at all.

This has not gone unnoticed here in the land of the free and the home of the maxed-out Visa. Here and there, when they can get a word in edgewise between the Barack/Hillary death match and the JLo twins, we hear cries of “Oh. The Horror!” from a few admirers of The Lama and a few more bleeding hearts, liberals and conservatives both, who never miss a chance to polish their morality haloes. Nancy Pelosi gushes outrage on the issue with admirable regularity.

Yes, I said admirable—because this time, she’s right, they all are, all the outraged, impotent hearts who bleed for Tibet.

But all the words are, to borrow a phrase, “Dust in the wind.” Because Darfur, Tibet, Falun Gong and the whole witches’ brew of Chinese oppression and callous indifference to the plight of anyone who stands in their way doesn’t amount to a hill of Mungbeans in American-Chinese relations. All that matters is cash. We are in bed with them.. If you don’t believe me, check the “made-in” tag on your pillowcase.

If our outrage was real, if we really meant it, we’d be screaming bloody murder.

“Hey, China! Cut out the crap in Tibet right now or we’ll void all those treasury bonds you hold and send our outsourcing to India.”

I’d love to live long enough to hear those words, but that would take several trips to the Fountain of Youth and I’m short of frequent flier miles. Instead we shed crocodile tears that make us feel noble about our cowardice in the face of brute power and hard cash.

But I can dream, can’t I?. My dream is for NBC to display the Olympic medal count using this graphic, come August.

Gold

Silver

Bronze

Dead Monks

It ought to be China’s dream too. It’s one category they’re sure to win.