Culture

The Chinese Communist Party has a brilliant new propagandist in Olympic gold medalist Eileen Gu, the American-born freestyler skier who is competing for China in this year's Winter Games. Gu is a talented athlete, gifted academically, and, well, gorgeous — she has done modeling campaigns for Louis Vuitton, Fendi and Gucci and has appeared on the covers of Elle and Vogue China. She's also a traitor. Gu, who is 18, was born and raised in San Francisco by her American father and Chinese mother. She plans to attend college at Stanford University. Yet she announced in 2019 that she would represent China in the 2022 Beijing Olympics.

The thing I am looking forward to the least right now is the Olympics, and I have a colonoscopy scheduled. The only answer is a drinking game. Enough with "politics by sportscasters for those who only care about politics." I threw away my Mao (and Che) T-shirts sophomore year. We all know Beijing is not a democratic regime. So for some sort of balance, can we all agree that for every hundred references to the Uighurs, Tibet and Hong Kong, we make one to where and how Covid all began? Or will the mainstream media continue their coverage détente? Bottoms up for every reference to bats, pangolins and Chinese wet markets. Speaking of Covid, a drink every time announcers insist China's Covid crackdown is autocratic draconianism while ignoring that much of the same was done in America.

Apologies to woke athletes — Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want you to “use your platform” in Beijing. On Thursday, the House Speaker testified before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, and discouraged America’s Winter Olympians from issuing political statements about China’s authoritarian regime. “I would say to our athletes: you’re there to compete. Do not risk incurring the anger of the Chinese government, because they are ruthless,” she said. “I know there is a temptation on the part of some to speak out while they are there,” Pelosi continued. “I respect that. But I also worry about what the Chinese government might do to their reputations, to their families.

Tom Brady was never the most approachable quarterback in the NFL. That would be Peyton Manning, who just last weekend brought down the house on Saturday Night Live. Aaron Rodgers is probably more athletic; Patrick Mahomes and Matthew Stafford have those cannon-fire arms. Lamar Jackson knows when to run the ball, while any number of QBs might be said to be faster. Yet it's Brady who is indisputably the greatest of all time. Somehow the geeky kid from that rookie weigh-in photo all the way back in 2000, the one who looked like he spent too much time brooding in a computer lab, blossomed into a force of nature the likes of which the professional sports world has never known.

Normally Cockburn isn't much of a sports fan, notwithstanding the occasional boozy tailgate for his local kickball team (which was disbanded years ago). But even he couldn't help but blow his whistle this morning when he learned that the Washington Football Team, formerly the Washington Redskins, had changed its name to the Washington Commanders. At first blush, the Commanders isn't such a bad choice. The franchise, after all, is based in the very seat of our military-industrial complex. Certainly it's a better choice than, say, the Washington Corporals (too low-rank) or the Washington Raytheon Lobbyists (too on the nose). And Commanders does have a distinctly DC oomph to it.

If you’ve ever read a headline along the lines of “Kardashian Family Worth Combined Zillion Dollars” and wondered how a gaggle of uneducated, tawdry, plastic people with a combined vocabulary of Joe Biden manages to account for, like, 10 percent of America’s GDP, you obviously haven’t visited a cosmetics store recently. In search of something to even out my complexion, made a little too ruddy for my liking by the harsh Pennsylvania winter and the constant firing of a gigantic coal furnace, I ventured to my local Ulta Beauty store. I just wanted a little something to temper my Rumpole-of-the-Bailey-after-a-bottle-of-cheap-claret skin tone. What I got was a heaping helping of humble pie and an appreciation for Covid masks behind which to hide my hideous mug.

While pundits bicker about whether bills targeting critical race theory in schools are ethical or constitutional, an equally important question is whether they’re effective. While such legislation is a workable stopgap to loathsome practices like affinity groups, it can only work as a temporary measure. CRT is manifested not primarily as a set of explicit ideas to be taught like the freezing point of water or the causes of World War Two. Rather, it’s a philosophy that informs the instruction, curriculum, and policies of various districts. We cannot outright ban CRT from our schools anymore than we can ban the influence of philosopher John Dewey. When the culprit is a belief system, bans are the wrong tool.

The first time President Trump was impeached by House Democrats was for his “high crime” of having a telephone conversation with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. There were some other minor details — and Trump was acquitted on February 5, 2020. While the impeachment failed to deliver his removal from office, it did elevate a minor figure to the stature of hero among die-hard Trump haters: Alexander Vindman, who served on the National Security Council. Vindman had conjured the story that Trump’s phone call entailed an impeachable “abuse of power.” Vindman’s feverish dream excited others, but there was no substance to it. Heads of state have hard-ball conversations all the time.

Jordan Peterson has left his professorial post at the University of Toronto. He announced his departure with characteristic blunt honesty in Canada’s National Post. Peterson first came to my attention in 2016, as he did for many, for his refusal to bow to demands to use novel pronouns preferred by the transgendered. For this, he was denounced as a bigot, his university threatened his career, his speaking events were disrupted, all done under the cloak of civility: all transgender people wanted was respect, to be addressed as who they were. How dare Peterson be so uncivil? Lost in the shrieking winds that enveloped him was his basic point: it’s no longer civility when it's backed up by the force of law.