Bao Bao and Obama’s Free Rider

Bao Bao (literally “baby”) panda at the National Zoo gets attention as the native to forests of western China entertain the crowds. I saw the native environment of the bearcat on a trek to the Garze Autonomous Region of Sichuan a year ago. I aborted when the rains poured on mountain roads hand chiseled on ravined mountain cliffs from raging waters eons before, making travel more than what I bargained for. After seeing the mammals in a Chengdu research station, I took the sweltering heat of the Sichuan plains in Chongqing, upstream from the Three Gorges Dam.

The panda is an endangered specie, cuddly in its behavior before crowds but having encountered the creature at very close quarters, I am not sure I want to be in the same pen with it in spite of its reputed disarming demeanor, even if I do not exactly taste like bamboo! (A non-sequitur aside: a Shanghai nurse called me bao bao once!)

For its appealing behavior, the panda, like other endangered species in Mother Nature’s kingdom, rides freely on the beneficence of parks and recreation budgets, and allocations from international preserves and research stations. Undisturbed and left to its own devices, the panda will survive. Unhappily, there is no such secluded place in the planet anymore.

It is in that context that I received Obama’s joking reference to China as a free rider when interviewed by New York Times’ Paul Klugman. Though Obama’s joke, explained lightly as occasioned by a glance to his office in-tray piling up crisis after another, asking, “Why can’t China handle some of these things?” his use of the free rider image might be a little overextended metaphor.

A historical sweep of geocentric proclivities: the Ptolemaic cosmology had the Earth at the center of the universe before Copernicus suggested otherwise. All roads led to Rome for the Caesars until Constantine moved the Imperium to Byzantium. The Prophet’s followers occupied Mecca before the Ottomans revived Constantine’s hangout and called it Istanbul, turning cathedrals into mosques. Pope Alexander VI kept the Roman Church in the game, granting Portugal permission to own the East, and Spain, the West.

In the East, the eunuch Zhongguo navigator Zhanghe launched an armada that dwarfed anything Columbus and Magellan later knew, but the Ming Dynasty turned inward and rubbed out the admiral’s gains out of official record (they were burned), strengthened the social glue in the lands between the two rivers (the Huanghe and the Yangtze), and connected the walls in its northern borders so the barbarians would be kept at bay. It did not but that didn’t stop the rule of the Middle Kingdom. It acted as the center of civilization under the mandate of heaven, expecting obeisance from the rest of the world, rudely violated by the Europeans, the U.S.’ westward ho, and Japan’s Meiji mid-1800s.

The wisdom of Kung Fu Tzu held an informal hegemony among the Hans, extended to Rìbĕn (Japan), Goryo (Korea), Yuenan (Vietnam) that went politically independent while the Southern Han, Zang, Uighur, Mongols, and Manchus stayed within the Kingdom, the latter two from north of the Great Wall getting assimilated rather than imposing “foreign” ways.

The British Empire discovered the power of the internal combustion engine and the politics of oil was birthed, with the industrial Ruhr and modernizing Riben/Nippon in Manchukuo competing for the privilege of imperial prominence, resulting in two devastating world wars with the Americans, their demonstrated nuclear military might over Hiroshima/Nagasaki, eventually becoming the guardians to the spigot.

A new world beyond oil emerged out of the blue (the Russians sent a Sputnik and a dog beyond the biosphere) when JFK’s determination to send a man to the moon was accomplished within a decade. The new Earth came dramatically to me in the earthrise picture of 1968 when my sense of social fealty and personal integrity was formed, and I chose to be on all counts earthbound, not beholden to loyalty to a single nation, race, or religion.

Weekend New Year 2014 I spent in Hong Kong where the Occupy Central gathered to disrupt Victoria Island’s center, not unlike their well-off cousins in the land of Siam. HK’s anti-Occupy has since taken to the streets, and Thailand just started the command and control of the generals. Ferguson MO erupted when a young black man was shot to death by a white cop, for disrespectfully speaking out-of-bounds.

The metaphor I grew up in was to be a “son of God” on behalf of all in servanthood as shown by Jesus the Nazarene. U.S. exceptionalism uses the simile in a privileged position, “a light on a hill,” to regulate and rule it over others.

There is no escape from the inevitability of life’s interrelatedness to life. Albert Einstein noticed that the fall of a leaf reverberates across the universe. The bao bao pandas are no free riders. They entertain for their meals! 

China, likewise, works hard for its fried noodles. Gambei!