 On Point Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages, writes his On Point column most weekdays. He is also an author and freelance writer. Reach Vincent Carroll at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com. |
Carroll: An uphill battle
Andrew Romanoff sounds very much like a man committed to getting the attention of the Chinese government. The Democratic speaker of the Colorado House even uttered the word “jail” Tuesday at a press conference where he promised to raise the Darfur genocide with Chinese officials when he arrives in that country on Saturday.
He’s “willing, not expecting” to be arrested, Romanoff explained.
Was he going to pull some sort of stunt, I inquired afterward, thinking of the Boulder woman who unfurled a banner three months ago at a Mount Everest base camp demanding “One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 2008.” She was arrested and later expelled.
He wasn’t sure what he would do, Romanoff replied. But if you believe that the killing in Darfur is “the central moral crisis of our time,” he insisted, you don’t sit quietly by.
Romanoff is part of a growing international campaign determined to shame China into ending its support for a Sudanese regime responsible for the Darfur slaughter.
The campaign plans to do this in part by highlighting Chinese hypocrisy: At the same time they’re preparing to host the 2008 Olympics with the theme “One World, One Dream,” they’re helping to obliterate the dreams of the people of Darfur.
If China doesn’t change course, Romanoff said, “we will be forced to bring Darfur to the Olympic games.”
Your taxes aren’t at issue here, by the way. Romanoff will be on a private tour, arranged by the Aspen Institute, with elected officials from across the country. Institute officials may have been as surprised as the Chinese when Romanoff tipped them to his agenda and his stated hope of enlisting his fellow travelers in the cause.
How quixotic is this campaign? As with any attempt to embarrass the Chinese government, it’s a long shot — although not nearly as hopeless as the cause of a free Tibet.
Romanoff expects that the Chinese, presented with a choice between having their prized Olympics sullied by international censure and abandoning a vicious ally in Africa, will do the right thing. He may be wrong. Yet as we’ve seen with the recent execution of China’s corrupt former chief food and drug regulator, Beijing does in fact occasionally care about the image it projects abroad.
Wanted: Diverse ideas
There isn’t a great deal of diversity on the Denver City Council — at least not the kind that counts most in politics, which is diversity of competing ideas. But so long as Jeanne Faatz holds a seat, the tradition of dissent will remain alive and well.
Faatz was at it again Monday night, reminding her colleagues that sometimes they need to cut expenditures instead of only hiking them.
“At a time when we are going to be thinking about asking citizens to raise taxes,” Faatz said, referring to a huge infrastructure package headed for this fall’s ballot, “it certainly isn’t the time to give money away for a very low priority.”
Such as? Spending a quarter million dollars for an endowment for public-access TV.
It’s a small outlay as these things go, of course, but instructive. At a time when YouTube, blogs and other technologies give individuals the power to publish and broadcast on their own, subsidizing anything to do with public- access TV should be passé. But just try telling that to the Denver council: Only two other members — Charlie Brown and Michael Hancock — joined Faatz in voting no.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountain
News.com.