The China Bill and other Kickshaws - 12 May 2000

I'm talking from the roasting oven of my study here, looking out from time to time on Central Park, whose vast blobs of green foliage stand very still.

About a hundred feet below, a small shaded box which registers the official New York temperature of, they say, 93 degrees.

Unfortunately most of us don't live in a little shaded box 100 ft in the air above Central Park, we live down where the radiation from the buildings adds 10 degrees or so.

Whatever it is inside or outside my window it's an outrageous record so early in May, too early for most of us to have had the air conditioners installed or reinstalled.

I found a peculiar way of taking my mind off our lamentable condition which was, among the many big issues I might have covered, to concentrate on a meeting in the White House of a collection of very cool customers in a very cool room.

More than 50 men, mostly, all in trim business suits - could have been the 1950s - sitting placidly and nodding agreement to any and everyone speaking from the lectern in one of the most ravishing rooms of the White House - the East Room - which Mrs John Kennedy turned into an elegant 18th century French salon.

This meeting, so placid, and unlikely to produce a startling or powerful story was nevertheless one about which a famous economist said later: "The effect of this meeting on the Congress, through it the American economy might continue on its euphoric rise or come tumbling down to all our woe and loss of Eden."

There met then about 50 Americans, but Americans of politically towering stature, at the invitation of President Clinton and Vice President Gore. Two ex-presidents, Carter and Ford - one Democrat, one Republican - that's the way it went. The present secretary of state and two former Republican secretaries of state - Mr Baker, Mr Kissinger.

That was the whole point of the meeting because two weeks from now there will be a vote in the House of Representatives which, remember, has the decisive voice on all money bills - a vote which has been fairly called a landmark vote on a bill to grant China - Communist China - permanent trading privileges with the United States.

The bill has bipartisan support but a small, equally bipartisan opposition. The expert guess is that, at the moment, it's about 15 or 20 votes short of passage. So the meeting was called to convince the House of Representatives of the crucial need to pass this bill.

It occurred to me, looking at it, if we were living in the age and the presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson there would be no need for a meeting in the White House or anywhere else. LBJ would have done all the lobbying necessary to have things his way by coaxing, nudging, bullying, threatening, falling just short of blackmail to persuade the unpersuadable - even the belligerent opposition - to think again and collapse his way.

But Mr Clinton is not LBJ. He can lay out a programme - a juicy, utopian programme - with more detail, more intelligence and more eloquence than any president I can think of. His trouble begins when he tries to sell utopia to the Congress.

The sad, brutal truth is that in the present Congress, for instance, most of the initiatives which eventually turn into law were, in the beginning, Republican initiatives.

Now Mr Clinton pleading for a bill - a reform, an idea - always sounds wonderful but he does not, as Henry James might have said, he does not wonderfully convert the Congress to his side.

So the leaders and ex-leaders of both parties were invited to the White House, not to be convinced about the need to pass the bill - they're already convinced - but by making a public show of their consensus they might, the president hoped, turn the hesitant tide in the House. And in so doing weaken the fairly solid opposition of the trade unions.

Now I've mentioned, in the past year or two, the revival of union power from its very low ebb during the past 20, 30 years. The main national industrial union was the only formidable and the most respectable of the paraders in the appalling protest rally that shut down the World Trade Conference in Seattle.

The administration hopes to convince, first, its own dissenters - the Democrats in the House - and then the unions that the opening of permanent trade with China will not throw hundreds of thousands of American jobs across the ocean to cheaper labour.

Publicly the union leaders take the moral tone that trade with China is wrong so long as its record on civil rights is so lamentable.

It's a tough sell for Mr Clinton whose been a very vocal advocate of punishing totalitarian countries by cutting off trade - witness the still existing embargo on Cuba which has been going on for nearly 40 years or so.

By way of rebuttal to the seeming contradiction of punishing Cuba but indulging China Mr Clinton could quote, if he cared to, the recent United Nations report which did not condemn China but did denounce Cuba in damning tones for suppressing dissent - which means prison, torture, labour camps.

But the fact, too big to overlook in a global commercial world, is that China constitutes a quarter of the human race, is a rising economic power and cannot forever be held off by any one of the big global players.

So President Carter deplored China's slowness to open up civil rights but he thought our refusal to give them trading rights would be more likely to antagonise them than to encourage them to loosen up and open up to a measure of democracy. And so said all of them.

No doubt the White House meeting will stir more lively protests among all the vocal opponents of the China bill from the serious anti-global economists - there are some - to the spotted owl defenders, the screaming Luddites and the loony self-proclaimed anarchists.

They did enormous harm - political and social - in Seattle and Mr Clinton, in this last throw of the dice, hoped to see this bill through the House by a wide enough margin so that all those angry rampant types could not sincerely claim that "the people" had been cheated.

That's the only big pressing issue of the many that came up this week that I propose to talk about.

I don't know about you but I find that in the more rancid days of summer, of which, as I say, we've just had a ghastly foretaste, my attention to the great issues, to the red meat of domestic or foreign policy tends to glaze over and I lean to the lighter - the side dishes - what my father called "the kickshaws".

Well I hope it doesn't sound condescending to say that the kickshaw I've selected will, for the moment anyway, be of more concern to one half of the American population than the Trade Bill with China or Washington's prohibition of Cuban cigars.

The half of the population I have in mind is the female sex - I refuse to use the now voguey word "gender" which is defined in all my dictionaries as "the grammatical classification of objects" and I refuse to consider women as sex objects.

So the great news comes from my favourite American town - San Francisco - pioneer of so many bold and so many barmy ideas.

San Francisco then has just struck another blow for yet another new individual right - and there will be great rejoicing through the land especially among what Americans prefer to call "the obese".

The liberty blow takes the form of an ordinance by the city council or the board of supervisors. In America an ordinance is the preferred word in municipal affairs for a regulation having the force of law.

It says that from now on in the City of San Francisco and its environs, what we now call the San Francisco area, it shall be illegal to discriminate against a person - the Constitution includes females as persons - on account of size - a good old English word meaning "dimension, magnitude".

The simple word goes on however and takes care not to be misunderstood by including - the law says - comprehends weight, height, width. And after the first court tests we'll no doubt start adding, moderating or nit picking extenuations like, as one lawyer solemnly suggests, "giving the appearance of size." Enough.

The San Franciscans have already started calling it "the fat ordinance." Many jokes have sprouted locally and will sprout nationally but it took only a run of television interviews, with women especially, to make us realise that this is, for many people, an immense boom - all those people of, shall we say, unwieldy shape or size who have been themselves the objects of passing jokes in life. Many interviewed women talked about the times they'd been turned down for a job or vaguely passed over when it came to preferred seating in a restaurant.

The first practical result of the ordinance was a reported rush of the fat, the very tall, the skinny, at employment exchanges. May luck and the Lord be with them.

It may seem a small thing to people who have the luck not to be, as Fats Waller moaned "Mr five by five", but the very notion that this could become a legally prohibited form of discrimination shows how far we've travelled since the time - 47 years ago - when I wrote a dispatch I've just come on.

It was about one of the big airlines announcing a new policy: that it would discharge all stewardesses on their 32nd birthday, adding age to "the other well established qualifications: attractive appearance, pleasant disposition, neatness, unmarried status - that are ordinarily found to a higher degree in young women." Wow!

If I didn't think I'd give offence I should chant the famous billboard advertisement: "You've come a long way, baby."

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