Powell?ro;”Right in the Kisser!; Oy, McVeigh

Last week Colin Powell dismissed as "Chinese propaganda" the claims that the U.S. had apologized for having its plane knocked out of the air and its airmen taken hostage. But of course we apologized, and Powell's dismissal was propaganda of its own sort. Americans tend to associate "propaganda" with Soviet-style bullying, as when some jowly minister announces to the world that a tiny country has "invited" the Russians in to blow up its buildings and torture its citizenry, or?more to the point?as when the Chinese brazenly insist that our sluggish spy plane "veered" into their fighter jet.

But there's also a propaganda?call it the Vichy version?that explains why the national interest is best served by what looks to the naked eye like opportunism or pusillanimity. Powell, like the rest of the administration, sought to present the spy-plane spat as a high-tech comedy of manners, and one despaired of finding anyone on network television to disagree with him. Martha Raddatz of ABC was typical here, saying the letter from U.S. Ambassador Joseph Prueher, with its two very sorrys and its one sincerely regret, "apparently has been enough to allow the Chinese to save face." Them save face? Both sides were behaving as if in one of those Three Stooges episodes where Moe, safely hauled away from a confrontation with a big galoot who would have cleaned his clock, makes a show of his belligerence. "Whyyyyy, I'd'a...! Why, I'd'a torn him limb from limb!" Diane Sawyer of ABC viewed the crisis in a similar light. "As we know," she began?and what could be more pricelessly Sawyerish than that as we know??"all of this has been a bit of a dance about pride and national pride." President Bush himself passed the crisis as if he thought this were true (finding out whether the hostages had Bibles seems to have been his major preoccupation). But it's not.

To an extent, the U.S. is caught in a trap laid through its own ethnic stereotyping. We conducted our hostage negotiations as if they were a labyrinth of "inscrutable Asian" protocol and manners. Oops, I guess that's Japan. Never mind. The Chinese will gladly indulge our misconceptions, but what really concerns them is more concrete stuff: a new space program centered on Hainan Island, which lets them carry out pan-Asian electronic surveillance; the most sophisticated super-subs in the world; an arsenal of CSS-7 rockets aimed at Taiwan; a naval buildup that will eventually give China the capability for an amphibious attack on Taiwan (or Japan, for that matter); and?the root of the present mess?getting rid of our ability to monitor their progress on all of the above.

It would be better to treat the Chinese as just a regular country, not as a display in some touch-and-learn museum of anthropology. "Saving face," whatever that means, may help them rile up their proletariat, but that's the extent of their concern with it. What China believes in is hanging on to our spy plane and bullying us out of our surveillance flights over the South China Sea. As for this tea-ceremony idea of national pride we've tried to impose on them, the Chinese don't believe in it any more than the Indians at some Yellowstone folkloric festival think that if they jump up and down and go wooga-wooga, it'll rain.

That's why?assuming we haven't already made a side deal with the Chinese?any discussion of who won or lost in this confrontation is premature. The two sides will continue to spin the apology, but the bilateral meetings that begin Wednesday will be decisive. If we consent to modify our China policy?whether on hawkish matters like the spy flights or dovish ones like human rights?we'll have lost. If the Chinese have to sacrifice membership in the World Trade Organization or their bid to host the 2008 Olympics to achieve their ends, they might consider it a worthwhile price to pay.

Clearly, the Chinese don't expect to be punished for what they've done. Chinese Ambassador Yang Jiechi, even before the agreement was announced, sent a letter to congressmen telling them that Olympic site selection is the purview of the International Olympic Committee, and warning them not to "obstruct" China's bid. Nor do we expect to punish them: Trent Lott's "prediction" that Bush won't sell Taiwan the Aegis-equipped destroyers it so desperately wants would not have been made without an Oval Office okay. It's a clear message that Bush didn't want to sell those systems in the first place.

The most puzzling comment on the whole standoff came from syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, who claimed last Thursday that Bush had conducted his negotiations "very differently than Bill Clinton did." Really? How? The Bush method consisted of message control so draconian that Rumsfeld was gagged for the duration of the crisis, a negotiating strategy proudly based on "constructive ambiguity," and post-facto spin in which everything depended on what the meaning of the word "propaganda" is. Maybe Geyer just means that when he greets the returning airmen, the President won't be wearing a lei.

Oy, McVeigh

Polls show Americans souring on capital punishment. Questioned the right way, as they were in a Bloomberg poll last week, a majority would back a moratorium of the sort Illinois recently passed. But don't expect to hear boo out of the death penalty's opponents until after next month, when Oklahoma City bomber Tim McVeigh gets put down in Terre Haute, IN.

The anti-execution lobby knows how to pick its shots, and has been almost totally silent on this case. On the one hand, you can see why: There is no ambiguity or doubt about McVeigh's guilt in the bombing. As a white Gulf War veteran, he's unlikely to claim discrimination on the basis of either race or lifestyle. And he's not only been unrepentant, he's reveled in his misdeeds, describing the dozens of children killed in the blast as "collateral damage."

The silence is damning to the anti-death penalty cause nonetheless, because 19 out of 20 people who get sent to death row are, like McVeigh, guilty as sin and wholly unrepentant. And unless activists are willing to rally to the defense of the guilty-as-sin-and-wholly-unrepentant, then they're largely posturing. They're not against the principle of taking criminals' lives at all. They're merely raising the practical worries that (a) the wrong guy will get sent to the chair, and (b) the death penalty will get applied unequally and indiscriminately. Which is to say, their feelings on the issue are just a pompous and morally self-aggrandizing version of everyone else's.

That said, Attorney General John Ashcroft's press conference last week?at which he announced that McVeigh's execution would be televised on closed-circuit to relatives of the bombing victims but not to the general public?raised questions about capital punishment in general for which no one has ever given satisfactory answers. First, if we believe killing criminals has a deterrent effect, then why not string McVeigh up (metaphorically speaking) in the public square? Why not televise his execution? Ashcroft takes this line of reasoning very seriously, and he doesn't like it at all. He urged the media to exercise "self-restraint" in Terre Haute and, in particular, not to sue the Justice Dept. for access. "We are already being sued," he said, "to provide more publicity for this execution. I would ask that the news media not become Timothy McVeigh's coconspirator in his assault on America's public safety and upon America itself." That's shockingly strong language, by the way. And it shows an unusual pliancy on the part of journalists that none of them saw fit to complain that an attorney general was placing demands for freedom of information and open access to the courts on the same level as being an accessory to a mass murder.

What Ashcroft is implicitly fessing up to, as anyone who thinks about it for more than an instant will realize, is that the deterrent effect of capital punishment pales next to its entertainment effect. And doubtless that has always been true, even before the days of mass media. Ashcroft can dodge the issue by talking about how television would "coarsen" the proceedings, but the conclusion is inescapable that capital punishment has always been only secondarily a deterrence phenomenon. Since people will read news accounts of the McVeigh execution, and since they have imaginations, the coarsening he fears will happen anyway?and will result not from the way executions are presented to the public but from the fact that they're done at all.

A second argument for capital punishment is that it answers society's need for recompense and vengeance. That's a stronger argument. Jeffrey Dahmer was not given the death penalty, but it's hard to escape the feeling that the country is a more just place, and the natural order more in balance, since some Wisconsin convict had the courtesy to bludgeon him to death six years ago. Ashcroft showed that he understands this rationale (and also that, for an alleged Bible-thumper, he is an extraordinarily touchy-feely fellow) when he explained why the execution would be televised on closed-circuit to a hundred relatives who've said they'd like to see it. Said Ashcroft, "I hope we can help them meet their needs to close this chapter of their lives."

Giving the aggrieved the right to see a malefactor's agony is an innovation that comes to us via the "victims' rights" movement, the most irrational and vindictive?and therefore the most enduring?corner of the Gingrich revolution of almost a decade ago. Problem is, in giving special treatment to a few people who've been done a bad turn, "victims' rights" turns an act of terrorism into a personal affront. (Which it is, in a sense?but only in a sense.) A bad precedent, for when the state metes out punishment, it either does so on behalf of society or it does so with dubious legitimacy.

And if a "coarsening effect" is such a problem for the general public, aren't we worried that it will coarsen the Elect, however small, who are given a private screening? Given their personal stake in the crime, we should perhaps be worried that it would coarsen them more. AP reporter Karen Gullo noted in a recent article that "in Tennessee last year...closed-circuit was used so a victim's family could watch in a separate prison room, away from the inmate's family and media witnesses." A good thing, that! I mean, having to share an observation room with the parents and siblings of the person being sent to his grave would sure dampen the high-fivin' atmosphere.

One of the side benefits of Ashcroft's press conference was that it let the public in on the carefully choreographed, meticulously scheduled process under which an execution is carried out. Director of Federal Prisons Kathleen Hawk Sawyer gave out the exact minute when protesters would be allowed to enter the Terre Haute facility, the details of the phone line kept open to the Justice Dept. until just before the execution, a list of the drugs used in the lethal injection, and the entire countdown, starting with McVeigh's move to the execution facility 24 to72 hours before the event. Until finally, Sawyer explained, "approximately one hour prior to the execution, McVeigh will be searched by the escort team." Searched? Searched for what? Maybe they're afraid he's going to try to smuggle something into hell.