The accustomed perspective.

The journalistic and popular cultures draw ever nearer together, and what unites them is the imaginative flight--by now a milk-run--to the top of Mount Olympus from where they look down like gods upon the petty struggles of lesser beings and keen "Give Peace a Chance," the simple-minded anthem of their kind. "Lord, what fools these mortals be" it seems to the gentle and pacific spirits who have been the tutelary deities to our intellectuals and artists and those who wish to emulate them since the 1960s. Up until the end of the Cold War there was some natural check upon their good-hearted naivete in the form of a palpable threat from a powerful enemy, but for the last decade the world has obliged our hippie moralists by looking (if you don't look too closely into its darker corners) like the kind of world where peace and happiness are to be had just by wishing for them.

Little wonder, then, that the recent detention by Chinese authorities of an American spy plane which had been forced to make a landing on Chinese soil brought out the worst qualities--which is to say sanctimoniousness and self-righteousness--of the American media. How easy the international crisis seemed to the editorialists of The New York Times, for example, who noted with spectacular but not untypical unhelpfulness:

 
   The aftermath of Sunday's midair collision of an American spy plane and a 
   Chinese jet fighter is following a tired but dangerous cold-war script that 
   is in neither country's interest. Common sense suggests that a decade after 
   the end of the cold war, the United States and China, nations that are not 
   enemies and that have a strong economic incentive to develop a productive 
   relationship, ought to be able to find a different way of resolving an 
   affair like this. The reflexive posturing of both sides has only hardened 
   the dispute and pointed the way toward a serious deterioration in 
   relations. 

"That," says the Times in its one concession to the American position, "is especially true of the Chinese response." Even so, "President Bush's stern admonitions to China, while correctly emphasizing the need to return the Americans, could have the unintended effect of limiting the diplomatic flexibility that may be required to resolve the affair." Taking up its accustomed godlike perspective, the editorialist tells us that "A more constructive approach for both sides would emphasize fact-finding and a sharing of information about the incident. ... The point of providing such information should not be to embarrass one another but to establish basic facts."

Doubtless this would be "a more constructive approach," if anybody had been disposed to take it. But as no one was, it was an observation of staggering banality, not to say stupidity. People ought to behave as if they were something better than two little boys fighting for dominance of a school playground, as the father of one of the hostages put it. How infuriating, then, that they don't! How infuriating, in the same way, that some people are poor, stupid, vicious, or ugly. But what is the point of continuing to respond to the fact that they are with the more wish that they would not be? If everyone thought like editorial writers for the Times perhaps there would be no more wars and universal harmony and understanding. But everyone doesn't. More particularly, those devoted to the frustration and defeat of American power do hot. And there, as Dr. Johnson would say, is an end on't.

Or so, if you are moderately practiced at observing the behavior of the nations of the world, you might think. But notice that pejorative use of the adjective "cold-war" in the Times's editorial. Notice also "tired but dangerous." Also "script." From words like these wafts the musty smell of flower-power gone to seed. From beyond the grave, Harry Truman and Dean Acheson, not to mention Joe McCarthy, can still induce their successors needlessly to put the world at risk by following a "script" written for them over hall a century ago by anti-Communists who just wanted to protect the profits of General Motors. Absent America's "confrontational" attitude, the Chinese, like the Soviets before them, would be as gentle and peace-loving as New York Times editorialists.

Talk about "reflexive posturing"! By now there must be a program on The New York Times computers to write editorials like this. But the editorialists' assumptions that they write not from America, or even from New York, but from Mount Olympus are reflected in news reporting as well. Thus the Times's Erik Eckholm: