I rarely write about issues of local importance, but this one required action.
KDHX-FM in St. Louis is one of the most powerful listener-supported FM stations in America. It can be heard as far away as Joplin, Missouri, and of course all over the internet.
This week KDHX is doing one of those long-winded fund drives. I have some interest in this station because I was one of the first individuals to have a show and work for the station on a volunteer basis when it consisted of nothing more than a hothouse transmitter shed in the boonies with a un-air-conditioned patchwork 4×6 closet euphemistically known as a “broadcast booth”.
As I was listening at about 8:15 PM tonight (Sunday), two male announcers were trying to loosen up listener donations. They went on a racist diatribe about China. Among other outrageous statements, one of them said that “if you take China’s population and lined them up in a column 8 people wide, it would go all around the world” (close quote from memory). The idea was apparently to create fear in the mind of the listener suggesting that KDHX could somehow save us from a Chinese invasion.
So much for the “diverse” respecting their version of the “ten commandments”.
I called the station, which refused to put me through to the studio. The “person in charge” refused to identify him(her)self or have an apology made on the air. The person hung up on me (they want the lines open for donors). I refused to take the brush-off, and called back a couple of times.
I warned them I would publish an article to force an apology if they failed to address the problem. The “mystery person in charge” then said he/she would call the police if I called back again. This was a stupid thing to say because I would have had a lawsuit against KDHX for false reporting or malicious prosecution because veteran activists like myself know better than to fly off the handle and make threatening statements.
I did find out that the person who made the on-air comments, who I am told was Ron Edwards, did not feel his fundraising scheme was racist. I digress. The person-in-charge informed me that Ron is married to a Japanese woman, and would therefore never make such a comment. Japanese have long considered Chinese heathens (I found out about this working for several years in Japan). So it seems the Japanese connection may be more indicative than not.
All opinions aside, you can hear a recording of the April 20th show when it becomes available online here and decide for yourself.
America’s current passion for insulting the Chinese is disgusting. I have been there and worked there. For the most part, the Chinese are tremendously nice people just trying to make a living like we do. They have problems with big government just like we do.
The Chinese are tremendously aware of their population problem. That is why they have a strict one-child policy. American elitists complain angrily about this “human rights violation” — but are very careful not to complain about China’s population problem in the same monologue.
The Chinese population problem began many years ago, but mushroomed during Mao’s people’s revolution. At the onset of the Mao era in 1949, the population of China was approximately 400-million, which was not unreasonable for a country with such a large tillable agriculture-based land mass. The Mao era encouraged families to have many children, and the population grew to over 700-million at the time of Mao’s death.
Today, China’s population stands at 1.32-billion. The fertility rate has been lowered drastically. Even with the present fertility rate of 1.7 births per woman (which is .4 below replacement level), and even with the 1-child policy, China’s population is expected to hit 1.4-billion by 2010 (primarily due to immigration and increases in longevity).
We have to give China credit for taking aggressive steps to resolve their population crisis. That’s a lot more than America has done addressing its horrid structural social problems. China’s illegitimacy rate is about 10%, ours is over 38% and still exploding. China’s divorce rate is tremendously lower than America’s rate of approximately 51% — despite the fact that in most Chinese provinces a final divorce can be obtained immediately for less than a dollar simply by walking into a local office and filling out a simple form.
Our greatest economic problems of poverty, lack of health care insurance, personal bankruptcy and mortgage default are primarily predicted by marriage-absence. Teen crime, violence and suicide, poor school performance, and poor achievement in adulthood are also primarily predicted by marriage-absence.
There is no question that our structural problem of marriage-absence is the leading factor why America is under-educated, lacking in job skills, and performs poorly in the competitive global economy. In China, collaboration of men, women, marriage, family, a strong work ethic, and devotion to education is their competitive secret.
China learned first-hand that class warfare is immensely destructive. That is precisely why Chinese view feminism — the sex warfare that brought on America’s problem of marriage-absence — with disgust and won’t have anything to do with it. I know about this because I was in Chengdu during the Beijing Women’s Conference and witnessed firsthand the reactions of people I was working with, including academics at the University of Chengdu, and in the papers and media.
Americans still mistakenly think that China allowed the Women’s Conference to be held in Beijing because it was opening the doors to “liberalization”. Wrong. The government wanted the Chinese people to get a good lesson about how dangerous feminism is. Hillary Clinton obliged, issuing a horrendous and indefensible feminist rant about men and marriage in “Chinglish” not broadcast overseas (it would end her political career permanently if it were ever aired in America). The Chinese people rejected feminist gender warfare with gusto and have not revisited it since.
Now, lets look at America. The largest line item in the federal budget is the $700-billion HHS budget we spent in 2007 entitling everything but marriage. Then everyone is aghast over our nation of ever-expanding social problems, a sick educational system, declining infrastructure, an out-of-control deficit, and investments and jobs going overseas.
The Chinese value marriage and do not spend anything destroying it. They put their money into infrastructure, economic growth, and education. Their public policies encourage and reward collaborative cooperation across all ethnic and gender lines, and avoid parsiminous “special interest” politics at all costs.
The Chinese are beating us in the world economy because they earned it. If we want it back, we have to learn from them and then do it more brilliantly ourselves.
Racist panjandrum cannot fix America’s problems. If KDHX hosts are to bring up China at all, it should be to urge America to responsibly deal with it very own structural problem of marriage-absence, and to discard K-street special interest politics with collaborative, goal-oriented politics beneficial to all. There is much we can learn from China — but we can’t learn it until we are willing to study what we, as a nation, have been doing wrong since the 1960’s.
Beyond this, KDHX should give a hard look at the forms of gender warfare some of its hard-line-feminist shows espouse. America simply cannot achieve a peaceful and collaborative society, a strong economy, or regain the leading role in the world economy while the marriage-absence problem remains unaddressed. Those who do not understand what I am talking about should spend some time visiting or working in Singapore — the richest nation on earth — which has a very peaceful egalitiarian society consisting of Chinese, Malays, Indonesians, Philipino, British, and many other ethnic groups. Every week is a public celebration of somebody’s holiday, in a melting pot the likes of which New York still dreams of achieving but never will given America’s addiction to sex and class warfare.
Certainly, marriage-absence is not on the horizon for the partisan or more-casual individuals who have shows on KDHX. It should be. If you like to eat nice food, drive a decent car, have affordable housing and gas, have decent jobs available in St. Louis, live in a relatively safe self-sustaining neighborhood where everyone gets along well, and not pay taxes out the gazoo to have big government break things worse than they were before, it should be the very first thing on your show list.
Speaking of lists: the first thing on my list is to see a formal apology from KDHX for the racist comments about Chinese made tonight. That’s the first, and requisite step that must be taken.
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David R. Usher is Senior Policy Analyst for the True Equality Network, and President of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, Missouri Coalition
Squiggy said,
Say what????? No we don’t. Forced abortions are an abomination. If you support them, you are a leftist wacko nutjob (which I’ve never taken you to be).
I hate the Chinese government, and that doesn’t make me “racist”. And if people don’t wake up in a real hurry, we’re on the way to the same thing here.
April 21, 2008 at 3:35 am
panic said,
A “racist” is, also, with equal vehemence, anyone falsely claiming racial animus of another.
“Racist” mean, in this context “I dislike the prior statement, but lack the competence to articulate an effective rebuttal. Instead, I retreat to a position of safety with a racist ad hominen attack”.
April 21, 2008 at 7:26 am
David R. Usher said,
Panic: Using a race or class to generate fears of one sort or another, in the context of a pledge drive, is unacceptable. Perhaps you would get it had KDHX used irresponsible fathers as the target for fundraising?
April 21, 2008 at 8:35 am
Denise Noe said,
(Denise) Mr. Usher,
your good friend, the dynamic and multi-accomplished Phyllis Schlafly, has written of the one-child per family policy as “brutal.” She is right. The results of it have been many abortions, some forced abortions, very late abortions, and possibly even outright infanticide.
April 21, 2008 at 8:41 am
David R. Usher said,
Abortion is wrong no matter who wants it. My article does not in any way analyze the terms of the 1-child policy or confer my approval of all methods used.
Since you brought up abortion [again], I will point out [again] that the Chinese government has backed off on forced abortions and is now mostly levying stiff penalties. That is a reasonable stimulus in the eyes of most everyone. This article is not about abortion — it is about hating chinese, and to point out that the Chinese have taken aggressive steps to resolve the population problem that the KDHX host raised, whereas we have done nothing to address our more serious marriage-absence problem (except to entitle more than it was).
There is zero political discourse on this problem in the presidential primaries, but a lot of dancing around the issues leading towards even more regressive entitlement band-aids. Both political parties have intentionally avoided these issues and have gone to extraordinary lengths to keep them off the plate. We must deal with our own problems openly and honestly instead of shifting the focus overseas to avoid our most important issue.
No further comments trying to change the subject of this article to abortion will be entertained.
April 21, 2008 at 8:59 am
Willis said,
Totalitarian abuses are inevitable with population control; respect for human rights cannot exist when something as basic as reproducing is to be controlled. A host of countries - including the United States (forced sterilisations) - demonstrate this. Thus, to claim a population problem exists is an inevitable defense of such abuses as they are necessary in any “solution”.
Don’t knock the alternative until it’s tried, otherwise you’re engaged in a circular defense of an inferior system that cannot feed its people. The more China changes - the better for the weakest among them (children, pregnant women…).
April 21, 2008 at 6:31 pm
David R. Usher said,
Their population is four times ours. A lot of their land is not usable for agriculture. tThey are moving from manual farming to large scale farming to make up the difference, but this is causing the same problems America faced when farm workers were replaced by machines. Even with mechanized agriculture, they could not withstand continuing population increases — and world oil prices would explode if Chinese were to start buying cars in mass. The wall is immovable, so the Chinese government is taking all measures needed so they don’t hit it.
Farmers are heading to the cities, where there is lots of low-skilled manufacturing making the stuff we buy. They take farmers and OJT them for construction (some of the work is horrid — I personally witnessed it). When I was there, any farmer with a pocket knife would be hired as an electrician and put to work. Kids are moving to the cities in mass to support elderly parents in the provinces who can’t work. Its doable for them and the Chinese government is managing it pretty well. They are going through the same problems any developing nation does. They are in much better shape than most because we are footing the bill with consumerism while we run a war economy that generates no stable GNP or net worth. China definitely has the upper hand here.
April 21, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Squiggy said,
But the fact is, China has had the policy since at least the early eighties. You say they’ve “backed off” that policy. I’d like to see what proved that to your satisfaction. But even if they have (backed off, whatever that really means), a bad, totalitarian government still controls this huge country.
They still “harvest” organs from political prisoners, and cause trouble for the rest of the world. “Market reforms” in a communist country mean very little in the end, other than corrupt foreigners can purchase a kidney relatively cheap. And communist party bosses get them for free.
April 22, 2008 at 3:43 am
panic said,
Facts may be removed from the equation if you find their use destructive to your objectives.
Is that your best effort?
April 22, 2008 at 7:52 am
David R. Usher said,
KDHX is huge on diversity — lots of gays, lesbians, feminists, and you name it. It seems the “diversity” operates independently of understanding who the Chinese people really are. Resorting to racial cliches is a very sad thing to see on a station that supposedly stakes its name on being accepting and inclusive other cultures.
April 22, 2008 at 9:41 pm
panic said,
You persist in your errors: you “observe” (meaning, your opinion is fact), and state another opinion as your conclusion.
Your turn: repeat your own errors.
April 23, 2008 at 7:43 am
stlouislivemusic said,
“As I was listening at about 8:15 PM tonight (Sunday), two male announcers were trying to loosen up listener donations. They went on a racist diatribe about China. Among other outrageous statements, one of them said that “if you take China’s population and lined them up in a column 8 people wide, it would go all around the world” (close quote from memory). The idea was apparently to create fear in the mind of the listener suggesting that KDHX could somehow save us from a Chinese invasion.”
This is flat out false and a distortion of what happened on-air.
This is the transcript from the on-air discussion:
Ron Edwards: “The other thing I read that really stunned me was that if you talk about a population, if the Chinese, if they were 8 abreast, and they walked in front of you, Art, just simply in a long file. It would never end. All the way around the world it would outgrow. Because of the rate in which they are having children and the population is growing, they could walk in front of you for the rest of your life and never repeat the same individual. So, that means if there are that many people in China and on the planet, and surely we have a good percentage of people here, walk in front of us, a brand new member, walk over to that phone. It would be a real thrill for a new member to call us—for us.”
Awkward, clumsy, and inappropriate, sure. But a racist attempt to “create fear in the mind of the listener suggesting that KDHX could somehow save us from a Chinese invastion”? You can’t be serious.
April 23, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Squiggy said,
April 24, 2008 at 3:33 am