Freeing Tibet

The BBC/NPR program The World aired an interview with novelist Eliot Pattison yesterday as part of a series of stories on the recent unrest in Tibet. I've never read one of Pattison's mysteries, but I'm definitely going to pick one up. Doesn’t a book about a disgraced Chinese inspector breaking rocks in a Tibetan gulag sound like it would make a great addition to my Easter basket?

However, thanks to my recent obsession with the book Where Does the Money Go? Your Guided Tour to the Federal Budget Crisis, I am extremely pessimistic about American efforts to stop Chinese human rights abuses. As long as we owe the Chinese boatloads of money—and by "boatloads" I mean "hundreds of billions of dollars"—they have no particular reason to listen to us about human rights abuses*. So if you’re truly interested in doing something to support the Tibetans, you might want to slap a “Pay back the Chinese!” bumper sticker next to that “Free Tibet!” one....

*Well, other than the fact that they want good press for the Beijing Olympics.