Former President Barack Obama, accompanied by Secretary of State John Kerry, meets with veterans and Gold Star Mothers to discuss the Iran nuclear deal in the Roosevelt Room at the White House in Washington on Sept. 10, 2015. (File/AP)
The Washington Free Beacon reported Wednesday that “the Obama administration skirted key U.S. sanctions to grant Iran access to billions in hard currency despite public assurances the administration was engaged in no such action, according to a new congressional investigation.”
And it gets even worse: “The investigation, published Wednesday by the House Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, further discloses secret efforts by top Obama administration officials to assure European countries they would receive a pass from U.S. sanctions if they engaged in business with Iran.”
This revelation comes after the news that came to light in February, that, according to Bill Gertz in the Washington Times, “the U.S. government has traced some of the $1.7 billion released to Iran by the Obama administration to Iranian-backed terrorists in the two years since the cash was transferred.”
There is a law that applies to this situation. U.S. Code 2381 says: “Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”
In a sane political environment, Barack Obama would be tried for treason.
Barack Hussein Obama has planted seeds that will be bearing bitter fruit for years, and probably decades, to come. He is, without any doubt, the worst President in American history. Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan? Yes, the doughface Presidents made the Civil War inevitable, but worse came later. Grant? Blind to corruption and out of his depth, but there have been worse than he as well. Wilson? That black-hearted Presbyterian bigot arguably gave the world Hitler and World War II, so he is definitely in the Final Four. Harding? Nah: his tax cuts and return to “normalcy” got the American economy, and the Twenties, roaring. FDR and LBJ gave us the modern welfare state and dependent classes automatically voting Democrat; the full bill on the damage they did hasn’t yet been presented. Nixon? A crook and an economic Leftist, who betrayed Taiwan for the People’s Republic; his record certainly isn’t good. Carter? Nothing good can be said about his four years of sanctimony and incompetence.
But there is one thing Barack Obama has on all competitors: treason.
He showered hundreds of billions of dollars on the Islamic Republic of Iran. There are those who say, “It was their money. It belonged to the Iranian government but was frozen and not paid since 1979.” Indeed, and there was a reason for that: not even Jimmy Carter, who made the Islamic Republic of Iran possible, thought that money, which had been paid by the Shah’s government in a canceled arms deal, belonged to the mullahs who overthrew the Shah. Likewise Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush all thought that the Islamic Republic was not due money that was owed to the Shah.
Only Barack Obama did.
The definition of treason is giving aid and comfort to the enemy. The leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran order their people to chant “Death to America” in mosques every Friday, and repeatedly vow that they will ultimately destroy the United States of America and the state of Israel. How was giving them billions and helping them skirt sanctions applied by the U.S. government not treason?
Other Presidents have been incompetent, corrupt, dishonest, but which has committed treason on a scale to rival the treason of Barack Obama?
The Iranians also operate a global network of jihad terror organizations, one of which, Hizballah, is quite active in Mexico now, with the obvious ultimate intention of crossing the border and committing jihad massacres of Americans. Obama has given a tremendous boost to these initiatives, as well as to Iran’s nuclear program, with his nuclear deal that has given the Iranians hundreds of billions of dollars and essentially a green light to manufacture nuclear weapons, in exchange for absolutely nothing.
There is no telling when the worst consequences of Obama’s aid and comfort to the Islamic Republic of Iran will be felt. But they likely will be felt in one way or another. Even as President Trump moves swiftly to restore sanctions and put Iran on notice that its nuclear activity and global adventurism will not be tolerated, those billions cannot be recovered, and the Iranians have already spent a great deal for their jihad cause.
However this catastrophe plays out, there is one man who will suffer no consequences whatsoever: Barack Obama. That’s Leftist Privilege. It’s good to be a powerful Leftist in Washington nowadays. Laws? Pah! Laws are for conservatives.
Oxford gang members convicted of child sexual exploitation
Since the arrest of Tommy Robinson on May 25, the presence generally -- and incorrectly -- referred to as 'Asian grooming gangs' has been back in the news. This has reignited a debate about whether victims are getting justice and whether perpetrators are encountering it.
In all this at least one key element is missing. What price has been paid, is being paid, or might be paid at some stage, by all those public officials who tacitly or otherwise allowed these modern-day atrocities to go on, doing nothing to stop them? The policemen, politicians, council workers and others who were shown to have failed time and again. They have never been sentenced to prison for any of their oversights -- and perhaps criminal charges (not even charges of criminal negligence) could never be brought against them. It is worth asking, however, if any of these people's lives, career paths, or even pension plans were ever remotely affected by their proven failure to confront one of the greatest evils to have gone on in Britain. That is the mass rape of young girls motivated by adults propelled by (among much else) racism, religiosity, misogyny and class contempt.
Perhaps the post grooming-gang career of just one public official might help to answer that question. Her name is Joanna Simons. In 2013 she was the Chief Executive of the Oxfordshire County Council. She had been at the centre of that Council's 'care' programme for nearly a decade: that is, throughout the period in which the mass rape of local girls (subsequently investigated under the name 'Operation Bullfinch') was carried on. The barbarism, which was carried out by local men of what is erroneously described as 'Asian' origin, included branding one of the girls with an 'M' on her body. The abuser's name was 'Mohammed' and the Mohammed in question wanted people to know that this girl 'belonged' to him and as such was his property.
Others among the hundreds of local victims endured equally horrific abuse. A number were in the care of the local authorities. Among the stories that came out in the 2013 court case at the Old Bailey was that one of the girls was drugged and raped by a gang of men. She managed to escape and hail a taxi which drove her to the care home she lived in. Staff at the care home refused to pay the taxi fare, so the taxi driver took the girl straight back to the property from which she had just escaped, where the gang then raped her again. This is not a nightmare set in some far distant land, or even a town in one of the towns in the north of England which the London media rarely get to, but a story set in leafy Oxfordshire. Families of some of the abused girls related that they had tried consistently to raise the alarm over what was happening to their daughters but that every door of the state was closed in their faces.
Former Oxfordshire County Council chief executive Joanna Simons has been appointed chairwoman of tourism board
After details such as the above came out in the criminal trial at the Old Bailey, Simons made a video, which was posted online by the Oxfordshire County Council. Over the last five years fewer than 2,000 people have watched this 48-second apology. But it deserves a wider audience. In it, Ms Simons looks into the camera and gives an apology to the people who the Council has let down, which tells a huge amount about the attitude that prevailed for years in Britain. From start to finish, everything about it is wrong. Its tone and content suggest that Ms Simons is apologising for a delay in local bin collections, or for delays in providing pavement-salt during inclement weather. Nothing about it fits the appallingness -- the sheer, unimaginable horror -- of what had gone on in leafy, lovely, dreaming-spires Oxfordshire on her watch.
When Simons subsequently appeared on the BBC's Newsnight, she faced some excellent questioning from the BBC's Emily Maitlis. Simons responded by saying not only that she was once again very sorry for the breakdown in services but also came with the reassuring message that she and her colleagues from the council in Oxfordshire 'have learnt a lot.' When Maitlis asked if Simons thought she should resign, Simons replied 'I have asked myself some very hard questions' but 'I'm not going to resign because my determination is that we need to do all that we can to take action to stamp this out.' When Maitlis asked Simons if she would resign if the victims or their families thought she should, Simons came up with one of those beautiful political dodges of not remotely answering the question, thus saying (louder than if she had actually said it) that she had no intention of resigning even if every victim and every family called on her to do so.
Perhaps there were other motives for her desire to stay in place. At the time that Operation Bullfinch broke, Ms Simons was receiving an annual salary of over £196,000, before other benefits were included. To put this into some context, the average annual salary in the UK sits at just over £27,000. The annual salary paid to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for running the country stands at just under £150,000 per annum. So for her pains at Oxfordshire County Council, Ms Simons was receiving a salary considerably higher than that of the Prime Minister and more than six times the average national salary.
Although she resisted pressure to resign in 2013, events moved on. A review into the whole case concluded that social workers and police had been aware of the abuse of hundreds of young girls in Oxfordshire since 2005 but that they had failed to investigate or even to record this as a crime.
In 2015, the Oxfordshire County Council chose to abolish Simon's role, apparently to save money. This decision, after some internal squabbling, was then reversed. Simons eventually stood down in 2015, at which stage she received a pay-off from the Council amounting to the sum of £259,000. Which, again to put this into context, is worth more than the price of the average house in the UK. The average UK house price in the year following Simons's pay-off was £220,000. So the investment most British people spend their working lives paying off could have been covered by Simons with a single year's haul.
Many people might assume that such a person would not reappear in public again, or would sit on their winnings and go away. But Oxfordshire did not lose Simons for long. Last July, the organisation which promotes tourism in the area -- 'Experience Oxfordshire' -- announced Joanna Simons as the new head of their board. A press release announcing her appointment quoted her citing her experience at Oxfordshire County Council as the qualification for taking up this role. She also said how much she was looking forward to 'helping to promote the wonderful place that Oxfordshire is to work, visit and live in.' The former chairman of the board, one Graham Upton, declared that Simons brought a 'wealth of experience' to the role.
Ms Simons is just one person -- one of the many people in the UK who for years turned a blind eye to the mass rape of young girls in their area. But of course these people are not in prison. They are rarely if ever vilified or even mentioned in the national press. They have not had their lives turned upside down. They have not been persecuted at every turn. Instead -- if Joanna Simons is anything to go by -- they have been able to keep their heads down briefly, cash in and then fall upwards again. If Britain is to turn around the disgrace of its culture of 'grooming gangs' it should start by changing the risk-reward ratio between those who identify these monstrous crimes and those who have been shown to have covered them up.
Douglas Murray, British author, commentator and public affairs analyst, is based in London, England. His latest book, an international best-seller, is "The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam."
Death at an early age has a tendency to preserve, and oftentimes enhance, a star's fame, whether from film (Marilyn Monroe, James Dean) or music (Elvis Presley and John Lennon immediately coming to mind). And then there's Bruce Lee, the Hong Kong-American actor and martial artist who, since his passing back in 1973, has only seen his star grow brighter, but under very different circumstances from most other people.
"He's the only iconic figure of the 20th century whose fame was almost entirely posthumous," offers Matthew Polly exclusively, whose exhaustive biography, Bruce Lee: A Life, will be published on June 5, 2018. "He died before the movie that made him famous — Enter the Dragon — actually made him famous, and there was no encounter with him beforehand as celebrity persona. People like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe were famous before they died early, but Bruce Lee, aside from viewers of The Green Hornet and a few martial arts fans, no one knew who he was. Enter the Dragon was our only text to understand him.
"Then," he adds, "the martial arts magazines ran with it and they turned him into the Patron Saint of Kung Fu, which is true as far as it goes, but the first huge revelation that came to me was when I was sitting in the Hong Kong Film Museum watching the 20 films he made as a child actor in Cantonese and Mandarin — not one of them had a single fight scene."
Revelations about his biographical subject came aplenty for Matthew, who spent nearly seven years researching and writing Bruce Lee: A Life, beginning with what he calls a "full career" of acting in which Bruce played "spunky orphans in melodramas and weepies."
"There was a sense," he explains, "that here's an actor who fell in love with the martial arts, and then merged his two obsessions by becoming a martial arts actor. That was a later phenomenon, but what he was first and foremost, with a father who was an actor, and growing up in the entertainment industry, was a child star. Thatgave me a sort of way to understand things that people had actually written out of his history, because it didn't fit with the Patron Saint of Kung Fu image. You know, that he had a Mercedes-Benz, and he bought a full mink coat, and he smoked a little dope, and he had a few extramarital affairs. His behavior as an adult was like Steve McQueen, who was his role model. He was a celebrity. He wasn't an aesthetic guru zen martial arts monk. That was the character he played inEnter the Dragon, but that'snotwho he was as a person. As a person, he was an actor first chronologically, andthenhe beame a kung fu expert. If you think of him as a celebrity actor who's into kung fu, then he becomes like many actors at the time, but if youonlythink of him as the kung fu master who accidentally made films, then he becomes this distinct almost demi-god in the way the fans think of him. They think he's invincible. They sit around arguing if he could beat Iron Man in a fight."
Uh, no.
Early Days and The Green Hornet
Bruce was born on Nov. 27, 1940 in San Francisco's Chinatown to Hong Kong parents. He was raised in Kowloon, Hong Kong and remained there until his late teens. During that time, he was led to the acting life by his father and appeared in a variety of films, which, as Matthew has noted, had nothing to do with fighting. Real life was a little different. Finding himself involved in skirmishes with local gangs, he was taught to defend himself, which led to a deepening interest in the martial arts. For his own safety, at 18 his family sent him to America to live and work at Ruby Chow's restaurant in Seattle. He attended college, studying drama, philosophy and psychology, and it was there that he met his future wife, Linda Emery, the two of them eventually having a son (Brandon) and daughter (Shannon).
In 1959, Bruce began teaching martial arts in the form of Jun Fan Gung Gu, opening his own school in Seattle. His students grew and his school expanded to another location. At the same time, he began participating in karate tournaments and his style continued to evolve. Acting wasn't really of interest, though Bruce was drawn back to it for the superhero series The Green Hornet, which aired from 1966-67 and saw him as the sidekick to the title character (played by Van Williams).
"He had been offered the TV series Charlie Chan's Number One Son by William Dozier," Matthew says, referring to the producer of the Adam West Batman TV series, "which means that the very first part he thought he was going to get in Hollywood was a starring role in a TV series, which no Asian male actor had ever been given before. He thought he was going to step in and be the Jackie Robinson of Asian actors and knock it out of the park in this first one. But what happened was that they submitted that to ABC, and ABC said, 'No, we're not going to do a show with an unknown Chinese male lead,' and rejected it immediately. Then William Dozier said, 'Well, I've got this other one, The Green Hornet...,' and so in the very first experience he had in Hollywood, he went from being the lead of a TV show to the house boy."
Created for radio in the 1930s by George W. Trendle, the focus was on millionaire muckraking newspaper publisher Britt Reid, who, by night, became the masked Green Hornet, who waged a war against crime. His sidekick was Japanese valet Kato. Reid, incidentally, was designed to be great-nephew of Trendle's other creation, The Lone Ranger.
"Bruce was not happy," says Matthew. "He initially balked and insisted that the part had to be real. The truth is, Bruce didn't really have a choice. He was under contract to Dozier. Even if he could legally, he had a young wife, an infant child, and an empty bank account. But despite having no leverage, Bruce insisted he would only take the part if it was upgraded and modernized from the radio version where Kato's biggest moments came when Britt Reid, the publisher, barked, 'My car, Kato!', and Kato answered, 'Yessuh, Mistah Blitt.' He and Dozier worked together to make Kato sort of a weapon of the Green Hornet. You can tell on set that he was still uncomfortable with playing second fiddle, and I think that not only was it the sort of Chinese pride he had, but it was also just his personality. He just never liked being in second place. He was only comfortable when he was in charge."
A saving grace about The Green Hornet is that the character's creator, George W. Trendle, had the right to veto Dozier's idea to follow in the tradition of Batman and have the show take a campy, over-the-top approach. "Dozier was convinced that Trendle was wrong," says Matthew. "Trendle wanted it serious and Dozier wanted it more comic booky. By the end of the show, Bruce had mixed feelings, because he knew this was his big break and he would never have had a Hollywood career without this show, but it was not what he was initially promised. He struggled afterwards to find other parts, and people kept trying to cast him essentially as a version of Kato — the house boy to the white hero. At the same time, I think he enjoyed the experience. He realized it was a huge break. Actors spend their whole lives trying to be the second in a TV series. Still, after it was over he would say things like, 'The writing was terrible and they didn't give me much to do.'"
There was something of a silver lining to the fact that had done The Green Hornet, however, despite the fact it only lasted a single season. Matthew details, "Kato proved to be a more popular character than the Green Hornet. His character received way more fan mail from kids. More importantly to his future, Bruce and Kato were embraced by the small but growing American martial arts community, who had never before seen their art performed on-screen by one of their own. Overnight, Bruce Lee became the most famous martial artist in the country with profiles in Black Belt magazine and invitations to headline karate tournaments — a far cry from the 1964 Long Beach International Karate Championships two years earlier where he was a virtual unknown."
While he continued to teach (with celebrities starting to become his students), Bruce made TV guest appearances, garnered some small film roles, and choreographed fight scenes for Dean Martin's Matt Helm film, The Wrecking Crew, and A Walk in the Spring Rain, money definitely remained a problem. "The popularity of Kato as a character," Matthew says, "allowed Bruce to supplement his income with paid appearances across the country. He was invited to perform at fairs, malls and public parks. He appeared at store openings and rode on floats, often in Kato's dark suit, chauffeur's cap, and black mask. His asking price quickly rose to $4,000 for an afternoon's visit. But after The Green Hornet was canceled, big money invites for Kato slowly dried up."
Eventually, he returned to Hong Kong to star in a film he hoped would prove to Hollywood executives that he had the stuff stars were made of. That was 1971's The Big Boss, which broke box office records. Even more successful was the following year's Fist of Fury, which in turn allowed him to become the star, writer, choreographer, and director of 1972's Way of the Dragon. This one pit him against karate champion (and future actor) Chuck Norris, set against the backdrop of the Roman Coliseum.
From there he began shooting Game of Death, the concept of which saw him battling his way up through various levels of a pagoda, encountering a different martial arts master on each one as he makes his way to the top to retrieve an undescribed prize. But production stopped in November of 1972 when he was offered a contract by Warner Bros to star in the film Enter the Dragon. This was the opportunity that he imagined — and which proved true — would catapult him to a whole new level of stardom. Sadly, he never got the chance to experience that for himself, as he died on July 20, 1973, about a month before the film was released.
The Creation of a Legend
Which is the point that the legend of Bruce Lee first took root. Enter the Dragon, which had cost $850,000 to produce, has pulled in more than $200 million at the global box office, while at the same time securing his legacy — 45 years later, and still going strong.
"What's fascinating to me is that at that point, Bruce Lee suddenly becomes a character," Matthew offers. "They start making Bruce-sploitation movies, where he fights Dracula and James Bond, and suddenly he's become a fictional character. That only happened because there was no long history of seeing him on The Tonight Show or seeing him in gossip mags, or all of the things that accumulate around a celebrity so that we hold them distinct from the characters they play on screen."
Bruce had espoused a public philosophy, a seemingly deep insight to the human psyche, and yet his behaviors in everyday life painted a portrait of a man driven by the same foibles that most of us are. "He was very serious about his philosophy," says Matthew. "I would talk to people who were, like, 'Yeah, he just wouldn't shut up.' That's not somebody who's faking it, you know? Somebody who's constantly talking about it all the time is somebody who's a real believer. But I think psychologically speaking, he was trying to balance himself out. That, at root, the little dragon was a fire element. He had a hot temper. He burned the candle at both ends. He had this great charisma, star power, and all the imagery when people talk about Bruce is very fire-oriented. Yet what he talked about was, 'Be like water, my friend.' To me, I think that was him in some sense knowing what his weakness was, and trying through philosophy to balance himself out. So when you study his life, you see all those kind of firey things: the short temper, the getting into fights, the arguing with people above him. Then you hear his philosphy, which, again, is be like water; adapt, bend with the wind. We preach what we need to practice, right? If you listen to a man preach about not having extramarital affairs, you know what you're going to find out."
And all of this, Matthew emphasizes, is what drove him to write this biography to begin with: "The goal of the book is to show how Bruce was human, because I think his accomplishments are more remarkable if you treat him as a human being and see what he had to overcome in order to become the first Asian American to star in a Hollywood movie, as opposed to treating him as a super heroic character who just rolled out of bed one day and had this tremendous success."
Part of the challenge in doing so, however, is the difference between much of what is presented in Bruce Lee: A Life and the image that has been preserved and cultivated by Linda and Shannon Lee (Brandon, sadly, died accidentally while shooting the 1994 film The Crow). For instance, while Bruce's official cause of death was a cerebral edema, possibly triggered by narcotics in his system, word is that he died in the apartment of actress Betty Ting Pei, with whom he was reportedly having an affair — one of several that are chronicled in the biography.
Matthew points out that he spoke to both Linda and Shannon. "I like them both," he says, "and admire the way they've worked so hard to keep Bruce's image alive and talk about his philosophy and the values that he espoused. So, bracketing that, I was curious, because the image they presented is more like Saint Bruce. I wondered if it was monetary or if it was true belief, and when I talked to Linda, and was interviewing her, my feeling was, 'My God, she really does believe that he was perfect.' And she wasn't fully convinced he'd cheated on her when I interviewed her. I'd written a piece where I'd said Betty Ting Pei was his girlfriend, and she hadn't agreed to the interview until she read that piece, and she basically came in to correct me. She was, like, 'Well, we don't know if this is true,' and I asked, 'So you don't believe it?' 'Well, he was such a good father and such a good husband. I don't think he would do anything to hurt his family.' At that moment I was, like, 'Wow, okay.'
"Here's the thing," he elaborates. "I think to this day, he was the true love of her life; her first true love, and she just has a remarkable love for him. I've been at wakes for students of his, and she kind of offers up things that Bruce said, and I came away feeling, like, 'She's a bit of a high priestess of the Church of Bruce.' My point is, I think it's quite sincere. Secondarily, the Bruce Lee estate, as policy, doesn't get involved with anything that touches on his death — which involved the scandal. As a result, when you see anything that's been authorized by the estate, you'll get his whole life and then there's an ambulance driving by and it goes into the afterwards. So it creates a distorted image of who he was."
Just as distorted is the last day of his life, beginning with the fact that the production company Bruce worked with, Golden Harvest, had put out a statement saying he had died at home with his wife while walking in the garden. That story was "blown up" three days later by the press, so a new wave of alternative facts came out stating that Golden Harvest's Raymond Chow and Bruce had both gone to Betty's apartment for a business meeting and to offer her a role in Game of Death, which was going to resume filming.
"Raymond Chow doesn't go to business meetings at the apartment of B-list actors," Matthew notes. "No movie executive does that. He had meetings in fancy restaurants or at his office. But the second story held up for a really long time. No one believed it, but no one could puncture it, even though it was also made up. It was a slightly altered version in order to cover up the affair. Then, finally, when I interviewed Betty in 2013, that was the first time she told a Western reporter, 'Look, I was his girlfriend. He came over by himself.'"
Game of Death
In 1978, Bruce's last film, Game of Death, was released and it was nothing short of a disaster. Working with the footage that Bruce shot, and using a lookalike who really did not look anything like Bruce Lee, a story was cobbled together, the resulting film pretty much dismissed. "Every fan hates that movie," Matthew concurs. "Part of it is because there were 30 minutes of actual filming that Bruce had done, and they cut that down to seven or eight. At the very least they could've let the whole thing run as the last 30 minutes of the movie instead of what they did. When I talked to [associate producer] Andre Morgan, their view was they were in an impossible mess: 'He didn't have a script and we were trying to figure out how to put this together, and it was insanity. This was the best we could do.' The one thing I can say is, looking at other kung fu movies from that time, Game of Death is better than some of them.
"Admittedly," he adds with a laugh, "it's a really low bar. But they're well aware of the criticism, and Raymond Chow has said through the years, 'I never wanted to make the movie, but there were contracts with distributors and I felt like I had to.' You know things are uncomfortable when no one wants to claim credit for them in Hollywood, right?"
For the record, all of Bruce's footage was included in the 2000 movie documentary Bruce Lee: A Warrior's Journey, which allowed fans to experience the actor's intent as his character made his way up the pagoda. "What's amazing about it now," Matthew points out, "is that I'll tell friends what the idea was, and they're, like, 'Oh, that seems so hackneyed.' I'm, like, 'That's because everybody's copied it.' That movie was the basis of almost every single video game. Doom, you go in and you fight up levels. That's The Raid constantly. So he caught a real archetypal idea, but he couldn't figure out how to make it; the story concept eluded him while he was working on it. And it eluded them when they were trying in 1978 as well."
Not so elusive is Warrior, a forthcoming Cinemax series based on a concept by Bruce that is, according to the network, "set at the time of the Tong Wars in the late 1800s in San Francisco. The series follows a martial arts prodigy originating in China who moves to San Francisco and ends up becoming a hatchet man for the most powerful tong in Chinatown."
"This was something that Bruce pitched at the same time he was trying out for the TV series Kung Fu, which is why everyone gets confused about it and thinks that he created Kung Fu, because the two projects were very similar," says Matthew. "I do think there's a tendency when you're combing through someone's archives where you're, like, 'Here's a genius idea, and it's inspired by Bruce Lee.' From my research, he did a seven-page treatment proposal for Warrior, and he pitched it to Warner Bros. They ended up turning it down, because they were going to do Kung Fu instead."
A Debt Repaid
Matthew Polly, it should be pointed out, doesn't come to this biography as a guy who one day said, "Wouldn't it be great to write a book about Bruce Lee?" At 21, after finding inspiration from a Bruce Lee film, he traveled to China to train at the Shaolin Temple, which is the birthplace of Chan (Zen) Buddhism and kung fu itself. He stayed there for two years, being the first American to be accepted as a Shaolin disciple. The experience resulted in the 2007 book American Shaolin.
"There was a period where I didn't have a publisher for the Bruce Lee book," Matthew details, "and I wasn't sure the book was ever going to come out. Then we took it back to market and a couple of people said no. At the same time, I sometimes felt like Bruce's spirit was guiding me, though I'm sure that's just my imagintion. Then Simon & Schuster picked it up, so for me there's a certain sense of relief and satisfaction. And as someone who is still an unabashed Bruce Lee fan, I'm happy that he finally has a complete biography. You look at Steve McQueen, Marilyn Monroe and James Dean — all of these people have multiple really good biographies, and Bruce Lee couldn't have one? The Asian guy doesn't get invited to the biography table? That was what motivated the project. I was, like, 'Well, if no one else is going to do it, then I guess I'll do it.' So now that he has one, it feels like I've fulfilled what Bruce Lee gave to me. I've fulfilled my end of the bargain."
He grew up wanting to be Bruce Lee, and later became a Shaolin disciple; now Matthew Polly is in Hong Kong to write story of kung fu star's life By Shirley Zhao http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1218619/american-who-idolised-bruce-lee-and-trained-shaolin-writing-stars April 20, 2013 Martial arts expert Matthew Polly in front of a statue of Bruce Lee in Tsim Sha Tsui. Polly, who dropped out of Princeton to become a Shaolin apprentice, is writing the late star's biography. Photo: Edward Wong Matthew Polly knows about being an introvert and an extrovert. When it's suggested he must be an extrovert, he doesn't deny it but confesses he used to be a skinny, nerdy boy, always too shy and geeky to communicate. Back then, he found it was always the suave and outgoing people who tended to lead or become popular among girls in the US, and he wanted to be one of them.
He believed going to China, to the Shaolin Temple to learn kung fu, would make him different. He went. It did.
"I'm getting better at it [being an extrovert] now," said the 41-year-old American author.
He certainly looks a natural now, always keeping a keen smile, hearty laughs, cracking jokes from time to time and, every so often, giving you a friendly pat on the shoulder or gentle touch on the arm. Even though he stands 1.92 metres tall, he doesn't look intimidating. He is a friend, a pal, and he makes sure you are impressed through showing off his tongue-curling Beijing Putonghua during conversations.
After American Shaolin, a US bestseller on his two-year kung fu training in Shaolin, and Tapped Out, on his ultimate fighting experience in mixed martial arts (MMA), Polly has come to Hong Kong for his third book project, a biography of Bruce Lee.
"No one's written a biography [of Bruce Lee] in the last 20 years," he said. "He's such a huge star. It seemed a shame that no one had written a very good biography about him."
Polly says most books in English about Lee only cover his life in the US, so he came, four decades after the death of Lee, trying to find out what he was really like through interviewing people in Hong Kong who actually knew him and his family.
Among those he has interviewed are movie mogul Raymond Chow Man-wai, Robert Chua Wah-peng, who created the popular television show Enjoy Yourself Tonight, martial arts master Ip Man's son Ip Chun and Betty Ting Pei, Lee's mistress, who was with him when he died in her apartment.
The interview with Ting lasted seven hours, Polly said, during which she showed him her kung fu moves and did Buddhist chanting.
"That has to be the most unique interview I've ever been in," he said. "I think it's one of the very first times she's ever told to Western journalists about her relationship with Bruce. For many years Betty Ting was blamed for Bruce's death, so I think it's good that she's finally decided to open up and tell her side of the story."
Polly's first encounter with Bruce Lee is a typical story. A scrawny 13-year-old who was always bullied suddenly discovered this exotic Hong Kong movie, Enter the Dragon, where a small, lean Asian man beat a whole bunch of people taller and stronger than him. The boy was fascinated and started learning kung fu two years later. He wanted to be Bruce Lee.
The boy, Polly, later entered the Ivy League, majoring in religion and East Asian studies at Princeton University, focusing on Buddhist and Taoist philosophies. He was charmed by the philosopher Zhuangzi's sense of humour and irony and imagined one day, through meditation, he could achieve enlightenment.
Then, after three years of study, he found the perfect answer to his pursuit of martial arts and spirituality - Shaolin Temple, which offered both. In Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee played a Shaolin monk, so there was a definite plus side to it.
"I thought I could become a badass," he said. "And become an enlightened Buddhist, a master. It made perfect sense to me but everyone else thought I was crazy."
That was in 1992, when China was a mystery to many in the West. Polly's mother cried over his decision to leave university for Shaolin, and his father wouldn't talk to him for six months after he bought his plane ticket.
He left anyway, with a backpack and a sleeping bag, expecting to camp outside a quiet, peaceful Buddhist monastery in the middle of Henan province for days or even months until the monks let him in.
Instead, he wound up in a tourist attraction with souvenir stores and restaurants. A young monk led him to a martial arts school next to the temple, Shaolin Wushu Centre, where the school party chief agreed to let him be a Shaolin student for US$1,300 per month. He later discovered the chief overcharged him by almost US$800.
Polly, the first American Shaolin disciple, stayed in the school for two years, training with the Shaolin monks for seven hours a day and six days a week. There was no TV nor any other entertainment, and no one talked to him for the first two months, because the school leaders told them not to, fearing he might spread "impure thoughts".
Two sympathetic monks did break the order and talk to him, and they became close friends. But the big change didn't come until nine months into the training, when a kung fu master from the city of Tianjin requested a challenge match at a banquet thrown by a French photojournalist for Shaolin in the school's restaurant. Polly offered to take the challenge. The monks agreed. He won.
"That was the moment when I became sort of an official member of Shaolin Temple," he said. "And instead of Bao Mosi [his Chinese name], they started to call me laobao ['old Bao', an affectionate nickname]."
In 1995, seeing many monks emigrating overseas, Polly realised he had spent too much money being a foreign disciple in Shaolin and he wanted to finish university and get a job. He went back to the US, but his parents were not impressed by his kung fu achievements. "I don't know what we did wrong," his father said to him when seeing him practising his "iron forearm" against a tree, "but whatever we did wrong, I'm sorry".
His was an achievement-oriented family. He went to Princeton, later Oxford and became a Rhodes Scholar. His sister went to Yale. "At first [my parents] thought I'd fallen off the path of success by going over there," he said. "I think it was after I wrote the book and it became a national bestseller and a Hollywood option that they were like okay."
His two years in Henan being the only foreigner among all the monks and disciples also made him tougher, more confident and outgoing. "For me, whenever any problems come up, I'll think 'well, it can't be worse than Shaolin'," he laughed. "No matter how scared I am now, I can't be any more scared than I was at Shaolin. I think that's the great advantage of chiku [eat bitterness]. If you eat bitterness, then you'll know what sweetness is."
Having stayed in Hong Kong for more than two weeks, Polly will return in July, when the Heritage Museum has an exhibition about Bruce Lee and Betty Ting Pei may be doing a television show on the 40th anniversary of his death. He also hopes to interview more people who knew Lee, such as singer-songwriter Sam Hui Koon-kit and his wife Rebu, as well as Jackie Chan.
Polly says Hong Kong people have been talking more about Bruce Lee recently. He suspects this is related to the huge success of the three films in the recent Ip Manseries about Lee's martial arts mentor.
"There's an old saying that a prophet has no honour in his hometown," he said. "Now people are remembering that it really was Bruce Lee who put Hong Kong on the map. He was the one who brought Hong Kong and Hollywood together. Without Bruce there wouldn't have been a Jackie Chan or Jet Li. I'm glad he's getting the attention I think he deserves it because, for a while, I think people thought he wasn't cool any more."
During the 2016 presidential campaign, amid the pontifications of a national press both certain about its disdain for Donald Trump and confused by his appeal, came a flash of insight. Salena Zito of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review explained that the press “takes [Trump] literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” With her ear for how Midwest people speak, Zito, along with her coauthor Brad Todd, expands on this understanding in The Great Revolt.
The authors commissioned an extensive survey for the book and also took a road trip “into the lives of Rust Belt voters.” They spoke with lifelong Democrats who had voted for Barack Obama in 2012 but switched parties in 2016. “On the back roads and side streets of places like Erie, Pa., and Kenosha, Wis.” emerged voters who never seemed to figure in the networks’ reporting. They were “blue-collar optimists, evangelical pragmatists and suburban vacillators who turned the dials just enough to shock the body politic”—part of a white electorate that, notes analyst Lloyd Green, had seen the loss of more than 700,000 jobs between November 2007 and late 2016.
Despite Trump’s narrow margin of victory—just 77,000 votes—in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, Zito and Todd see the 2016 election as representing a tectonic shift in America’s electoral plates. “Far from a fluke, the 2016 election was a product of Obama’s globalist conceits that produced defective trade deals, open borders and an aggressive secularism.” Trump’s victory was his triumph, not the Republican Party’s. Neither the two-time Obama voters who switched to Trump nor the habitual nonvoters who came out to the polls in 2016 saw much to rally around in the GOP. Their ties are to Trump, a finding with implications for the upcoming midterms.
“Eighty-nine percent of Trump voters represented in the Great Revolt Survey agree with the statement ‘Republicans and Democrats in Washington are both guilty of leading the country down the wrong path,’” Zito and Todd write. An Iowa voter insisted that the “only person that is able to turn me against Trump is Trump.” Similarly, in economically hard-hit Ashtabula, Ohio, east of Cleveland, a voter said: “So to ask me what would extricate me from Trump would be like asking me to remove me from myself, from my family, and from my community.” The most important issues for voters in the authors’ survey were “restoring manufacturing jobs, protecting Medicare and social security and appointing conservatives to the Supreme Court to protect religious liberty being threatened by assertive Hilary Clinton Progressives.” One interviewee said that NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, “is no longer an acronym—it’s a noun, and a profanity.”
Zito and Todd show a keen understanding of voter sentiment and do not condescend to their subjects. White working-class swing voters have generally been characterized as resentful, ignorant, and often racist, but Zito and Todd describe thoughtful men and women who made a deliberate and sometimes fraught decision to support Trump. Upper-middle-class Joe Steil of Keokuk, Iowa, whom the authors dub a “Rotary Reliable,” interacted with middle- and lower-middle class citizens through his involvement in local civic organizations like the Rotary Club and the YMCA. Steil and many other residents of small and midsize communities are more likely to vote “with their neighbors and not their economic or educational class,” the authors conclude.
With the Democratic Party doubling down on its hyper-progressive, identity-politics-driven agenda, it will have a hard time recapturing the voters it lost in 2016. “A liberalism that seeks to spread cosmopolitan relativism to the masses,” Zito and Todd write, “by force if necessary, instead of spreading economic equality, was destined to leave a decisive slice of the American electorate in search of a new home.” The Great Revolt does an excellent job of limning the concerns of this crucial and much-maligned segment of the American electorate.
Sirhan Sirhan, is taken from the Hotel Ambassador early June 5, 1968 after he shot Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
What was the first act of Arab terrorism committed inside the United States?
If you were thinking of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which killed six people and wounded 1,000, you’d be off by almost a quarter-century. It actually occurred 50 years ago this week, when Sirhan Bishara Sirhan assassinated Senator Robert F. Kennedy — an act that subverted the American electoral process and altered the history of the United States.
Kennedy had just won the California presidential primary on the night of June 5, 1968, when he thanked a huge crowd of enthusiastic supporters at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and made his way out through the kitchen. Waiting for him there was Sirhan, 24 years old, holding a .22 caliber revolver. Sirhan, a Palestinian Arab, shot the presidential candidate three times — twice in the back and once behind his ear. It was the last shot that proved fatal. Kennedy died 26 hours later at the young age of 42. Five other people in the crowd were wounded but survived.
Because the assassination came just over four years after his brother President John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, and just two months after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in Memphis, the nation focused on gun violence and hatred of the Kennedy family in its aftermath. Many blamed right-wing racists, since the Kennedys had supported the civil-rights movement. I was in school back then, and I remember the most common phrase: “They killed another Kennedy.” The “they” was generic. It wasn’t an individual; it referred to a supposed violent streak that ran through American culture and mythology all the way back to our frontier days.
But a single individual killed Kennedy for very specific reasons. Sirhan was obsessed with both Israel and Jews. He was born in British Mandatory Palestine in 1944 and emigrated to the United States in 1956, attending school in Los Angeles. Yet even though the California economy of the 1950s and 1960s was one of the strongest in the world, Sirhan never took advantage of what surrounded him: He worked as a stable boy and never became a U.S. citizen.
The shooting took place on the one-year anniversary of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War. This was no coincidence. When Kennedy was 22 years old, he traveled to Palestine, writing articles for the Boston Post about his admiration for the country’s Jewish inhabitants. As a senator from New York, Kennedy continued his strong support of Israel. Shortly before the assassination, in a televised debate with his chief Democratic rival, Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy, Kennedy said he supported the sale of fighter jets to Israel.
Indeed, Kennedy was a consistent and staunch supporter of Israel — which infuriated Sirhan. In a 1989 interview with David Frost, Sirhan said: “My only connection with Robert Kennedy was his sole support of Israel and his deliberate attempt to send those 50 bombers to Israel to obviously do harm to the Palestinians.”
Sirhan was convicted of the murder of Kennedy in 1969 and sentenced to death. Three years later, when the California supreme court invalidated all pending death sentences issued before 1972, the conviction was commuted to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole. (Charles Manson was another beneficiary of this ruling.)
Sirhan’s 15th and most recent parole hearing took place in 2016. He was, once again, denied. In a previous hearing in 2006, Tip Kindel, a spokesperson for the board of parole hearings, said Sirhan was “very hostile.” “He hates Americans,” Kindel said. “He continues to pose a risk for public safety.”
It is unclear whether Kennedy could have taken the nomination from Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who entered the race after the incumbent president, Lyndon Johnson, withdrew. Humphrey never ran in any of the primaries, which were fought between Kennedy and McCarthy. Considering the chaos that occurred at the Democratic convention in Chicago the following August, and the strong influence that the Kennedy family still had within the Democratic party, people have debated whether Bobby Kennedy might have won the nomination and gone on to defeat Republican Richard Nixon in November.
But, of course, it’s only conjecture. We will never know. Sirhan Sirhan, who resides in Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego and is now 74 years old, decided that on his own for the American voter.
Americans under 50 might not even know his name.
WARREN KOZAK — Warren Kozak is the author of LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay.
