DEAR EDITOR:

President Biden probably didn’t actually stand up to Chinese leader Xi Jinping as he claimed in his expertly emollient speech to Congress. There’s way too much money to be made by American elites in down-capitalizing America to up-capitalize the still nominally communist People’s Republic of China for an American president to risk alienating that global powerhouse.

One research metallurgist at an old-time American industrial manufacturer told me outright his firm, which once employed tens of thousands in the U.S., relocated most manufacturing elsewhere, leaving here only headquarters and research facilities, which hire from international labor markets.

Plus, America is in the vise grip of strange ideas, such as group health insurance, a jobs- and capital-busting, one-way ticket to outsourcing. President Biden won’t touch that for fear of offending agenda-dictating specialized elites.

Fight, flee, collaborate or surrender? If you’re reading this, you’re likely a cubicle monkey, whiteboard warrior or factory drone. No worries. There’s no shame in duck and cover.

Fight? Participate if you must in do-gooder / do-something outfits, but keep expectations nap-of-the-earth low. Then lower them again.

The worst are profoundly dishonest and stupid. How do you tell well-intended, important people they’re full of beans? You’ll be controlled opposition, replete with canned opinions.

The health care landscape is jammed with petrified web and P.O. box organizations claiming to be “taking action” and “fighting,” etc. Most want to go from Point A to Point B without really knowing the coordinates of either, and they seem happy cocooning themselves in their own virtue-signaling rhetoric.

Big organizations with long pedigrees and narrow focus, such as the AARP, NRA, NAACP, ACLU, etc., may actually do some good in painfully arthritic, incrementalist fashion, plus you get a slick magazine or newsletter to boot.

Keep your expectations very low.

Flight? Outed CIA operative Valerie Plame and her truth-telling diplomat husband, the late Joe Wilson, thought about bugging out of the states for New Zealand. Two pitchmen for Team America throwing in the towel? Whew! They stayed. Daniel Boone fled. So did Davy Crockett. He died fighting to found another country, and, like Boone, miraculously got retconned into American herohood.

There’s an untold number of Americans who’ve successfully relocated from the land of the stuffed shirt and empty suit to points elsewhere. Anglophone parts of Asia and the Middle East get especially good reports. Ditto, Northern Mexico, the Philippines and Eastern Europe, with cautions for language and corruption.

Emigration is a thought for disgruntled Americans and Americans who were never gruntled to begin with.

JACK LABUSCH

Niles