By Tony Kornheiser

December 1 1996 - The Washington Post

A major assault on artistic freedom was reportedly averted this week when the Disney Corp. said it will not succumb to pressure from the Chinese government, and will go ahead with its plans to distribute a movie based on the life of the Dalai Lama.

For those of you who are not famous journalists as schooled in international politics as I am, let me remind you who the Dalai Lama is. He is that skinny guy who wears linen robes but is not Gandhi, who I am pretty sure is dead.The Dalai Lama, who is alive and possibly 60,000 years old, fled into exile some 40 years ago, a few years after the Chinese "annexed" Tibet (this is a complex diplomatic term that translates to "overran it with tanks and Gatling guns and bazooka-equipped mountain yaks"). To most of the world, the Dalai Lama is a saintly figure. He even won the Nobel Prize for chemistry, I think. But to the Chinese, he is basically a giant insect in a diaper.

So much for the history lesson.

Now, for the economics lesson. It turns out that Disney is very interested in China, from an economic standpoint. This means that Disney realizes China contains a billion human beings. A billion human beings have 2 billion wrists, not counting the few who have been punished for stealing loaves of bread, but that shocking cultural stereotype can be saved for another column altogether. Anyway, Disney figures, hmm, if 2 billion wrists were equipped with Mickey Mouse watches . . .

The point is, China is a potentially HUGE market for things Disney.

For a while there, it looked like the company was going to cave in and kill distribution of its movie, titled "Kundun," which is being directed by famed movie maker Martin Scorsese, who seems like an odd choice for this movie because he keeps making films about people who talk like dis and blow udder people's brains out de sides of dere heads. Anyway, Scorsese is considered a great movie genius, with great credibility, and this promised to be a major embarrassment for Disney. But as I said, they decided to go ahead with the movie.

Big public relations coup for Disney.

Except Disney exec Mike Ovitz never said whether the company was going to go ahead with the movie exactly as planned.

"Yo, Marty? This is Mike. How's the shooting going with the Dalai Lama film?"

"Great. We're almost done!"

"Fabulous. Fabulous. Listen, the board members and I were talking, and we were thinking, we love the film, but maybe the concept can be punched up a little."

"Punched up?"

"Yeah, like for example, we were thinking, since this is a Disney flick, we thought maybe it ought to be, you know . . . "

"No, I don't know."

"An animated feature. We will call it `Dolly the Llama.' See, it would be about this cute Tibetan alpaca who wants to be a giraffe . . . "

Our country has never really figured out how to behave when dealing with foreigners, particularly Asians. Last week, the mayor of Washington returned from a trip to China gloating that he had established "very fruitful relationships with the duck people."

The duck people????

If he'd gone to France, would he have called them "the frog people"?

When the previous American president went to Asia, he acknowledged his friendship for the people of Japan by vomiting on their prime minister. I thought there could not be a worse photo op (in China, these are called Wor Shu Ops) until I read my hometown paper the other day and saw Bill Clinton dancing in a conga line trying to teach the "wave" to the heads of state of Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand. The wave! They were as out of sync as the audio portion of a 1957 Hercules movie.

Anyway, Bill and the boys were all wearing these ceremonial open-necked shirts that I am sure are the height of dignified fashion in Asia the equivalent of tux and tails and cummerbunds but frankly made them look like they'd just finished clearing the tables at Grossinger's.

And now I read that Hillary Clinton, while traveling in Australia, which is WAY the hell out there near Asia, said that sometimes she wonders whether she should "just put a bag over my head."

As a humor columnist, and noted international expert, let me just say I would not touch this line with a 10-foot chopstick.