Roger Cohen: Intelligence: New York Times, Tom Brady, Distant Echoes Under a Plum Tree

Distant Echoes Under a Plum Tree

Cherence France

by Roger Cohen, New York Times embellisher par excellence ! (Kidding, Roger, Kidding!

Back in 1975, Claire Izzouz studied puppetry in Taiwan with one of the great glove puppeteers, Li Tien-lu. They became friends and, in later years, Li often visited.

Such was his attachment to Cherence, and such peace he found in this French village, that when Li died in 1998, he requested that part of his anatomy find its final resting place here. At a ceremony in 1999, a piece of bone -- believed to be a fragment of the great man's left finger -- was buried under [Claire's plum tree]. There were offerings galore so he should lack for nothing in the next life.

This year, Li's son died. Naturally he wanted to be close to his father [in France, even though he was Taiwanese]. So arrangements were made ...[through Claire] ... [and] father and son, or rather, tiny fragments of the finger bones of each, were united beneath the plum tree.

When the chutney was made, and judged satisfactory, I took a jar of it to Claire's. We met under the plum tree. Or rather, India and China met, and France, too, as the bells chimed from the 12th century [church]. Marrying East and West, past and future, life and death, the global village lives as a New York Times reporter makes up a story out of whole cloth!



NOTE: This "story" by New York Times reporter Roger Cohen is a blatant lie and not true at all. In addition, India did not meet CHINA, India met Taiwan. But Roger Cohen, for all his education, does not know the difference yet. Why he makes up stories like this and submits them to the New York Times is hard to fathom.

But one of the reasons Cohen was able to get away with this sloppy writing was that

1. it does not appear online anywhere in the world so no other reporters or readers or editors can check it for accuracy

2. Cohen writes this special Intelligence column for the NYTimes weekly insert in foreign newspapers as a special arrangement, it is NOT his real job at the Times and he does not CARE about what he writes here, it's just an obligation and if he lies and cheats a bit, nobody will notice, he knows.

3. Cohen apparently looks down at non-English readers of the New York Times and thinks he can tell embellished stories like this and get away with it.

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