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An Observer (Teresa L)'s avatar

Yes, saw that Israeli family being rejected by the Vietnamese cafe owner on Twitter. (I do wonder what happened to precipitate the owner's reaction before the video started.) "Anti-semitism!" he and his cohorts will cry. Forever the oppressor as well as the victim. Few other groups (none?) have managed to exist for so long with this contradiction so deeply and widely ingrained in unthinking minds.

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Tom Herzog's avatar

For some reason I am reminded of President "Jimmy" Carter's "Malaise" speech to the American people in 1979. Carter never actually used the word "malaise" but the tone of his speech was gloomy, one might even say down cast. The president wore a frumpy sweater and it was strongly implied if not fully expressed, that American viewers needed to turn the heat down in their homes and get used to a bit of discomfort. (I don't believe the term "austerity" was in use at that time.)

Americans resented the buck-toothed, oddly accented Georgia peanut farmer telling them how to live their usually profligate lives and quickly threw the little grinning man out of the office of President and put in his place the slickly bombastic former General Electric pitchman Ronald Reagan in Carter's stead. What followed was about 40 years of economic "neoliberalism" (not to be confused with the political liberalism of Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal) that, according to scholarly estimates, shifted about 50 trillion dollars of American wealth from the middle and lower classes to the top 10% of the population (see e.g. the writings of renowned economists Emmanual Saez and Thomas Picketty).

Unbeknownst to many Americans President Biden has in many ways tried to put himself forth as the new FDR. (Yes it was hard for me to believe, too.) However the small progress he has made on behalf of the working-class in America only emphasizes how ALL of the presidents since Reagan have essentially sold-out the American working class benefiting the rich, the capitalists and the financiers instead.

I don't know what in Mr. Dinh's current essay reminds me of this except the phrase, "My last night in Vung Tau..." I've reached that stage in life where the word "last" always makes me uneasy. And I wonder if my coffin will be a relatively luxurious pine box or, as Mr. Dinh refers to, mere cardboard (in a pauper's grave)?

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