Flying Nowhere Fast

[Abu Dhabi’s Zayed International Airport on 7/22/20]

Reduced to self-publishing, I’m also my own critic and, soon enough, one of my last readers. The most exclusive of clubs, we’ll all fit on the same couch or camp bed. From 1999 to 2004, I lived primarily in Vietnam and Italy, so in my Blood and Soap of 2004, themes of foreignness, displacement, misinterpretation, eviction, escape and refuge were explored. They had already appeared in my Fake House of 2000.

Just now, I released a 171-page book, Escape from America, that features 20 American refugees. I’ve met countless more in numerous countries. Still welcomed, they’re fanning across the globe. Soon enough, though, borders will be sealed and airports shut down, but only for your sorry ass. Your massas must keep on globe trotting!

There’s an English YouTuber, Neil McCoy-Ward, who clearly sees the West collapsing. Among his recent videos are “UK Cities Experiencing Unbelievable POVERTY,” “People Are Prepping Like Crazy For This…” and “Jim Rogers On Why The West Is COLLAPSING... (& Asia Is Rising)”

Seeing Southeast Asia as a possible haven, McCoy-Ward and his wife have made exploratory trips to Thailand and Vietnam. Since the shit can hit the fan at any time, they best hurry. I know many South Vietnamese who paid dearly for hesitating in 1975, but without such indecisiveness, my brother and I wouldn’t have had the false papers to get on that C-130. Just hours later, shells and bombs killed hundreds of evacuees at Tan Son Nhat Airport.

Having flown over six decades, I’ve had many opportunities to reflect on airports. Vietnam’s used to be like prison gates or the Berlin Wall. So few could get out. At Tan Son Nhat in the 1990’s, people had to wait outside in the sun to greet friends or relatives arriving from overseas. These might have come from another galaxy.

Now, Vietnamese can actually use their airports! All new, they’re better appointed than American ones! With their incomes rising over +20 years, many Viets are eager to travel, and they can do so without a visa to 28 countries, including Singapore, Taiwan, Iran, Pakistan, Barbados and Kenya.

Budget VietJet Air made international headlines in 2012 when five of its attendants performed a three-minute dance in bikinis to startled or delighted passengers. Fined less than a thousand bucks, it flashed flesh again in 2018 to welcome home the Vietnamese U-23 soccer team. Its CEO is a woman, by the way.

I must admit to finding its song upon landing exceedingly charming. In a babyish voice, Hong Kong songstress Fiona Fung babbles:

Hold me up, hold me tight
Lift me up to touch the sky
Teaching me to love with heart
Helping me open my mind
I can fly
I’m proud that I can fly
To give the best of mine
Till the end of the time

Tearing up, I must be wrested from my seat by a platoon of armed guards. Please, sirs, can I hear that song again and again?

Wishing to fly is certainly childlike and, like sex, primal. The first man to lift off, though, was a celibate who never left his family home. Thin lipped, with small, uncalloused hands, fastidiously dressed Orville Wright even bleached his face with lemon juice. Wilbur was the genius. He, too, never touched a woman, however.

Compared to Vietnamese, of course Westerners have access to much more, but their world has been darkening and constricting, with collapse inevitable. With rapidly rising homelessness, illegal immigration, inflation and crime, plus squeezed farmers protesting, wokesters blocking roads and sexually confused youth still in danger of becoming missile or drone targets, Westerners are rather preoccupied, let us say, by homebound problems. They’re bogged down.

While stressing how widespread prepping has become in the West, McCoy-Ward noted, with amusement, its near absence in Thailand. That’s also true of Vietnam. You can say they’ve always prepped, however, since most Viet homes have enough rice to last a while, plus fish sauce and, often enough, instant noodles. Of course, it’s garbage, but there’s a reason why ramen is currency in prisons.

Visiting Vietnam in 1822, Scottish John Crawfurd wasn’t enamored of its cuisine, “The nature of their diet may also be referred to, as evidence of grossness. It is impure and indiscriminate […] their favorite sauce is a kind of soy, in part, at least, composed of the juices of putrid fish, and which, both from taste and odour, would be intolerable to any other people.”

If you’ve had phở or just about any other Vietnamese dish, you’ve tasted fish sauce, so it’s not so stomach-turning after all. Obama and Anthony Bourdain enjoyed bún chả with its fish sauce in Hanoi. It’s unlikely Bourdain’s suicide by hanging can be traced to fish sauce.

What’s indiscriminate in Crawfurd’s eyes is actually a virtue, for one should be able to eat just about anything, depending on the situation. Ossobuco, steak tartare, sautéed langoustines and rabbit paella are all dandy, but leaves, snails, ants, ant eggs and shit on a shingle have their moments.

In Blood and Soap, there’s this passage from “A Plane Ride”:

Approaching the airport we are elated with anticipation, a novel sensation. Prior to today, the airport did not symbolize for us release or adventures, but only the cruelties of life’s essential promises. It was like a magnificent gate bolted shut permanently, erected only to humiliate us, with banquet noises, like rumors, faintly echoing from the other side.

There’s so much anxiety and even fear before you’re allowed onto that plane:

We enter the airport’s magical confines without a major incidence. And they really do show us which plane to get on. But first, they must frisk us for daggers and books. They must also sniff our shoes and try to dislodge the fillings from our teeth. They take turns peering into our crevices. It’s a miracle they don’t just strip us naked before they allow us onto the plane. We would happily consent to it, in any case. They liberate us from our wallets, of course. A man grabs my stiff, shiny ticket and pretends to tear it to pieces. Our gathering relatives sob and pass out.

Though only fiction, and humorous, at that, it speaks of an underlying truth that’s far from over. The 9/11 false flag gave them the pretext to impose irrational travel rules which Covid then advanced to an insane degree. Restrictions on movement, speech and livelihood are the key features of totalitarianism.

Most effortlessly, you may soon become a triple crown winner, just like Seattle Slew and Miguel Cabrera, so congratulations!

The first commercial flight occurred a decade after the Wright Brothers’ achievement. For five bucks, you could fly from Saint Petersburg to Tampa, a 30 minute trip. Fatsos, though, were unjustly penalized, “Passengers are allowed 200 pounds GROSS including hand baggage, excess charged at $5.00 per 100 pounds, minimum charge 25 cents.” During those dark days, the US wasn’t just racist, sexist and transphobic, but sizeist.

Should our flying era come to an end, Mehran Karimi Nasseri must be credited as a grounded pioneer. Though the Iranian made it to the airport, he couldn’t go anywhere. For 18 years, Nasseri languished in the departure lounge of Charles de Gaulle’s Terminal 1.

[Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport on 10/18/22]

[Belgrade’s Nikola Tesla Airport on 7/22/20]

[Amsterdam’s Schiphol on 8/5/21]

[Rome’s Fiumicino on 8/4/21]