From Threepenny Activism to Distant Noticing

[Russia Today’s On Contact, 3/13/17],

My Prison Norms in Paradises includes seven interviews from 2004 to 2022. I left out one by Leakthina Ollier from 7/12/2000. It’s included in Of Vietnam: Identities in Dialogues (Palgrave 2001), coedited by Ollier and Jane Winston. An Assistant Professor of French at Bowdoin College in Maine, Ollier had to track me down in Saigon for that conversation! It occurred in my tiny District 6 room. Transcribing it, she had to ignore my noisy air conditioner.

As an ethnic Chinese born in Cambodia who had lived in Vietnam and, if I remember correctly, also France before moving to the US, Ollier’s story had to be fascinating. I should have interviewed her! I did learn she was planning on opening a Tex-Mex joint in Siem Reap.

By July of 2020, I had published just one poetry chapbook, Drunkard Boxing, with my watercolor on its cover accidentally printed upside down. Its indigo hue was also lost. I had also edited an anthology of contemporary Vietnamese fiction, Night, Again. My budding reputation was built on poems and stories scattered in obscure literary journals, such as Chicago Review, Threepenny Review, Sulfur, New American Writing and American Poetry Review. The last did have a circulation of 22,000.

At 36-years-old, I had not been to Europe, Africa, the Middle East or even Mexico. In Asia, I had only the briefest peeks of South Korea and Singapore during layovers. Italy, which changed my life, was still 17 months away. In short, I had experienced very little of the world.

Most importantly, 9/11 had not happened, so I didn’t even know what “false flag” meant. My political concerns, then, were too focused on my own pains and frustrations. Ollier’s very first question exposed this:

Leakthina Ollier: Linh, you have been living in Ho Chi Minh City for a year and a half now, and this is your third trip back since your left Vietnam in 1975. On a personal level, how is Ho Chi Minh City different from where you lived in the U.S. and do you consider this city home?

Linh Dinh: Yes, this is more home than Philadelphia. I don’t have to apologize for being here. I might get harassed on the street, but I know that this is my city. In the States, I always felt apologetic. I always felt like I was walking through someone’s living room to go to the bathroom. I always felt like I was a squatter. Maybe that was a very extreme attitude. I hope most Asian Americans and immigrants don’t feel the same way I do because that is a very uncomfortable way to live. Maybe that’s just my hypersensitivity, but in Philadelphia, people were always asking me, “Where you’re from?” It’s such a standard question when they see you. When people say “Where are you from?” what they really mean is, “What are you doing here?” Here, they might ask the same question but I don’t care. At the same time, Ho Chi Minh City isn’t quite home either. When I walk down the street people know immediately that I’m not a regular citizen. They think I’m Taiwanese, or at the least a Viet Kieu, an overseas Vietnamese. They can tell immediately, there’s no hiding it.

My first reasonably mature political writing was a 2001 review of Apocalypse Now Redux in The Guardian, then came a 2009 piece in the New York Times, “Get Together, Slim Down.” This was arranged by my Jewish publisher, Dan Simon. Dan also had me on a 2004 panel in NYC with Susan Sontag and Carolyn Forché. Had I gone along with the program, I would undoubtedly be married to a buxom Jew and teaching at Yeshiva University. All of my burps and farts would be broadcast live on Radio Tel Aviv and Radio Haifa.

Instead, I started providing commentaries for Iran’s Press TV! Though paid almost nothing, I did this for five years. I also appeared for free several times on Russia Today’s debate program, Cross Talk. With a stream of articles on Common Dreams and CounterPunch, I committed numerous heresies against progressive orthodoxy, so I lost that audience. Unz Review became my only outlet until its Jewjab stance exposed it as just another limited hangout. Having dissed Obama, Trump, Hillary and Bernie Sanders, I’m not a fit anywhere, but thankfully, there’s SubStack, but who knows how long that will last?

With Press TV, I was on many YouTube videos, but all those have been scrubbed. My Cross Talk debates are also gone.

My last interview on American soil was in NYC with Chris Hedges. This Pulitzer Prize winner at the New York Times had become untouchable in “the land of the free,” so had to carry on at Russia Today. In 2022, RT America was deplatformed. Hedges is now just a YouTuber and SubStacker.

I’ve transcribed this 2017 conversation before it’s flushed away. Nothing has been added. A few meaningless “you know” or “I mean” were deleted. Interviewing me, Hedges had nothing to gain, so again, I thank him. My takes on 9/11 and the Bin Laden “assassination” would have annoyed many Hedges fans, but we didn’t go there. There was so much else to discuss.

On the day of the show, I was wandering around Atlanta with my friend, Ian. Since we looked like bums, a charity van stopped to give us nearly inedible food. Back in Philly, I heard it never came on, so maybe it’s canceled, I thought. Must have tripped on some treif.

Turned out is was merely delayed, so I got to watch it at Friendly with my people. Since none was an academic or intellectual, they didn’t put up with any bullshit. Attentive throughout, they broke into applause when it was over.

Chris Hedges: Welcome to On Contact. Today we discuss the irrevocable decline of the American Empire with poet and author Linh Dinh.

Linh Dinh: We are really the poorest country on earth, and people refuse to see that. We’re only surviving, we’re only looking good because of our military might, because we are an empire. But this farce cannot go on forever.

Hedges: When we look back on this sad, pathetic period in American history, we will ask the questions all who have slid into despotism, ask, Why were we asleep? Why did we allow this to happen? Why didn’t we see it coming? Why didn’t we resist? Why did we allow the corporate state to strip away the rights of poor people of color and force them to live in terror in many police states? Why did we permit corporations to de-industrialize our nation and thrust the working class into poverty? Why did we swallow the absurdity of neoliberal ideology that told us the dictates of the marketplace and Wall Street should govern every aspect of our society? Why did the press and the academy stand mute as money replaced the vote and lobbyists authored our laws? Why did they render the poor and the working poor invisible? RT correspondent Anya Parampil looks at the plight of over half the country living in poverty.

Anya Parampil: In his 1961 inaugural address, John F. Kennedy declared, “The world is very different now, for man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life. Over five decades later, that power to abolish human poverty has not been harnessed in the United States. According to the Social Security Administration, as of 2015, half of the American population made $30,000 a year, or less, working a 40 hour work week. That comes to a wage of about $14 and 42 cents an hour. According to the Alliance for Just Society, a living wage in the US would be more like $16 and 87 cents an hour. And that’s just to afford the basics. And while poverty doesn’t discriminate, it does impact some groups of people more than others. According to Poverty USA, as of 2015, 14.8% of American women live in poverty, compared with 12.2% of men. 14.9% of single dads are in dire straits, while a whopping 28.2% of single moms live below the poverty threshold. As you can imagine, this means children are impacted the most. In 2015, 19.7% of American children, that’s one out of every five lived in conditions of poverty. The National Center on Family Homelessness found in 2013 that 2.5 million children experienced homelessness at some point during the year. That’s one in every 30 children in the US, but it’s not just children. The elderly suffer as well with the senior poverty rate weighing in at 13.7%. Overall, black Americans have the highest poverty rate at 24.1%, with Hispanics making up the second poorest demographic. 11.4% of Asians live in poverty while whites have the lowest rate, at 9%. While we may as a society have the resources and tools to alleviate the suffering of these people, as Kennedy believed, for nearly half of the population, just making enough money to survive is a struggle.

Hedges: Thank you, Anya. Linh Dinh is author of Postcards from the End of America. In the book, he lifts up the voices of those who’ve been disappeared by our corporate state, the homeless intense cities, the elderly and sick. Those working 70 hours a week, barely able to survive. And those struggling with the violence, addictions, despair and abuse that always comes with chronic poverty. He chronicles from city to city, in graphic and moving detail, the accelerating collapse of the United States, and its tragic human cost. Thank you. So, the power of this book is that you both give voice and a visual, I think, not only through your photographs, but through your brilliant writing. You take half of this country which has been rendered invisible and make them visible. And I think in doing that, you expose what’s happening within the American Empire. If there’s a common thread in terms of, you know, the cities that you go to, the experiences that you write about, the lives that you chronicle, what is it?

Dinh: Well, I would say it’s more than half. I think the majority of the people in this country are living the lives I described in my book, and I’m always surprised by how astounded some readers get, by my depictions, because they say, well, these are the  down-and-outs, these are the lowlifes. Who are these people? These are the people I’ve known all my life. So the commonality that I see is this growing despair, and a degree of anger. And so it give a lie to the false narrative in the recovery, that we are doing so well. We are not doing well at all.

Hedges: Describe a little bit about, we were talking before on air about Barbara Ehrenreich describing the life of the poor as one long emergency, that kind of stress, which is a kind of common theme throughout the lives that you chronicle. Describe a little bit about, you know, what the emotional state, both the economic and emotional state of the people you write about.

Dinh: Well, um, even when things were relatively going well, these lives were very difficult, you know, because I was a house painter, I was a house cleaner. I worked with these people. It wasn’t like an experiment. I had to do these jobs, and I could barely believe how difficult it was to get by day to day.

Hedges: Physically.

Dinh: Physically, and mentally and spiritually. So it has only gotten harder, because the anxiety and the stress of losing your job, or not being able to perform your job daily is, is, astounding. And I would say it affects the majority of Americans right now. So, ah, it’s only going to get worse, you know, but you can’t see it from a privileged place like, say, Manhattan or the Bay Area.

Hedges: You can’t see the… the corporate media doesn’t reflect this reality either.

Dinh: But, see, the thing is, whenever they talk about unemployment figures or the state of the economy, you read the comments, OK? And the comments are people howling and cursing the article. But, so most people know that these articles are just nonsense.

Hedges: Right.

Dinh: But, if you’re not threatened, you know, with your livelihood, you will tend to believe these articles, you know. I think there’s an intellectual class, people who read you, for example, or me, for example, who read alternative news. We’re not talking about CNN or Fox News, we’re talking about even alternative media, even the people who read alternative media don’t know how bad it is.

Hedges: Well, the only way to know is to do what you did, which is to go there.

Dinh: Yeah.

Hedges: That’s it. And most people don’t go there. Even people whose sympathies might be with the underclass don’t go.

Dinh: And, you know, what’s more disturbing is a hatred of these people.

Hedges: Yeah, that's right, you’re very right.

Dinh: I think on the left, the left always pretend to talk about the masses, the working class, but it really hates the working class.

Hedges: Yeah, it does.

Dinh: Because it doesn’t pay any attention to the working class, and it mocks their values, OK?

Hedges: Yeah. It mocks them, it ridicules them, it makes fun of them as irredeemable racists, as bigots, as uneducated.

Dinh: And, and they’re not. I mean, these people are not alien to me. I've been around the so-called underclass my whole life, because I’m a part of the underclass, OK? I mean, I may not look this way now because I have my funeral and wedding suit on, but day to day, these are my people, OK? So, I’m just saying they know how to accommodate other people, other races, other ethnic groups, because they have to deal with that daily, OK? The underclass has no, ah, no means of withdrawing to an enclave. They have to take the bus, they have to take the train, they have to drink at bars that are mixed with all kinds of different types of people. So the underclass is actually less racist than the educated class, in my experience, you know, because they’re less condescending to me, in my experience.

Hedges: To what extent, you came to the United States at the age of 11, is that correct, from Vietnam as a refugee. In a sense, I think all of the great, brilliant chroniclers of any society are kind of one step removed. Outsiders, people like W.E.B. Du Bois or James Baldwin. To what extent does that separation allow you to see things that perhaps those of us who are native to the United States, well, I mean after displacing indigenous people, are unable to see?

Dinh: Well, yes. I mean, I'm an outsider because I arrived here as an immigrant. I write in English, which is not my

Hedges: Name. I mean, you were a refugee.

Dinh: I was a refugee too.

Hedges: And you were living in tents like Syrians.

Dinh: Well, yes, I mean, I’m an outsider, because I arrived here as an immigrant. I write in English, which is not my native…

Hedges: I mean, you were a refugee.

Dinh: I was a refugee.

Hedges: You were living in tents, like Syrians.

Dinh: Sure, I was living in tents in Guam, living in army barracks in Arkansas. And, you know, I’m also writing in a language not my own, OK? So, of course I’m an outsider, but that’s fine. That used to disturb me. I used to try to figure out a way to wiggle in, but I realize it’s hopeless because I’m not part of, you know, any kind of mainstream, which is fine, because I realized a lot of Americans are not part of the mainstream either, including white Americans. So I don’t draw this boundary, this distinction, between, say, people of color, so to speak, and white Americans, because a lot of white Americans are also alienated, and also excluded from any participation in this economy, in this culture, in any meaningful way.

Hedges: I want to read a passage from your book, “Along with the visible decay that can be seen in cities and small towns alike, there is a widespread malaise afflicting the American spirit, and this is most acutely felt among the younger set. If they have gone to college, then they are most likely crippled with insane debts while stuck in a job that doesn’t require their overpriced yet diluted education, acquired with bankster loans. To make ends meet, they’re living in a crowded, shared apartment or at home with mom and dad, again. As for the professions, many are rotten with fraud, corruption or other immoralities, what a quaint word, so that to hold even the lowliest job in the military, police, government, banking, accounting, insurance, health care, media, advertising or the academy, etc., is to swim among crooks and liars, and it’s all too easy to become a cynical and sinister asshole yourself.”  

But you’re writing about the emerging generation here, and what is that doing to this next generation? Because perhaps, unlike their parents, they from the beginning don’t buy the American dream.

Dinh: Yes,  because they pay too much for college, and they’re in debt for life. And basically I’m describing the Occupy crowd, the people who populated all these Occupy encampments across the country. And those are the same people who are on the streets now protesting Trump, OK? So, I mean, I can see their angle and their frustration, but I think they’re being misdirected because, with the Occupy Movement, it started out with a very clear focus, which was the bankers is the source of the problem, and then it became all over the place, OK? And because it was all over the place, it had no clear agenda. It alienated the people it should have, you know, enlisted into the movement. So the growing frustration, the growing despair of growing up without a future is something I see a lot, you know, with a younger generation.

Hedges: We’ll come back to that after this break. Thanks. We’ll take a short break. When we return, we'll hear more from Linh Dinh, author of Postcards from the End of America.

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Female voice: About your sudden passing, I’ve only just learned. You wore yourself thin, taking your last wrong turn. Your act caught up to you as we all knew it would. I’d tell you I’m sorry if only I could. So I write these last words in hopes to put to rest, these things that I never got off my chest. I remember when we first met, my life turned on each breath, but then my feelings started to change. You talked about war like it was a game. Still some were fond of you. Those that didn’t like to question or argue, and I secretly promised to never be like you. It’s said one does not leave a funeral the same as one enters. The mind gets consumed with death. This one quite differs. I speak to you now because there were no other takers, to proclaim that mainstream media has met its maker. [WATCHING THE HAWKS].

Hedges: On Contact with Chris Hedges. Welcome back to On Contact. We’ll continue our conversation with Linh Dinh, author of Postcards from the End of America. So is this frustration, rage, the force that Trump tapped into?

Dinh: Absolutely. Absolutely. Although I see him as a fraud, as a conman, I don’t dismiss the people who support him because I can see his appeal to all these people. You know, it’s unfortunate that they are being, ah, they’re depositing their hope onto this farce. In a way, I see him as similar to Obama. Obama was used to appease a certain segment of the population. So Trump is used to pacify the working class, and specifically the white working class, middle America. You know, and he’s also used to provide a target, a convenient target, a scapegoat for the left, you know. So, in the end, Trump, he’s not a decider. I really don't see him as making any real decisions. So I actually wrote about this before he became president. I predicted he was going to win. I said, he’s so useful for the elite, in the sense, you know, he's providing false hope to half the country, and providing a convenient target to the other half. So, you know, he’s very useful for the ruling class.

Hedges: Do you expect that, at a certain point, that segment of the population that supported him will realize they’ve been betrayed?

Dinh: Well, see, here’s the funny thing. I think some of them already know. They already know that they’ve been conned, OK? But what happened with Obama? Obama did not change any, ah, Obama was supposed to overturn the Bush fiasco, but he continued a lot of the policies of George Bush, and yet he was reelected. So I realized that once people have decided they’re going to support an icon, you know, a savior, they’re going to double down and keep going with it. You know, so, I think that a lot of Trump supporters are in denial about how much of a fraud he is.

Hedges: You have a very bleak view of where we’re headed, I mean, into a kind of Hobbesian universe. And a kind of subtheme throughout all of your writings is this internal collapse of the American empire, the American state. Talk a little bit about that, about where you see us kind of rolling forward.

Dinh: Well, everywhere I go, OK, every town I visit, you don’t see any industries. You don’t see any factories, you don’t see anything. We don’t make anything. And we’re in debt, you know, we are really the poorest country on earth! People refuse to see that. We’re only surviving. We are only looking good because of our military might, because we are an empire. But this farce cannot go on forever. I mean, it should be so obvious that we’re only chugging along with accounting fraud, with, with, we’re bullying people into lending us money, and sending us stuff that we don’t deserve, we haven’t earned. So, how can we survive this way?

Hedges: You write at one point that hundreds of thousands of Americans have been reduced to living like savages in this self-proclaimed greatest country on earth. And I think one of the things that you see, you live in Philadelphia, North Philadelphia, that even those minimum wage jobs where people could barely survive, they’re not even there anymore. Even they’re gone. And that’s something that you see in your book. People can’t even stock shelves anymore.

Dinh: Yeah, and we’re talking about working people, not, you know… I know friends who are working, personal friends, who are on food stamp, who can barely survive, you know.

Because, while their wages haven’t gone up, and actually, for many, many, they’ve gone down, rents have gone up. Because, there’s a certain class of people who can afford to buy homes, you know, who buy multiple homes and jacking up… Here’s another thing about immigrants, you know, when people talk about immigrants, they have a picture of a destitute refugee or destitute, you know, a Third World immigrant, but a lot of the rich from these other countries are moving in too. In the Bay Area…

Hedges: You write at the end about San Francisco, the Chinese millionaire, billionaire class coming in and buying up the real estate.

Dinh: Right, so let’s rethink this open borders proposal for a second. So you have the rich coming in and making rent unaffordable for many poor Americans, including other immigrants. I have personal friends who can barely eat right now.

Hedges: Right. What do you see is happening? What do you, where do you think we're gonna go?

Dinh: I know you’ve been talking about like a potential revolution from the left.

Hedges: That’s a hope. I think the revolution will probably be Fascist.

Dinh: OK, so the Fascist revolution is a counter-revolution.

Hedges: Right.

Dinh: Let’s don’t even call it a Fascist revolution. Let’s just call it a counter, some kind of counter revolution. I’m not sure that will happen because, I mean, the Occupy Movement was bigger than the anti-trump movement and nothing came of that. So you have all these seething middle Americans who are not on the streets, the so-called Trump supporters. You know, they have their guns, they have their, you know, but I think the government is going to use this internal conflict to become even more of a police state, and that’s something you pointed out all along, so I think that’s part of the plan. They want to divide us so they can…

Hedges: But talk a little bit about what that, about how are we gonna be reduced to living? I mean… what are our lives gonna look like?

Dinh: Increasing poverty! I don’t see any way around that, you know. I think very soon, perhaps within this year, Americans are gonna discover how poor they really are. I mean many, my friends, are already barely surviving. So, you know, this is a kind of mirage. We’re sitting in Midtown Manhattan. This is not gonna last. I don’t see that lasting, because we there’s no foundation. We’re not making anything and Trump’s not gonna make America great again. He’s not gonna be there.

Hedges: So what’s that gonna look like? I mean, you talk about a kind of almost clannish antagonisms, that in the breakdown of the country you see coming, a ratcheting up of violence, a ratcheting up of racial conflicts.

Dinh: Well, a resurgence of nationalism, that’s for sure.

Hedges: Which is racist.

Dinh: Not necessarily! Because, I mean, would you call Vietnamese nationalism racist? Palestinian nationalism racist?

Hedges: I call any kind of nationalism that celebrates exceptionalism, which, at least, our version as racist, because you, by elevating yourself, there’s no kind of equality. You’re immediately creating a kind of hierarchy.

Dinh: OK, how about we rephrase, to call it a kind of regionalism, you know, an attachment to place.

Hedges: OK.

Dinh: And maybe an attachment to the status quo as is, you know. OK, let’s say we’re cool with a certain percentage of whites, certain percentage of blacks, certain percentage of Asians, but let’s not disrupt this, let’s not cause too much more upheaval. I think, I mean I already see that happening, and you talk about coming back from Eastern Europe, and you see that in Eastern Europe.

Hedges: Yeah.

Dinh: So, I think people will have a better sense of community, in a sense that we want our community to stay put, we don’t want any more disruption, because there’s been so much upheaval. I know it’s a paradox for me, as an immigrant, to talk about this. I’m not defending it! I’m just telling you what I see, OK? A kind of retrenchment of regionalism, you know. Multiculturalism is over. I really think it’s over because, if you live in Manhattan, multiculturalism just means choices, choices of places to eat…

Hedges: Right, right.

Dinh: Choices of babysitters. But if you’re at the bottom, when you have outsiders coming in all the time, it just causes so much tension, and so much conflict, and so much competition. People have had enough of it. I know it sounds very pessimistic and, like I said, for an immigrant to say that sounds very bizarre, but that’s what I see.

Hedges: What gives you hope? What sustains you? Or maybe you’re sustained by anger, which isn’t…

Dinh: No, no, what gives me hope is that I think people, when they have direct contact with each other and, you know, most people have no… There’s this deep alienation in my book.

Hedges: Yeah, you write, at one point, “Like television, the private automobile was invented to wean us away from our own humanity. From each, we’ve learnt how to amp up our impatience and indifference towards everything, and with life itself. Anything that’s seen through a screen or windshield becomes ephemera, with its death nearly instant. You don’t have to switch channels or run over it, it will disappear by itself. All screens and windshields have been erected to block us from intercourse.”

Dinh: You’ve talked about the same thing, about the tyranny of the image.

Hedges: Yeah.

Dinh: OK, so people hardly know where they are, you know. They can be in Osceola. They can be in Jackson.

Hedges: They all look the same!

Dinh: They all look the same because they’re looking at the screen, OK?

Hedges: But also the strip… I mean, I did a book on the Christian right, so I was going around to, you know, lower-income cities. I was moving from city to city, as you did, and I sometimes forget. Am I in Detroit or am I in Cleveland?! I didn’t… because you’re just one long Burger King and, yeah, you can’t even tell where you are.

Dinh: People can be sitting across from each other and not see each other. That’s across the country, so my hope is that, as this system breaks down, you know, the sooner the better for me, actually, people can rediscover each other’s humanity, and they can deal with their neighbors. I think people are actually very accommodating. They know how to, you know, respect each other. I don’t see that at the moment because they’ve been bombarded by nonsense from elsewhere, by media centers that have nothing to do with their own lives.

Hedges: I just want to end by reading the end of your book because it kind of symbolizes what you've done with your brilliant writing and reporting, Stories make a place. Without stories, there is no place, but without place, there can still be stories. If your stories are not organically grown, but imposed on you by those who hate everything about you, then you’re virtually dead.

“After the last Centralian,” and this is a town destroyed by coal mining, “has come home to be buried.” You talk about how it’s an empty town and people just come back to be put in the graveyard. “The town will be just its cemeteries and a section of lost road. Buckled and cracked, it’s filled with graffiti, much of it erotically inspired.”

In a way, what you’re doing is telling these stories before many of them disappear. That’s a kind of an attempt, I think, to kind of recover before it’s eviscerated, the humanity of the places you write about, and the people you write about.

Dinh: I actually think whatever observations I’ve been able to make will become more obvious, with each passing year, so this book would become… Right now, some people may see it as outlandish. Like, “What are you saying?!” But I think you know my messages will become so clear with each passing year, because this is the future, I believe.

Hedges: And you know it. Brilliant!

Dinh: Thanks, Chris.

Hedges: Thank you very much. That was Linh Dinh, author of Postcards from the End of America. The failure of our capitalist democracy was collective. It was bred by ignorance, indifference, racism, bigotry and the seduction of mass propaganda. It was bred by elites, especially in the press, the courts and academia, who chose careerism over moral and intellectual courage. Our rights as citizens were taken from us one by one. There was hardly a word of protest. America is rapidly devolving into a Third World nation, run by oligarchs, corporations and militarized police. Our anemic democracy is being replaced by an authoritarian state, led by a demagogue who cares nothing for the rule of law. Tens of millions of people, brutally controlled, already live in perpetual poverty. This is the result of unchecked corporate capitalism. The goal is to make us all serfs on the corporate plantation. Thank you for watching. You can find us on our R T dot com, slash, on contact. See you next week!

[Music]

[Chris Hedges at Russia Today Studio in NYC, 2/15/17]

[Iran’s Press TV on 1/11/13, with Chris Bambery in London]

[Press TV on 8/10/13 with Lawrence Korb, former United States Assistant Secretary of Defense for Sustainment]

[Press TV on 2/19/16. I was supposed to debate Taras Kuzio, Head of Mission of the NATO Information and Documentation Centre in Kiev, but he was so offended by our moderator’s first question, he cut off his studio feed right after his huffy answer.]