Plainly Glorious Banality, Please!

Jan 20, 2024

[Vung Tau, 1/20/24]

9:03AM on this Saturday finds me sitting at Cóc Cóc Coffee. Awash in strangers’ babble, traffic noises and no music, I am happy. On an orange wall to my left is this fake pearl, “More Espresso less DEPRESSO.”

The Vietnamese version is more poetic, “CÀ PHÊ trên môi cuốn trôi muộn phiền.” Coffee on your lips washes away worries and sadness. Muộn phiền is 悶煩, so two yellow syllables equal four white ones, worries [and] sadness. Terseness is an Oriental virtue. Xi doesn’t sound like Trump or Biden.

Of course, my translation is fluffed, though not fatally, but who knows? Such a travesty might just kill you, especially if you’re Bourlaed. (See, I didn’t write Jewjabbed!) With your immunity shot, anything can keel you over.

Two doors away is where I can get camembert, chorizo, salame rustico, roquefort, sharp cheddar and virgin olive oil, etc. Across the street is a Malaysian restaurant, Sambal, which means hot sauce. I learnt that word just a month ago in Jarkata. Two blocks away is Kichi Kichi, a Vietnamese chain offering Korean BBQ. The same company also owns Cowboy Jack’s, Chixmax, Mak Mak Thai Kichen, Crystal Jade, Sumo and Hutong, etc. We’re still living through peak abundance, though day by day, everything dwindles.

If you still have your McJob, McCar and McDwelling, it’s tempting to dismiss all talks of doom as alarmist, so I’ve heard smugfaces dismiss concerns over wars, refugees, food shortages, bankruptcies, job losses, rising homelessness, fentanyl crisis, tranq plague, random attacks and unchecked inflation. Everything is AOK, they insist. Why ask why, they rap. Just go with da riddum!

Whatever happens in Gaza, Ukraine, Venezuela, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Yemen, Iran, Poland, Germany, Lampedusa, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Myanmar, Aceh, Colombia, Ecuador, Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland, East Palestine or Lahaina, etc., is localized and overhyped. Shit has always happened. It’s obvious these tranquil folks haven’t seen how Rome, Berlin, Paris, New York and London have changed just in the past few years. Everything still looks great on their flat screen TV.

Tiny, flat minds can’t grasp more than five or six objects at a time. Worse, these are translated into reductive and distorting words, so it’s nearly impossible for anyone to see anything. That’s just how we’re made. Quick, what’s the color of the walls surrounding you?

These two lines by Li He (c.790-816) may explain our myopia, if not blindness:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

China from up high are just nine wisps of smoke.
Water from the deep ocean enough for one teacup.

遙望齊州九點煙
一泓海水杯中瀉

Overwhelmed by this world’s richness, we shrink everything. Life’s neater that way. In this quest, we’re getting a marvelous assist from our overlords. Quite openly, they’re determined to reduce us all to insect eating bugs.

A dutiful cog with flattened, rigid emotions, Gregor Samsa had always been a tiny, toothless and crushable being with circumscribed movement. His becoming a cockroach, then, was just a formality. As for his death, it wasn’t just overdue but welcomed. Sounds familiar?

Ideally, we won’t emit anything. Faulted for eating red meat, flying, driving, breeding or just breathing, we will own nothing and feel like dogshit. In this light, their command that we mask up makes perfect sense. Superfluous and annoying, we’re just wasting their oxygen, so via war or “science,” most of us must be shown the door.

Just five months into its war with Russia, Ukraine released a weirdly triumphant video. By 2030, Ukraine has become “the most digital and convenient country in the world,” with its education, medical care and government services mostly digital and remote. All nations try to emulate it. A headline, “UKRAINE IS THE MOST DIGITAL AND FREE COUNTRY IN THE WORLD WITH A STRONG SECURITY SYSTEM,” so being divorced from the tactile and social is to be most free and secure. That hellish isolation we endured via Covid will be permanent. Most cheerfully, dystopia is promised, but only for those who are spared.

Nearly daily for the last three years, Steve Kirsch’s been asking out loud why American health authorities keep ignoring his sea of evidence against genocidal Jewjabs. If still alive in 2030, he’ll still consider this systematic culling merely a regrettable boo boo.

On 1/18/24, Kirsch demanded from the World Economic Forum, “When you make a mistake, admit it publicly as soon as you realize you made a mistake.” Kirsch should heed his own advice. His failure to see a genocide in progress makes him complicit, actually, but Kirsch is hardly alone. If there’s no crime, these butchers of millions are merely bungling well-intentioned bureaucrats.

With 235,000 subscribers, Kirsch is a bigshot SubStack. Recently, this platform for the canceled and shoved aside has come under attack by the New York Times and Atlantic. Others foes of free speech have jumped in. Oozing sickness, America no longer pretends to be democratic or free.

Though just a mite at SubStack, I might be a bigger target for erasure than Kirsch, for my Jewjab refrain can’t be too melodious to Jewjabbers. Still, I’ll keep singing. Until everything suddenly goes dark, I’ll keep dishing up doses of plainly glorious banality. If nothing else, they serve as reminders of how things were, should be and, we must insist, will be again. The alternative is Bill, Yuval and Klaus’ technocratic and inhuman hell.