Worse Food, Worse People, Worse Life

[Singapore, 11/6/15]

The most pleasant way to reach Vung Tau from Saigon is on a high speed boat. Just minutes after leaving the congested city, you’re flanked by mangroves. Small fishing boats that double as houses bobble. Always, I’m the first to leave the passenger compartment to stand outside at the back, admiring the views. As I leaned against the railing 24 years ago, an old woman elbowed me in the ribs to nudge me out of the way. She did this wordlessly and without looking at me. I’m happy to report such incivility has largely disappeared.

On the Vietnamese border with Laos in 2020, I stood in line behind a white couple at customs. Wordlessly, a tiny tribal woman in colorful dress cut in front of us. City, citizenship, civilization and civility are related words. Common sense, though, should have told her each is served in turn. Maybe she’ll never leave her lush mountains with their squawking birds, thieving monkeys, poisonous snakes and houses on stilts.

Last week at Minh Bảo, I was the first to arrive for my excellent $2.22 vegetarian buffet. Arriving ten minutes later, a large group of older people turned my fan completely in their direction. If civilized, they would have had it turning, so all could be cooled, in turn. Last night at Cóc Cóc, a man in his 20’s, arriving a good half an hour after me, did exactly the same. Though exceedingly trivial, these examples of barbarity are telling. Most folks in Vung Tau are courteous and considerate nearly all the time. The 20% who run red lights just don’t care if people may be killed. Quite blithely, some woman with a toddler will glide across a busy intersection.

While staying with my friend, Lyle, in Sihanoukville, I heard the Brisbane native say to his two kids, “It takes work to be civilized!” Though adverse to cleaning, they’re very well behaved. Of course, each of us can be more civilized. It’s an ebbing commodity.

Vietnamese kids used to fold their arms and bow to old farts, even strangers. In two plus years in Vung Tau, this only happened to me once. Told by his mom to do so, this boy of seven was so embarrassed, he barely nodded, and his “ạ ông” was hardly audible. He’d rather rap.

Arm, leg and even neck tattoos are showing up here, even on women. Even in the West not that long ago, fancy tatts were only seen on criminals and whores. Now, even dorks and nerds must come off as hoes and gangstas.

Socialists are proud to be iconoclasts. To them, traditions and decorum are reactionary. Nazis were National Socialists. Chinese Red Guards destroyed priceless works of art. During the Spanish Civil War, Communists, Socialists and Anarchists burnt down churches or used them as latrines.

Since leftists seek to remake society from the top down and outside in, they must hollow out, or revolutionize, if you will, the nuclear family. In hardcore Communist societies, children were celebrated for denouncing their parents. The most famous was Pavlik Morozov. Statues, children’s books, songs, plays, poems and even an opera lauded this 14-year-old who had caused his father’s death. After he was supposedly killed by relatives, via decapitation with a saw in one version, a show trial resulted in four more deaths. Maxim Gorky said that Morozov “understood that a person who’s a relative may well be an enemy of the spirit, so such a person should not be spared.”

The core problem, you see, is “marriage fundamentalism,” since it’s “a key structuring element of White heteropatriarchal supremacy.” George Mason professor Bethany L. Letiecq in 2024:

Marriage fundamentalism can be understood as an ideological and cultural phenomenon, where adherents espouse the superiority of the two-parent married family. But it is also a hidden or unacknowledged structural mechanism of White heteropatriarchal family supremacy that is essential to the reproduction and maintenance of family inequality in the United States.

Dropping out of college saved my mind and soul.

Even during peace, those with poor impulse control are already savages. Are increasing attacks on strangers across the USA no big deal? Fatherless thugs just strut or dance afterwards. Wetting them is sexual.

Since the business of war is to violate strangers, all barbaric acts follow, with civilians always targeted. Soldiers kill, rape and loot, and so do desperate civilians. I still chuckle at a tea biscuit comment about war refugees. Daffy bird, “In a war, men should stay and fight, and women should stay to help them.” In war, all shoulds are blasted bloody.

Malaparte’s The Skin is about Naples at the end of WWII. Among its most striking phenomena is how locals lured, traded and captured black American soldiers:

When a street arab managed to seize a negro by the sleeve of his tunic and drag him along behind him from bar to bar, from inn to inn, from brothel to brothel, all the windows, doorsteps and street corners in the maze of alleys that constitutes Toledo and Forcella would fill with eyes, hands and voices crying: “Sell me your black! I’ll give you twenty dollars! Thirty dollars! Fifty dollars!”

[…]

The negro does not notice that the boy who holds his hand and strokes his wrist, talking to him softly and looking up at him with mild eyes, from time to time changes his identity. (When the boy sells his “black” to another street arab he slips the negro’s hand into that of the buyer and loses himself in the crowd.) The price of a negro on the “flying market” is based on the lavishness and recklessness of his expenditure, on his avidity for food and drink, on the way in which he smiles, lights a cigarette or looks at a woman. A hundred expert eager eyes follow the negro's every gesture, count the coins that he draws from his pocket, observe his pink-and-black fingers with their pale cuticles.

[…]

If the cost of hiring a negro soldier on the “flying market” for a few hours was only twenty or thirty dollars, the cost of hiring him for one or two months was high, ranging from three hundred to a thousand dollars or even more. An American negro was a goldmine. The owner of a negro slave possessed a sure income and a source of easy gain. He had solved the problem of making a living, and often grew rich. The risk, certainly, was great, since the M.P.s, who understood nothing about the affairs of Europe, nourished an inexplicable aversion to the traffic in negroes. But in spite of the M.P.s the negro-trade was held in high honour in Naples. There was not a family, however, poor, which did not possess its negro slave.

Black were more valued than white soldiers because they were much more profligate, and to pay for their extravagance, they had to steal:

[…] the negro would come home every evening with gifts of sugar, cigarettes, spam, bacon, bread, white flour, vests, stockings, shoes, uniforms, bedspreads, overcoats, and vast quantities of caramels. The “black” was delighted by the quiet family life, the decorousness and warmth of his welcome, the smiles of the women and children, the sight of the table laid for supper beneath the lamp, the wine, the pizza cheese, the sweet fritters. After a few days the fortunate negro, having become the slave of this poor, warm-hearted Neapolitan family, would become engaged to one of his master’s daughters; and he would return home every evening laden with gifts for his fiancee—cases of corned beef, bags of sugar and flour, cartons of cigarettes, and treasures of every kind, which he filched from the military stores, and which the father and brothers of his fiancée sold to dealers on the black market.

These fraudulent arrangements were only necessitated by war. For a black, brown or yellow man, a white woman is a particularly special treat, if she’s even available, so he’s willing to pay much more. Whites, on the other hand, often prefer a brown or yellow whore. Her being tiny or childlike only makes him feel more manly. Her broken English adds to this illusion. Bitch’s just learning how to speak.

Such bluntness isn’t welcomed today. Political correctness has warped thinking and bred rampant dishonesty. Cowards lie. As for literature, few try to read, and most who do, misread.

For many, just paying attention to anything for more than a few seconds has become impossible. That’s why pranks, stunts and selfies. Streamers insult strangers for online laughs. One woman’s specialty is taking off her panties in supermarkets then leaving them on food. Since being an asshole gives lives meaning, rudeness must rise. The self-absorbed are often much worse than oblivious.

As a boy in Saigon, just seeing a popular chopsocky required physical exertion. I had to force myself into the theater. It’s not uncommon for jostlers to lose their rubber flip flops. It’s worth it to see those flying kicks, flourishing swords and blood splattering.

Such practice hadn’t quite prepared those fighting to get onto whatever could float out to sea in April of 1975. Trampled corpses littered Bạch Đằng Quay. My buddy, Giang, crapped in his pants. We still joke about that.

Leaving southern Lebanon in December of 2020, I said to Taxi, “We’ll still drive to Jerusalem together!” When it’s liberated, that is. She hasn’t answered my email or Skype in over a year. From Beirut, I can hire a car. “You will always have a home in Lebanon,” she told me.

Hearing about my vague plan, a well traveled Saigon friend said, “My friends in Lebanon lost their flip flops getting out in June.” Like Dostoievsky’s contemplator standing alone in winter, I will only dream of reaching Palestine.

[Philadelphia, 3/30/15]

[Pennsauken, NJ on 5/30/18]

[Pohang, South Korea on 4/19/20]

[Vietnam-Russia Bank in Vung Tau on 8/19/24]