From AOL News:
BOISE, Idaho (Oct. 28) - A black cat won't cross your path this Halloween, not if a northern Idaho animal shelter can help it. Like many shelters around the country, the Kootenai Humane Society in Coeur d'Alene is prohibiting black cat adoptions from now to Nov. 2, fearing the animals could be mistreated in Halloween pranks - or worse, sacrificed in some satanic ritual.
This is what we worry about these days, is it?
Last night I was out in Thailand, where they're cat crazy. Cats are everywhere. I stopped in at a joint for a cold beer, and a black cat was on the bar, flat on his back, getting some zzz's. He was probably the coolest cat I'd seen in my life. Jet black, just lying there with all four paws up, lounging to the rock music coming over the box.
For a laugh, I asked the Thai lady behind the bar how much she wanted for him. She told me 1000 baht, or around thirty bucks. Another guy came in and I pointed at the cat. I told him how much the cat cost.
"1000 baht?" the guy said. "For what, the BBQ?"
I swear on all the books that the cat jerked its head up, looked at me and the other guy, and then took off like a bat out of hell.
That's a smart cat. Earlier that night I happened by a hotdog stand and looked at their wares. From left to right, the selection was thus: cockroach, grub, cricket, scorpion, and something I couldn't recognize. In a place like that, cats beware.
But in northern Idaho?
More from AOL News:
The shelter's executive director, Phil Morgan, said that while the risk may be remote, the policy will remain just in case.
"It's kind of an urban legend. But in the humane industry it's pretty typical that shelters don't do adoptions of black cats or white bunnies because of the whole satanic sacrificial thing," Morgan said. "If we prevent one animal from getting hurt, then it serves its purpose."
"The whole satantic sacrificial thing." That's almost as dubious as "kind of an urban legend." Well, which is it? An urban legend, or not?
I'm willing to bet that Morgan has no firsthand evidence of a sacrificial rite being performed on a cat, black or otherwise. If he did, he wouldn't have to tell us that it was "kind of an urban legend." He'd be able to say, "Last year ten cats were slaughtered and I won't allow that to happen again."
But he can't. Because it's a crock.
Morgan isn't entirely to blame. The latest laws and rules being passed are for our own protection. Protection from living the life we want, that is. Morgan's just going with the flow. Kids can't play tag in school. You can't ride a bicycle without a helmet. People in Omaha are being told to call 911 if they see someone light a cigarette in public. All massive concerns.
I watched a news conference the other day, where four people were being held as 'people of interest' in the murder of a Florida family. The man behind the podium read off each individual's name and, without a hint of embarrassment, told us their criminal histories. More than a dozen felonies between them, and a slew of misdemeanors. Not one of them had a clean rap sheet. Two of them had been arrested and charged with other crimes as recently as a few months ago.
That a lawman can stand there without shame and tell the nation that a family is dead because they didn't lock up these scumbags when they had the chance(s) is amazing. The press should have been all over him for that. They let it slide, because we're used to it. Letting lowlifes off the hook is our stock in trade.
Imagine standing in front of your boss and saying the following: "As you know, the company's going under because I was late to work three times. Then I didn't bother to call John to make sure something was being done. Then I goofed off for a weekend so I could go fishing. Then I went to Vegas and got some hookers on the company's dime. Well, you're not going to like this, but I cheated on the tax forms and now we're going bankrupt."
Would your boss let it get to the 'bankrupt' stage, or would you be canned after the fishing trip? Should we allow the cops and judges to let it get to the 'family murdered in Florida' stage?
The real concern is when we stop looking at evidence, and start basing our rules on feelings. "I once heard an urban legend that cats are sacrificed to Satan. I like cats. Therefore I will ban anyone from adopting a black cat over Halloween."
The implied argument here is that you're the Satan worshipping criminal. Morgan went on to say the shelter "is happy to adopt out animals. Would-be black-cat owners will simply have to wait a few days." Just like that, you practice black magic and you're on a waiting list that would make the anti-gun crowd applaud. Try explaining that to your kid. "I'm sorry, sweetie, we can't pick up Muffy till after the weekend because the nice man is afraid you'll disembowel her in Lucifer's name."
We'd better start worrying more about the people that want to kill Florida families, and less about the urban legends. After meeting that cat in Thailand, I can tell you that the cats can take care of themselves.
Time we did the same.
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Tunnel Rat
Saigon is another in a line of 'communist' cities that I've visited lately, none of them resembling anything close to communist. Tianjin was certainly a communist city. You could tell by the rundown buildings, the filth, and the poverty. But then, even Tianjin served Budweiser.
Before heading into Saigon for the night, I decided to check out the Cu Chi tunnels. They're leftovers from the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese lived in them, cooked in them, sometimes fought in them. After crawling around in the tunnels myself, I have come to the firm conclusion that war is a dirty business. It's also muggy. When fourteen people are crawling around in a tunnel fifteen feet underground, filling it with carbon dioxide and who knows what else, it can get steamy. And we were only tourists.
The tour started out with the Obligatory Video. It's the one where you sit and listen to the latest propaganda from the company that is selling you the tour. Nine times out of ten, tours have an environmental axe to grind: the Grand Canyon you're visiting will only remain a pristine wilderness if people stop visiting it. Or, Niagara Falls was a much better place before human beings existed. Or, Hawaii's volcanoes knock over houses in a symbolic gesture of taking back the island.
The gist of the Cu Chi video was this: during the war, Americans killed women and children with impunity, and they bombed the greenery because Americans are mean people who don't respect the earth. That's pretty telling. This last part told me that someone in the Cu Chi region has a firm grasp of modern propaganda: nobody gives a damn about women and children (Darfur), but tell them a tree might die and they will freak out (Alaskan pipeline).
The video was black and white. I wasn't sure if it was old, grainy film stock, or if it was just bad videography. In any event, it had a lot of scenes of Vietnamese people blowing away Americans and winning the day. Except there were no Americans on the screen. The shots were always of smiling Vietnamese women holding rifles incorrectly, or a man making a homemade bomb. Then the video would cut to an explosion of dirt flying in the air, and the narrator would say that the Americans had run away.
Whatever. Propaganda videos don't bother me much these days. Virtually every news channel on TV is an anti-American propaganda piece. Anchormen at the CBC have made entire careers out of it. But for the record, I'm pretty sure the Yanks never lost a pitched battle in Vietnam (yes, even the beloved Tet Offensive, where the Americans creamed them), and not many GIs were pot smoking losers that hated their own country. Most of those people were in Canada, trying to get a job at the CBC.
I didn't catch the end of the Cu Chi video. Me and a couple of Americans left the room, not out of protest, but because we needed a smoke.
Our guide took us on a trip through the jungle. He pointed out a couple of hidden trapdoors. One led to a tunnel. Another led to a pit full of spikes. One thing about the Vietnamese, they sure knew how to make a booby trap. There was the 'fish trap,' where your foot would fall through and your calf would be embedded with spikes. There was the 'rolling trap,' where your leg would be mashed like a sausage. There was the 'chest impaler,' where a board of spikes would fall down from a tree and clobber you in the breadbox.
It wasn't all doom and gloom, however. For a dollar a bullet, you can fire off any old weapon you want. They have a collection of them beside the beer counter: machine guns, shotguns, AK-47s. After downing a quick brew, a few people from our tour decided to let fly. I didn't bother to enlist in our little army; I'd fired weapons before.
I wandered down to watch the action. It was interesting to see how many males thought they knew how rifles worked, and it was comical to see them all line up right where the ejected cartridge casing was going to hit them in the face. The Vietnamese guy holding the rifle told them to get out of the way. Then he told a young lady to come up and give it a shot.
The guide was careful. He didn't take his hands off the weapon until the girl had it pointing down the range. Then he stayed very, very, very close to her, making sure she didn't do something stupid like say, "Quick, take a picture," and point the thing at us.
She prepared to fire. She squinted. She tensed. She actually looked pretty cute. I don't know what it is about a woman in hot pants holding an assault rifle, but it isn't the worst thing you'll ever see.
She pulled the trigger.
Click.
The guide was indeed being careful. He'd forgotten to cock the thing for her. He pulled the slide back.
She tensed again. BANG.
A word about firearms. If you've never fired one, they're amazingly loud. The movies don't do them justice. I had a good laugh when I heard Spielberg going on about how real he wanted Saving Private Ryan to sound. If he had tried that, he would have deafened the entire audience within the first five seconds of the film.
Standing near a powerful assault rifle when it goes off is painfully loud. They're an ugly weapon, not built for pretty. When they go off, your ears ring and you wonder what hit you. You also wonder how the hell people fight a war when a hundred of those things are going off all around them.
When the young lady on our tour pulled that trigger, everyone winced and the women jumped a foot in the air. One of them screamed. As I said, weapons are loud. They also stink. One rifle will cover an entire group with the unmistakable stench of cordite.
A few people took a turn each. Bam, bam, bam, firing down the range. The change that came over them was evident: before coming down to the range from the beer counter, they'd been all smiles and laughs. Now they were plugging their ears and frowning. Others walked away without firing a shot. Seeing and hearing deadly things close up is not as fun as people think it is. It doesn't make you a braver, tougher person. It makes you a cautious person.
Thinking of that AK-47 firing a bullet into an American GI was an image that probably came up for a few of them. It isn't a nice image. The guide himself was all chuckles. While the people frowned and plugged their ears, he entertained himself by catching the ejected casings in mid-air as they came out of the rifle.
We made it to the tunnels after sampling some rice wine. I didn't bother to ask why there was a rice wine hut on the tour. At first I thought it was because the VC drank a lot of rice wine before going into battle, much like the Japanese had done during WWII. I was wrong. The reason there was a rice wine hut on the tour was because they were selling rice wine. Five bucks for a great big bottle. It tasted like gasoline, it burned your stomach, and it instantly made me want to shoot somebody. Powerful stuff.
The tunnels were our last stop. During the Vietnam War, there were miles and miles of them, some of them going more than thirty feet into the ground. Throughout the maze, there were living spaces, storage areas, hospitals, you name it. Americans who went into them would be greeted by booby traps, spiders, rats, and enemy soldiers waiting to stab you to death in the dark. I read once that some of the tunnel rats, as the American interloper was known, would go nuts from the stress of going down those holes.
I don't know if I could have done it. Who can know that, except for a diagnosed claustrophobic? All is know is, tunnels are very tiring to crawl through, they're hot, and they stink.
Our tourist tunnel had been smoothed out since the war. The guide told us they were quite safe. We were only going to go fifteen feet underground. The tunnel was about three feet high. It would be shoulder-width. There were no rats or snakes, but there might be spiders. That raised eyebrows.
Two people bailed out immediately. As we descended a set of dirt steps into the ground, two young ladies came walking back past me. One said, "No way." The other said, "Fuck that."
When I got the bottom of the steps, I was greeted by a trapdoor, minus the door. I dropped down into darkness. A small red light was set into the wall, but it didn't do anything for my vision. There was an immediate left turn in front of me. The guide had told us to expect a sharp turn after every trapdoor. They'd been built to muffle a grenade being dropped down the hole.
I was on my hands and knees, the ceiling of the tunnel brushing my back. The tunnel smelled of dirt and sweat. I felt my way along the wall and made the turn. I could hear my group up ahead, but I couldn't see them. Once in a while there was a flash of light as the guide turned his flashlight back towards us, and I could make out the silhouette of someone's butt up ahead of me.
The air got muggy. We went down at an angle. Someone in our group had the worst B.O. of all time, and it threatened to gag me once or twice. I could not imagine making this crawl knowing that there might be an enemy soldier up ahead with a bamboo spike in his hand, dying to drive it home.
Turn, turn, turn. And quite a few of them, too. Whoever had constructed these tunnels was not a fool. For a tourist like me, they were a simple pain in the ass. For an invader, every turn would be considered a deathtrap. There would be no way to know what was around every corner.
I bonked my head against the wall. I hadn't seen it coming. I felt around with my hands. No way out. Trapped. I reached up, and discovered there was a hole in the ceiling. I stood up, and bonked my head against the ceiling of the next level. Between AK-47s and tunnels, the tour should come with a free bottle of Excedrin.
I crawled through the hole. I could hear people up ahead. I heard the guide say, "It's okay." I knew he was at least ten people and two corners ahead of me, but he sounded five feet away. Noise in the tunnel carried far, and I suddenly regretted saying, "That guy stinks," a little while ago.
It brought up another thought of the American invader. There's no way they snuck up on their enemy in the tunnels. It must have been primal warfare. Wits, and knives, and fists, and the gun as a last resort, deafening you and alerting the entire tunnel system to your presence. And once you did that, how to escape? How do you run when you can't even walk?
We reached a bottle neck. My friend Matt was jammed up. His voice was shaking a bit in the dark. He said he was stuck, that he had to take his knapsack off his chest. Claustrophobia was closing in on him. Only later did he tell me that he'd done the tour to face his fear of tight places. Tight, dark places were another matter.
"You're all right," I said. "You've got plenty of room," I lied.
He pushed his way through. I crawled forward and heard him disappear around another corner. Then I felt what he'd been afraid of. I say felt, because I hadn't seen it. It was a good bottleneck, and it had me by the shoulders. My knees were hurting more, and my shirt was soaked through. Sweat was dripping off my face like a salt shower.
I pushed forward and slipped through. I shuddered to think of a fat person getting jammed in there, yelling for help, and not being able to see help coming.
Light.
I'd reached an exit, steep steps leading ten feet up to the surface. I saw two people climbing the steps, breathing hard, congratulating themselves. I yelled ahead into the darkness. I got a yell in response. So push on. If you're going to crawl through an old war tunnel, you might as well crawl through the whole thing.
More dirt, more heavy breathing, more sweat. The tunnel past the first exit was narrower. That first exit must have been for the people who felt the rest of the tunnel getting a bit too tight. These tunnels had been made to fight American soliders and scare the crap out of American tourists.
And the Vietnamese lived like this for years. Crawling around in the dark, dragging rifles and ammunition, food and water, perhaps wounded Marines. It was Iwo Jima flattened to pancake proportions, the tunnels spreading out around the country. They would lie in wait. And wait. And wait. And when the time came, up they'd come, out of the ground, looking to kill somebody in a green uniform.
They may never have won a pitched battle, but they certainly inflicted enough pain and misery upon their invaders. The Americans got their digs in too, but leaving Vietnam was probably a wise decision no matter how you felt about communism. People who dig tunnels underground and fight a smash-and-grab guerilla war are not going to surrender, it's just that simple. I only had to crawl through the tunnels; the willpower to dig them and make house must have been extraordinary.
The answer to the tunnels, of course, would have been to cut off their head. We can't go into all the reasons the Americans didn't nail North Vietnam to the wall, but the fact is, they didn't. Hence the tunnels lived on throughout the war and lasted to be the pain in the ass they were for the Americans.
And for me. I finally got out the other end after twenty-five more meters of darkness. A shaft of daylight looks blue when it's coming down into the tunnels. It is deceiving, too, because it looks closer than it is.
Finally up and out, fresh air tasting as good as a dry martini. I looked down into that black mouth, then looked at the faces of my group. They were all sweating, laughing, and taking pictures. They couldn't wait to get out of that hole. We drank Tiger beer and said that it had been interesting, hot, and stank like hell, and we were better off outside than inside.
That the Vietnamese couldn't wait to get back into that hole during the war speaks volumes. To them, that hole was home.
Before heading into Saigon for the night, I decided to check out the Cu Chi tunnels. They're leftovers from the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese lived in them, cooked in them, sometimes fought in them. After crawling around in the tunnels myself, I have come to the firm conclusion that war is a dirty business. It's also muggy. When fourteen people are crawling around in a tunnel fifteen feet underground, filling it with carbon dioxide and who knows what else, it can get steamy. And we were only tourists.
The tour started out with the Obligatory Video. It's the one where you sit and listen to the latest propaganda from the company that is selling you the tour. Nine times out of ten, tours have an environmental axe to grind: the Grand Canyon you're visiting will only remain a pristine wilderness if people stop visiting it. Or, Niagara Falls was a much better place before human beings existed. Or, Hawaii's volcanoes knock over houses in a symbolic gesture of taking back the island.
The gist of the Cu Chi video was this: during the war, Americans killed women and children with impunity, and they bombed the greenery because Americans are mean people who don't respect the earth. That's pretty telling. This last part told me that someone in the Cu Chi region has a firm grasp of modern propaganda: nobody gives a damn about women and children (Darfur), but tell them a tree might die and they will freak out (Alaskan pipeline).
The video was black and white. I wasn't sure if it was old, grainy film stock, or if it was just bad videography. In any event, it had a lot of scenes of Vietnamese people blowing away Americans and winning the day. Except there were no Americans on the screen. The shots were always of smiling Vietnamese women holding rifles incorrectly, or a man making a homemade bomb. Then the video would cut to an explosion of dirt flying in the air, and the narrator would say that the Americans had run away.
Whatever. Propaganda videos don't bother me much these days. Virtually every news channel on TV is an anti-American propaganda piece. Anchormen at the CBC have made entire careers out of it. But for the record, I'm pretty sure the Yanks never lost a pitched battle in Vietnam (yes, even the beloved Tet Offensive, where the Americans creamed them), and not many GIs were pot smoking losers that hated their own country. Most of those people were in Canada, trying to get a job at the CBC.
I didn't catch the end of the Cu Chi video. Me and a couple of Americans left the room, not out of protest, but because we needed a smoke.
Our guide took us on a trip through the jungle. He pointed out a couple of hidden trapdoors. One led to a tunnel. Another led to a pit full of spikes. One thing about the Vietnamese, they sure knew how to make a booby trap. There was the 'fish trap,' where your foot would fall through and your calf would be embedded with spikes. There was the 'rolling trap,' where your leg would be mashed like a sausage. There was the 'chest impaler,' where a board of spikes would fall down from a tree and clobber you in the breadbox.
It wasn't all doom and gloom, however. For a dollar a bullet, you can fire off any old weapon you want. They have a collection of them beside the beer counter: machine guns, shotguns, AK-47s. After downing a quick brew, a few people from our tour decided to let fly. I didn't bother to enlist in our little army; I'd fired weapons before.
I wandered down to watch the action. It was interesting to see how many males thought they knew how rifles worked, and it was comical to see them all line up right where the ejected cartridge casing was going to hit them in the face. The Vietnamese guy holding the rifle told them to get out of the way. Then he told a young lady to come up and give it a shot.
The guide was careful. He didn't take his hands off the weapon until the girl had it pointing down the range. Then he stayed very, very, very close to her, making sure she didn't do something stupid like say, "Quick, take a picture," and point the thing at us.
She prepared to fire. She squinted. She tensed. She actually looked pretty cute. I don't know what it is about a woman in hot pants holding an assault rifle, but it isn't the worst thing you'll ever see.
She pulled the trigger.
Click.
The guide was indeed being careful. He'd forgotten to cock the thing for her. He pulled the slide back.
She tensed again. BANG.
A word about firearms. If you've never fired one, they're amazingly loud. The movies don't do them justice. I had a good laugh when I heard Spielberg going on about how real he wanted Saving Private Ryan to sound. If he had tried that, he would have deafened the entire audience within the first five seconds of the film.
Standing near a powerful assault rifle when it goes off is painfully loud. They're an ugly weapon, not built for pretty. When they go off, your ears ring and you wonder what hit you. You also wonder how the hell people fight a war when a hundred of those things are going off all around them.
When the young lady on our tour pulled that trigger, everyone winced and the women jumped a foot in the air. One of them screamed. As I said, weapons are loud. They also stink. One rifle will cover an entire group with the unmistakable stench of cordite.
A few people took a turn each. Bam, bam, bam, firing down the range. The change that came over them was evident: before coming down to the range from the beer counter, they'd been all smiles and laughs. Now they were plugging their ears and frowning. Others walked away without firing a shot. Seeing and hearing deadly things close up is not as fun as people think it is. It doesn't make you a braver, tougher person. It makes you a cautious person.
Thinking of that AK-47 firing a bullet into an American GI was an image that probably came up for a few of them. It isn't a nice image. The guide himself was all chuckles. While the people frowned and plugged their ears, he entertained himself by catching the ejected casings in mid-air as they came out of the rifle.
We made it to the tunnels after sampling some rice wine. I didn't bother to ask why there was a rice wine hut on the tour. At first I thought it was because the VC drank a lot of rice wine before going into battle, much like the Japanese had done during WWII. I was wrong. The reason there was a rice wine hut on the tour was because they were selling rice wine. Five bucks for a great big bottle. It tasted like gasoline, it burned your stomach, and it instantly made me want to shoot somebody. Powerful stuff.
The tunnels were our last stop. During the Vietnam War, there were miles and miles of them, some of them going more than thirty feet into the ground. Throughout the maze, there were living spaces, storage areas, hospitals, you name it. Americans who went into them would be greeted by booby traps, spiders, rats, and enemy soldiers waiting to stab you to death in the dark. I read once that some of the tunnel rats, as the American interloper was known, would go nuts from the stress of going down those holes.
I don't know if I could have done it. Who can know that, except for a diagnosed claustrophobic? All is know is, tunnels are very tiring to crawl through, they're hot, and they stink.
Our tourist tunnel had been smoothed out since the war. The guide told us they were quite safe. We were only going to go fifteen feet underground. The tunnel was about three feet high. It would be shoulder-width. There were no rats or snakes, but there might be spiders. That raised eyebrows.
Two people bailed out immediately. As we descended a set of dirt steps into the ground, two young ladies came walking back past me. One said, "No way." The other said, "Fuck that."
When I got the bottom of the steps, I was greeted by a trapdoor, minus the door. I dropped down into darkness. A small red light was set into the wall, but it didn't do anything for my vision. There was an immediate left turn in front of me. The guide had told us to expect a sharp turn after every trapdoor. They'd been built to muffle a grenade being dropped down the hole.
I was on my hands and knees, the ceiling of the tunnel brushing my back. The tunnel smelled of dirt and sweat. I felt my way along the wall and made the turn. I could hear my group up ahead, but I couldn't see them. Once in a while there was a flash of light as the guide turned his flashlight back towards us, and I could make out the silhouette of someone's butt up ahead of me.
The air got muggy. We went down at an angle. Someone in our group had the worst B.O. of all time, and it threatened to gag me once or twice. I could not imagine making this crawl knowing that there might be an enemy soldier up ahead with a bamboo spike in his hand, dying to drive it home.
Turn, turn, turn. And quite a few of them, too. Whoever had constructed these tunnels was not a fool. For a tourist like me, they were a simple pain in the ass. For an invader, every turn would be considered a deathtrap. There would be no way to know what was around every corner.
I bonked my head against the wall. I hadn't seen it coming. I felt around with my hands. No way out. Trapped. I reached up, and discovered there was a hole in the ceiling. I stood up, and bonked my head against the ceiling of the next level. Between AK-47s and tunnels, the tour should come with a free bottle of Excedrin.
I crawled through the hole. I could hear people up ahead. I heard the guide say, "It's okay." I knew he was at least ten people and two corners ahead of me, but he sounded five feet away. Noise in the tunnel carried far, and I suddenly regretted saying, "That guy stinks," a little while ago.
It brought up another thought of the American invader. There's no way they snuck up on their enemy in the tunnels. It must have been primal warfare. Wits, and knives, and fists, and the gun as a last resort, deafening you and alerting the entire tunnel system to your presence. And once you did that, how to escape? How do you run when you can't even walk?
We reached a bottle neck. My friend Matt was jammed up. His voice was shaking a bit in the dark. He said he was stuck, that he had to take his knapsack off his chest. Claustrophobia was closing in on him. Only later did he tell me that he'd done the tour to face his fear of tight places. Tight, dark places were another matter.
"You're all right," I said. "You've got plenty of room," I lied.
He pushed his way through. I crawled forward and heard him disappear around another corner. Then I felt what he'd been afraid of. I say felt, because I hadn't seen it. It was a good bottleneck, and it had me by the shoulders. My knees were hurting more, and my shirt was soaked through. Sweat was dripping off my face like a salt shower.
I pushed forward and slipped through. I shuddered to think of a fat person getting jammed in there, yelling for help, and not being able to see help coming.
Light.
I'd reached an exit, steep steps leading ten feet up to the surface. I saw two people climbing the steps, breathing hard, congratulating themselves. I yelled ahead into the darkness. I got a yell in response. So push on. If you're going to crawl through an old war tunnel, you might as well crawl through the whole thing.
More dirt, more heavy breathing, more sweat. The tunnel past the first exit was narrower. That first exit must have been for the people who felt the rest of the tunnel getting a bit too tight. These tunnels had been made to fight American soliders and scare the crap out of American tourists.
And the Vietnamese lived like this for years. Crawling around in the dark, dragging rifles and ammunition, food and water, perhaps wounded Marines. It was Iwo Jima flattened to pancake proportions, the tunnels spreading out around the country. They would lie in wait. And wait. And wait. And when the time came, up they'd come, out of the ground, looking to kill somebody in a green uniform.
They may never have won a pitched battle, but they certainly inflicted enough pain and misery upon their invaders. The Americans got their digs in too, but leaving Vietnam was probably a wise decision no matter how you felt about communism. People who dig tunnels underground and fight a smash-and-grab guerilla war are not going to surrender, it's just that simple. I only had to crawl through the tunnels; the willpower to dig them and make house must have been extraordinary.
The answer to the tunnels, of course, would have been to cut off their head. We can't go into all the reasons the Americans didn't nail North Vietnam to the wall, but the fact is, they didn't. Hence the tunnels lived on throughout the war and lasted to be the pain in the ass they were for the Americans.
And for me. I finally got out the other end after twenty-five more meters of darkness. A shaft of daylight looks blue when it's coming down into the tunnels. It is deceiving, too, because it looks closer than it is.
Finally up and out, fresh air tasting as good as a dry martini. I looked down into that black mouth, then looked at the faces of my group. They were all sweating, laughing, and taking pictures. They couldn't wait to get out of that hole. We drank Tiger beer and said that it had been interesting, hot, and stank like hell, and we were better off outside than inside.
That the Vietnamese couldn't wait to get back into that hole during the war speaks volumes. To them, that hole was home.
Monday, October 16, 2006
Talking Dirty
Swearing can be a hell of a lot of fun.
I was reading an article by Rick Riley the other day. He said we had a problem, that we "swear too goddamn much." Rick's right. We do swear too goddamn much. Sometimes it is called for, other times not. Asking your mom to pass the "fucking potatoes" is not cool. However, telling a man he's a "no good sonofabitch" after he sleeps with your girlfriend is completely reasonable. Swearing, like most things, needs to come in context.
My first memory of swearing comes in the seventh grade. I walked into Mrs. Foster's geography class and a friend told me that we had a quiz in five minutes. I wasn't a study bug back then, and I remember saying, "Oh, shit, I forgot." I looked up, and there was Mrs. Foster looking me dead in the eye. She had a grin on her face. Foster was one of those good and rare teachers: honest and fair. She gave me a ten minute detention, not necessarily because I'd cursed, but because I'd been dumb enough to do it in front of her.
My next fond memory comes from the father of a girlfriend, who told me that if it "floats, flies, or fucks, rent it." This turned out to be some of the soundest advice I have ever heard. I haven't always followed it, much to my chagrin. It didn't occur to me for a long time that a girlfriend's father probably shouldn't be telling me to frequent the local cathouse, but what the hell.
My dad swore a lot. He was handy with a "this asshole can't pitch" during the baseball game, and a "have you ever heard such shit in your life?" during the evening news. My mom didn't swear in front of me until I was well into my teens, and her swearing was of the type that can't be impeached: "Men always get in trouble because of sex. How can they be so fucking stupid?" You can't argue with that.
Next to the British (who break out the C-word with astonishing regularity) no one can touch North Americans for swearing. We'll swear at anything. No one is safe. If a guy cuts us off in the fast lane, we'll say whatever comes to mind, most of it starting with the letter 'F.' When I was a kid, I think about 12-years-old, I once walked across a guy's lawn. He was an old dude, maybe sixty, and he lived around the corner from our place. I was with my good friend Sandra. I said, "Hello." He said, "Get off my lawn, faggot." When you can call a kid a faggot, you know you're from a self-assured culture.
Swearing can make for defining moments. There's not a chance I would remember that old guy if he hadn't called me a nasty name. I wonder where he is now. I wonder if the old bastard's gone and fucked himself.
Another defining moment happened at a Mr. Submarine. I was in high school. Me and a friend ate a sandwich, and my friend talked to the guy behind the counter while we ate. As we left, the guy said good-bye, and my friend said, matter-of-factly, "Eat shit." I'll always love him for that. I pissed myself laughing the whole way home, and in fact, I am laughing right now.
Swearing can be trivial, or called for, or outright embarrassing. I was dating a South African girl once, and I went to visit her in Durban. They have a nasty name for every race under the sun in that country, but leave it to me to step over the line during dinner theater. There was a live band at this place where you bring your own food and eat on picnic tables. No waiters, you even had to get your own drinks at the bar. We're there with her mom, stepfather, aunt, uncle, sister that hated me as sisters do, more friends of the family, on and on, a regular clan affair. So the band is playing, and after an hour of them blaring out the tunes and me getting drunk, they strike up "Mony Mony."
I did not know that the Billy Idol cover hadn't made it to South Africa. So there we are, all dancing away, and during the little chorus part, I scream, "Hey motherfucker, get laid, get fucked." And a few of them look at me strangely, and I don't catch on, and my girlfriend is giving me an embarrassed grin which I interpret as a smile of, "Look how well my boyfriend's fitting in," and I go on to do the less well-known chorus of, "Hey motherfucker, she's fat but I'm drunk."
Not knowing the Billy Idol version, her entire family basically thought I made that stuff up on the spot and had decided to announce that I was drunk and willing to screw a fat girl.
That was a long night. Her stepfather told me later that he would never forget it and it was the best thing he'd seen in years.
Nobody beats Canadians and Americans for swearing. Let's face it, we're pricks and we love it. I knew a girl from Tennessee who got mad whenever we said "goddamn." She wasn't our friend for long.
Another time in South Africa I broke out the granddaddy of them all. Not the C-word you're thinking of, because it isn't a swear word at all, really. As far as I'm concerned, if it can't be used as a verb and a noun, it isn't a swear word. Shit is a good example. "You're a piece of shit," is right up the middle, and, "He was shitting me," gets right to the point.
No, cocksucker really has to take the cake. The imagery in that word leaves no doubt in anyone's mind what you really think. And, by switching the words around, you find the verb: you suck same.
So in South Africa I used it without thinking. Being from North America, sporting events involve a lot of good swearing, and I thought the rest of the world agreed. I was wrong. I've heard namby-pamby English guys say, "Well, this is good for football," when their lame soccer team gets beaten by some Third World country. And I've heard South Africans say that there has to be a sense of decorum in the stands.
Who knew? I hardly understood the rules of rugby, but even I could see that the ref blew the call. While the rest of the wimps in the stadium shook their heads and muttered, I jumped to my feet and told the ref, "You're a cocksucker." All right, perhaps I screamed it.
I don't think he heard me. But my ex-girlfriend's stepfather did. I think his words were, "disgrace" and "embarrassing." Behind me, I heard a guy say, "Bloody Americans."
That damn word cost me a bunch of money, too, because Norm was a season ticket holder and I stopped going to games with him. I knew he didn't want me around that seating area in case I got out of hand. But it was all right. I joined the guys in the nosebleeds and actually found some common ilk.
Swearing is our national pastime. It's not the best thing to be known for, but at least we're known for something. And let's face it, it does make us cooler than the rest. You can take chivalry, and politeness, and nicety any day. But when an Englishman tells you, "We send our warriors into battle. On the field, we're sportmen," you're suddenly proud of where you're from.
When a man with an accent who has never heard a shot fired in anger in his life hands you stuff like that, the first thought in your head, unfortunate or not, has got to be:
"Are you shitting me, cocksucker?"
I was reading an article by Rick Riley the other day. He said we had a problem, that we "swear too goddamn much." Rick's right. We do swear too goddamn much. Sometimes it is called for, other times not. Asking your mom to pass the "fucking potatoes" is not cool. However, telling a man he's a "no good sonofabitch" after he sleeps with your girlfriend is completely reasonable. Swearing, like most things, needs to come in context.
My first memory of swearing comes in the seventh grade. I walked into Mrs. Foster's geography class and a friend told me that we had a quiz in five minutes. I wasn't a study bug back then, and I remember saying, "Oh, shit, I forgot." I looked up, and there was Mrs. Foster looking me dead in the eye. She had a grin on her face. Foster was one of those good and rare teachers: honest and fair. She gave me a ten minute detention, not necessarily because I'd cursed, but because I'd been dumb enough to do it in front of her.
My next fond memory comes from the father of a girlfriend, who told me that if it "floats, flies, or fucks, rent it." This turned out to be some of the soundest advice I have ever heard. I haven't always followed it, much to my chagrin. It didn't occur to me for a long time that a girlfriend's father probably shouldn't be telling me to frequent the local cathouse, but what the hell.
My dad swore a lot. He was handy with a "this asshole can't pitch" during the baseball game, and a "have you ever heard such shit in your life?" during the evening news. My mom didn't swear in front of me until I was well into my teens, and her swearing was of the type that can't be impeached: "Men always get in trouble because of sex. How can they be so fucking stupid?" You can't argue with that.
Next to the British (who break out the C-word with astonishing regularity) no one can touch North Americans for swearing. We'll swear at anything. No one is safe. If a guy cuts us off in the fast lane, we'll say whatever comes to mind, most of it starting with the letter 'F.' When I was a kid, I think about 12-years-old, I once walked across a guy's lawn. He was an old dude, maybe sixty, and he lived around the corner from our place. I was with my good friend Sandra. I said, "Hello." He said, "Get off my lawn, faggot." When you can call a kid a faggot, you know you're from a self-assured culture.
Swearing can make for defining moments. There's not a chance I would remember that old guy if he hadn't called me a nasty name. I wonder where he is now. I wonder if the old bastard's gone and fucked himself.
Another defining moment happened at a Mr. Submarine. I was in high school. Me and a friend ate a sandwich, and my friend talked to the guy behind the counter while we ate. As we left, the guy said good-bye, and my friend said, matter-of-factly, "Eat shit." I'll always love him for that. I pissed myself laughing the whole way home, and in fact, I am laughing right now.
Swearing can be trivial, or called for, or outright embarrassing. I was dating a South African girl once, and I went to visit her in Durban. They have a nasty name for every race under the sun in that country, but leave it to me to step over the line during dinner theater. There was a live band at this place where you bring your own food and eat on picnic tables. No waiters, you even had to get your own drinks at the bar. We're there with her mom, stepfather, aunt, uncle, sister that hated me as sisters do, more friends of the family, on and on, a regular clan affair. So the band is playing, and after an hour of them blaring out the tunes and me getting drunk, they strike up "Mony Mony."
I did not know that the Billy Idol cover hadn't made it to South Africa. So there we are, all dancing away, and during the little chorus part, I scream, "Hey motherfucker, get laid, get fucked." And a few of them look at me strangely, and I don't catch on, and my girlfriend is giving me an embarrassed grin which I interpret as a smile of, "Look how well my boyfriend's fitting in," and I go on to do the less well-known chorus of, "Hey motherfucker, she's fat but I'm drunk."
Not knowing the Billy Idol version, her entire family basically thought I made that stuff up on the spot and had decided to announce that I was drunk and willing to screw a fat girl.
That was a long night. Her stepfather told me later that he would never forget it and it was the best thing he'd seen in years.
Nobody beats Canadians and Americans for swearing. Let's face it, we're pricks and we love it. I knew a girl from Tennessee who got mad whenever we said "goddamn." She wasn't our friend for long.
Another time in South Africa I broke out the granddaddy of them all. Not the C-word you're thinking of, because it isn't a swear word at all, really. As far as I'm concerned, if it can't be used as a verb and a noun, it isn't a swear word. Shit is a good example. "You're a piece of shit," is right up the middle, and, "He was shitting me," gets right to the point.
No, cocksucker really has to take the cake. The imagery in that word leaves no doubt in anyone's mind what you really think. And, by switching the words around, you find the verb: you suck same.
So in South Africa I used it without thinking. Being from North America, sporting events involve a lot of good swearing, and I thought the rest of the world agreed. I was wrong. I've heard namby-pamby English guys say, "Well, this is good for football," when their lame soccer team gets beaten by some Third World country. And I've heard South Africans say that there has to be a sense of decorum in the stands.
Who knew? I hardly understood the rules of rugby, but even I could see that the ref blew the call. While the rest of the wimps in the stadium shook their heads and muttered, I jumped to my feet and told the ref, "You're a cocksucker." All right, perhaps I screamed it.
I don't think he heard me. But my ex-girlfriend's stepfather did. I think his words were, "disgrace" and "embarrassing." Behind me, I heard a guy say, "Bloody Americans."
That damn word cost me a bunch of money, too, because Norm was a season ticket holder and I stopped going to games with him. I knew he didn't want me around that seating area in case I got out of hand. But it was all right. I joined the guys in the nosebleeds and actually found some common ilk.
Swearing is our national pastime. It's not the best thing to be known for, but at least we're known for something. And let's face it, it does make us cooler than the rest. You can take chivalry, and politeness, and nicety any day. But when an Englishman tells you, "We send our warriors into battle. On the field, we're sportmen," you're suddenly proud of where you're from.
When a man with an accent who has never heard a shot fired in anger in his life hands you stuff like that, the first thought in your head, unfortunate or not, has got to be:
"Are you shitting me, cocksucker?"
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Tianjin by Taxi
How well do you know the person you're sleeping with? How well do you know your friends? I'll bet I know a lot about my friends, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that I know everything. Sooner or later, that friend might surprise me. Once in a while, people you thought you knew like the back of your hand will blow you away with a dark secret. Maybe we'll end up like the neighbour on TV: "Ted? Well, he was really a nice guy. Very friendly. I don't know why he cut off their heads and put them in the freezer."
I ask these questions only because the news out of North Korea has got me thinking. Not about nuclear weapons. When North Korea tested that kinda-sorta-maybe-working bomb last week, the media and the world's capitals responded with, you guessed it, condemnation and outrage. My immediate reaction was, "Who cares?" They were going to build one eventually, and there wasn't a chance that someone was going to use force to stop them. North Korea was more or less getting on with the show.
My concern with the news out of North Korea is that we are taking North Korea seriously at all. Not the nuke part. That's serious business. I don't want Tokyo to glow in the dark, and I would rather Seoul not evaporate in a cloud of dust. But why are we listening to anything Kim Jong Il has to say about any subject whatsoever?
Let me go off on a tangent here. I think it ties in. I went touring in Tianjin, China the other day. I thought I knew all about China, and I'm willing to guess that you do, too. Our shoes are made in China. Our coffee cups are made in China. The Chinese have a lot of people, and they have a really big economy. And...what else?
In Tianjin you find a lot of things, or at least you try to, if you can work your way through the smog. China is the smoggiest place I have ever seen. They burn coal like mad, and a drive from Tianjin on the coast, to Beijing a hundred miles distant, is hell on a still day.
Los Angeles is nothing compared to Tianjin. In fact, it is laughable to see LA movie stars buying hybrid automobiles in order to 'do their part.' In Tianjin, the regular folk ride a lot of bicycles (not to do their part, but because Communism has made them dirt poor, something else the movie star might care to think about) than cars, and still the air is a deadly cocktail. When the visibility is literally a few hundred yards, sightseeing trips seem pretty pointless.
Tianjin is a very good example of Coyote's Law #1: if you want to know how well a country is doing, take a taxi ride or visit a construction site.
That easy. If you really want to know a people, nevermind the museums and the art galleries. They're boring and, being museums, they're full of old stuff that hasn't been relevant in at least a hundred years. Don't bother visiting the monuments, either. Sure, they're big and worth a visit if you have the time, but they're not nearly as good as a cab at exposing culture. In Tianjin, I went to the Great Wall of China to look at the Great Wall, not the China. I almost didn't get to see either, because of the smog.
Taxi drivers will show you how corrupt a country is. First clue: get in a taxi and notice that the meter is broken, or has never been used. Second clue: ask the driver how much a trip is going to cost. Then haggle with him. Third clue: when being dropped off, try not to punch your friend in the jaw when he laughs and says he got the same ride for five bucks less.
Construction crews tell you if the place gives a damn about its own people. First clue: the guys on the makeshift scaffolding are not wearing boots or hardhats. Second clue: the guy with the jackhammer rattling in his hands and asphalt flying past his face is not wearing goggles (though if he has a jackhammer, the country might be 'developing.' Some places still use pick and shovel to tear up the road. In barefeet). Third clue: though they're only being built, the buildings already look old and you know that it will take ten years to finish the project. In Tianjin, you run out of fingers pretty quickly when trying to count the number of unfinished buildings that have been left to fall down.
Anyway, by following Coyote's Law #1, I can report to you that China is pretty much flunking the test of prosperity. If so many American jobs are being done in China, it must be news to most of the Chinese. All I see beyond the smog is begging, rubble, and the economic rot of Communism at its best.
Modern China started out with Mao and the usual pitch of a worker's paradise. Lenin, Marx, Mao, Castro, the rest, they all sold people a bill of goods that said men were equal. Just as it easier to destroy than to create, their respective countries all sank into the abyss that comes from bringing people down to the lowest level.
Mao perfected this, though it would be hard to find anyone in the West who is even aware of the fact.
Traveling through Tianjin, I wondered how much people really know about China. I don't mean what they know in knee jerk fashion. What I'm talking about is real knowledge. Knowledge that you can only see with your own two eyes. We take it for granted that when various countries come to the table at the UN, they're like us. Why we take it for granted is, of course, the media. But the only way you are going to see the inside of a country is if they run a story that will somehow make us feel bad. There's two reasons for that.
One, the media pretty much hate themselves, and us, for being who we are and having what we have. Two, hating ourselves sells newspapers. Honestly, besides a documentary on cheetahs or a commercial featuring starving children with 1-800 numbers written beneath their faces, how much to you really know about Africa?
Same goes for China. I will bet you that people do not know that the majority of live bands in Chinese bars are made up of Filipino expats. Or that Budweiser beer is served ice cold. Or that the average price for a knick knack is, "One dallah!" Or that every bar plays American music, and many of them have posters of Elvis Presley on the wall. Or that the Chinese are just plain poor, poor, poor. CNN, Fox, Bloomberg, none of them have my respect anymore when they talk about 'the Chinese answer' to North Korea, because they are not talking about China at all. I even heard one commentator on Fox congratulate China for "...what the Chinese people have done."
There are no Chinese "people," not in the political sense. There is a small group of rich guys headed by a dictator, and then there are the construction workers wearing sandals.
When our Tianjin taxi got lost on the way to a club one night, the driver took us up a dark alley and stopped in front of a glass door. We were pretty sure we were going to get mugged. Turns out, he just wanted to visit his friend because she spoke some English and would help him with directions. We got out of the car, and instantly a frail woman with a bundle in her hands asked us for money. The bundle was a baby (this is the problem with traveling and wanting to see people; sometimes you see them, and it can rip you apart). The driver motioned us inside. On the floor of the shop were knock-off Louis Vuitton bags. On the walls were pirated season series of Lost, 24, and Law & Order. An entire season for only fifteen bucks, the lady said.
The Chinese might be a threat to the US economy, and they might seem like a bigshot when it comes to yelling at North Korea, but it sure doesn't look like it to me. Coyote's Law #2 kicks into effect here: when the apartment buildings have air conditioning units hanging out of every window, you know the place is in trouble. In China, the units are there, and they rust, leaving brown streaks down the walls. I was reminded of St. Petersburg in thinking that communist buildings just need a bath in order to get some dignity back.
Mao would roll over in his dungarees if he saw the China of today. They are losing the culture war in a hurry, if they haven't lost it already. When a state security guard stands overlooking the dance floor as the men swill beer and the girls gyrate to Metallica, something's up. Because the kicker is, all of the men are Westerners just in town on leave from a ship, an oil rig, a cruise liner, a mining expedition. They can afford the drinks. Meanwhile, the women are - surprise! - hookers. They're Chinese, and they're looking for money. Not being idiots, they go to the watering holes to find it. I doubt Mao thought his security force would end up guarding a pick-up bar for Americans.
China will not save us from the North Korea problem. They're too busy trying to sell the idea of a booming China to foreign investors that don't know enough to open their eyes and look around. Russia? Same thing. Don't believe me? Go check it out. I did.
After getting a taste of China up close and personal, I flicked on the TV news and watched as they quoted Kim Jong Il, and told us his demands, and paraded the experts through the studio to tell us what old Kim wants, and what the Six Party Talks will have to do, and blah, blah, blah.
We are listening to Kim Jong Il as if he is on the same level as us. He isn't. He starves his own people. He won't let them use something as evil as the Internet. If you are born in North Korea, the chances of you ever seeing the Eiffel Tower in person are exactly zero. Your life is worthless. The man is a tyrant and a scumbag. This we know.
When are we going to do something about it? Probably never. But at least let's stop deluding ourselves over and over again. Historians love to poke fun at poor Neville "Peace in Our Time" Chamberlain. He bought Hitler's line, and was run around so badly in the diplomatic talks that he might as well have been a dog.
Meet Kim Jong Il. Start barking.
I ask these questions only because the news out of North Korea has got me thinking. Not about nuclear weapons. When North Korea tested that kinda-sorta-maybe-working bomb last week, the media and the world's capitals responded with, you guessed it, condemnation and outrage. My immediate reaction was, "Who cares?" They were going to build one eventually, and there wasn't a chance that someone was going to use force to stop them. North Korea was more or less getting on with the show.
My concern with the news out of North Korea is that we are taking North Korea seriously at all. Not the nuke part. That's serious business. I don't want Tokyo to glow in the dark, and I would rather Seoul not evaporate in a cloud of dust. But why are we listening to anything Kim Jong Il has to say about any subject whatsoever?
Let me go off on a tangent here. I think it ties in. I went touring in Tianjin, China the other day. I thought I knew all about China, and I'm willing to guess that you do, too. Our shoes are made in China. Our coffee cups are made in China. The Chinese have a lot of people, and they have a really big economy. And...what else?
In Tianjin you find a lot of things, or at least you try to, if you can work your way through the smog. China is the smoggiest place I have ever seen. They burn coal like mad, and a drive from Tianjin on the coast, to Beijing a hundred miles distant, is hell on a still day.
Los Angeles is nothing compared to Tianjin. In fact, it is laughable to see LA movie stars buying hybrid automobiles in order to 'do their part.' In Tianjin, the regular folk ride a lot of bicycles (not to do their part, but because Communism has made them dirt poor, something else the movie star might care to think about) than cars, and still the air is a deadly cocktail. When the visibility is literally a few hundred yards, sightseeing trips seem pretty pointless.
Tianjin is a very good example of Coyote's Law #1: if you want to know how well a country is doing, take a taxi ride or visit a construction site.
That easy. If you really want to know a people, nevermind the museums and the art galleries. They're boring and, being museums, they're full of old stuff that hasn't been relevant in at least a hundred years. Don't bother visiting the monuments, either. Sure, they're big and worth a visit if you have the time, but they're not nearly as good as a cab at exposing culture. In Tianjin, I went to the Great Wall of China to look at the Great Wall, not the China. I almost didn't get to see either, because of the smog.
Taxi drivers will show you how corrupt a country is. First clue: get in a taxi and notice that the meter is broken, or has never been used. Second clue: ask the driver how much a trip is going to cost. Then haggle with him. Third clue: when being dropped off, try not to punch your friend in the jaw when he laughs and says he got the same ride for five bucks less.
Construction crews tell you if the place gives a damn about its own people. First clue: the guys on the makeshift scaffolding are not wearing boots or hardhats. Second clue: the guy with the jackhammer rattling in his hands and asphalt flying past his face is not wearing goggles (though if he has a jackhammer, the country might be 'developing.' Some places still use pick and shovel to tear up the road. In barefeet). Third clue: though they're only being built, the buildings already look old and you know that it will take ten years to finish the project. In Tianjin, you run out of fingers pretty quickly when trying to count the number of unfinished buildings that have been left to fall down.
Anyway, by following Coyote's Law #1, I can report to you that China is pretty much flunking the test of prosperity. If so many American jobs are being done in China, it must be news to most of the Chinese. All I see beyond the smog is begging, rubble, and the economic rot of Communism at its best.
Modern China started out with Mao and the usual pitch of a worker's paradise. Lenin, Marx, Mao, Castro, the rest, they all sold people a bill of goods that said men were equal. Just as it easier to destroy than to create, their respective countries all sank into the abyss that comes from bringing people down to the lowest level.
Mao perfected this, though it would be hard to find anyone in the West who is even aware of the fact.
Traveling through Tianjin, I wondered how much people really know about China. I don't mean what they know in knee jerk fashion. What I'm talking about is real knowledge. Knowledge that you can only see with your own two eyes. We take it for granted that when various countries come to the table at the UN, they're like us. Why we take it for granted is, of course, the media. But the only way you are going to see the inside of a country is if they run a story that will somehow make us feel bad. There's two reasons for that.
One, the media pretty much hate themselves, and us, for being who we are and having what we have. Two, hating ourselves sells newspapers. Honestly, besides a documentary on cheetahs or a commercial featuring starving children with 1-800 numbers written beneath their faces, how much to you really know about Africa?
Same goes for China. I will bet you that people do not know that the majority of live bands in Chinese bars are made up of Filipino expats. Or that Budweiser beer is served ice cold. Or that the average price for a knick knack is, "One dallah!" Or that every bar plays American music, and many of them have posters of Elvis Presley on the wall. Or that the Chinese are just plain poor, poor, poor. CNN, Fox, Bloomberg, none of them have my respect anymore when they talk about 'the Chinese answer' to North Korea, because they are not talking about China at all. I even heard one commentator on Fox congratulate China for "...what the Chinese people have done."
There are no Chinese "people," not in the political sense. There is a small group of rich guys headed by a dictator, and then there are the construction workers wearing sandals.
When our Tianjin taxi got lost on the way to a club one night, the driver took us up a dark alley and stopped in front of a glass door. We were pretty sure we were going to get mugged. Turns out, he just wanted to visit his friend because she spoke some English and would help him with directions. We got out of the car, and instantly a frail woman with a bundle in her hands asked us for money. The bundle was a baby (this is the problem with traveling and wanting to see people; sometimes you see them, and it can rip you apart). The driver motioned us inside. On the floor of the shop were knock-off Louis Vuitton bags. On the walls were pirated season series of Lost, 24, and Law & Order. An entire season for only fifteen bucks, the lady said.
The Chinese might be a threat to the US economy, and they might seem like a bigshot when it comes to yelling at North Korea, but it sure doesn't look like it to me. Coyote's Law #2 kicks into effect here: when the apartment buildings have air conditioning units hanging out of every window, you know the place is in trouble. In China, the units are there, and they rust, leaving brown streaks down the walls. I was reminded of St. Petersburg in thinking that communist buildings just need a bath in order to get some dignity back.
Mao would roll over in his dungarees if he saw the China of today. They are losing the culture war in a hurry, if they haven't lost it already. When a state security guard stands overlooking the dance floor as the men swill beer and the girls gyrate to Metallica, something's up. Because the kicker is, all of the men are Westerners just in town on leave from a ship, an oil rig, a cruise liner, a mining expedition. They can afford the drinks. Meanwhile, the women are - surprise! - hookers. They're Chinese, and they're looking for money. Not being idiots, they go to the watering holes to find it. I doubt Mao thought his security force would end up guarding a pick-up bar for Americans.
China will not save us from the North Korea problem. They're too busy trying to sell the idea of a booming China to foreign investors that don't know enough to open their eyes and look around. Russia? Same thing. Don't believe me? Go check it out. I did.
After getting a taste of China up close and personal, I flicked on the TV news and watched as they quoted Kim Jong Il, and told us his demands, and paraded the experts through the studio to tell us what old Kim wants, and what the Six Party Talks will have to do, and blah, blah, blah.
We are listening to Kim Jong Il as if he is on the same level as us. He isn't. He starves his own people. He won't let them use something as evil as the Internet. If you are born in North Korea, the chances of you ever seeing the Eiffel Tower in person are exactly zero. Your life is worthless. The man is a tyrant and a scumbag. This we know.
When are we going to do something about it? Probably never. But at least let's stop deluding ourselves over and over again. Historians love to poke fun at poor Neville "Peace in Our Time" Chamberlain. He bought Hitler's line, and was run around so badly in the diplomatic talks that he might as well have been a dog.
Meet Kim Jong Il. Start barking.
Sunday, October 08, 2006
Hiroshima
Visiting Hiroshima today is a sobering experience on three different levels. One, you get chills thinking that 61 years ago, a bomb named Little Boy exploded 500 meters above the spot where you're now standing, obliterating the city and killing about 80, 000 people. Roughly 60, 000 more would follow, succumbing to their injuries and dying of radiation poisoning. Estimating the dead is a tricky business, but it doesn't matter: one look at a photograph taken a few days after the Little Boy airburst says more than any numbers could. A building's skeleton here, a building's skeleton there, and the rest....just gone.
Two, the Japanese don't sweep their history under the carpet. The Atomic Bomb Dome stands high, and the Peace Memorial stretches for hundreds of yards along a river. There are Peace Bells, Peace Clocks, eternal flames, and plaques of every size and description, etched in Japanese with the English translation printed directly beneath. It is surprising how soon the monuments went up, one of them being dated in 1951. New York City had better stop arguing and get to monumenting. Hiroshima was wiped out like no city had been wiped out before, and yet they managed to come to grips with it and put up a memorial to their dead in relatively no time at all.
The third and perhaps most sobering thing about visiting Hiroshima is how absolutely naive and foolish the people are who visit it. I'm not talking about the Japanese. If you want an exercise in how to face your own past and perhaps a few inner demons, I invite you to visit the children's memorial. It's about three hundred yards away from ground zero. It stands thirty feet high. It is fairly nondescript: a cone of concrete, a couple of statues at the top, one of them a woman with arms spread, vaguely reminiscent of the cross. In the center of the cone, a bell. People are invited to ring the bell, and say a prayer for the children who were killed in the bombing, as well as pray that children will be safe from such acts again.
While the tourists gawk and the cameras click, the Japanese say their prayers. They handle the tourists with the panache of an old Hollywood star: they ignore them completely. There's nothing particularly solemn here. The Japanese don't rope the area off, give the evil eye to a tourist that chews gum, or tell anyone to keep quiet.
I watched as an old man approached the bell. He had two children with him, a boy and a girl, both under the age of five. The man who designed the children's monument must have had a sense of humor, because the rope for the bell ends four feet above the ground, well out of the reach of small kids. The old man dutifully picked the little boy up, and the boy rang the bell. He put the boy down and they said a five second prayer. Or rather, the old man did; the kid seemed to be complaining that he wanted to ring the bell again because he's a kid, and ringing a bell is fun, if you'll recall.
Next, the little girl. Heartbreak time for everyone watching. It's a touching sight, seeing a very old Asian man stoop over at the waist, pick up a beautiful little girl, and hold her against his chest. He turned her around to face the ropes, her tiny blue dress riding up and showing off her diapers. The girl reached out her little arms and grabbed the ropes. The old man said something in her ear. The little girl grasped the ropes tightly. The old man rocked his body back and forth, helping her. There was a solemn gong. The kid loved it. Smiled, laughed. The old man put her down. No, no, no, and back up again, the old man holding her out to the ropes and gong, one more time. Then they stood side by side and the man prayed for a few moments. The little girl looked up at him and clapped her hands together beneath her chin, mimicking him. Then they walked away.
The dignity in that act was astounding, and it was repeated over and over throughout the morning, men and women hauling boys and girls up to face the ropes and ring the bell. The dignity lay not in their faces or their prayers, but in their very concept of the site. If this had been Canada, the US, Egypt, or any other country besides Japan, there would have been velvet ropes, and a guide to keep order, and sanctimonious worshipers whose only purpose for being there was to be there: to be seen worshiping, and to revel in that worship. The Japanese don't mind the cameras, the tourists, and the noise that comes with them because those things just don't matter. They are irrelevant.
For the Japanese, this worshiping of the dead and the past does not seem to have the rest of the world's affectation of 'look at us mourn, look at us pray.' The memorials in Hiroshima are not a Wailing Wall, a Mecca, or a tomb of an unknown soldier. Not much happens here beyond prayer. Nobody's protesting anything. It is, to those of us used to watching violence mixed with remembrance on the TV news, boring.
It took me a while to figure out why the Japanese are better at remembrance than we are. It didn't take long. Listening to the Westerners around me, I learned that most of us are pretty dimwitted when it comes to matters of history and death.
There was the woman who told her friend that they bombed Hiroshima because the Enola Gay was flying around and it was a clear day over the city. Not too much planning went into it. There was the man who said that if more people came to a place like this, there would be peace on Earth. There was the European who told his American friend "This is all your fault, you know." There was the American man who said, "Isn't it amazing how forgiving the Japanese are?"
No, not really. I don't think the Japanese even look at it as a matter of forgiveness. The very fact that they have so many monuments here tells you that they teach to truth in school: Pearl Harbor was a bad idea. Perhaps when they pray to the dead, they ask forgiveness for themselves.
And they look at WWII for what it is: history. They've erected their monuments, and they pray for their dead, but I get the impression from the way they pray that they know two things: they got themselves into a conflict a long time ago, and it was an act which led to massive death and destruction on the homefront. The second thing I know is that they harbor no grudge, they want no re-match of any kind, and never have. They live with their history, they hold their children up to ring its bells. They don't hide from it, and they don't use it as pretext for hate.
It is refreshing to see a people that can get on with their lives. It is alarming to see us visiting their monuments and blaming our own peoples for acts which the Japanese no longer look at as political. Someday, maybe, we will let ourselves off the hook for being right once in a while, and for doing the right thing. The Japanese today are a beautiful, gracious people, but the atomic bomb wasn't dropped on them. It was dropped on people that cut off the heads of innocent civilians and downed pilots, that used brutal slave labor, that bayoneted POWs in the stomach for the dishonor of surrendering, that made the Bataan Death March three of the most vile words in the language.
"This was a tragedy," a man said to me as I was ready to leave the memorial.
"No, it wasn't," I said. "It was a victory."
And it's in the past.
Two, the Japanese don't sweep their history under the carpet. The Atomic Bomb Dome stands high, and the Peace Memorial stretches for hundreds of yards along a river. There are Peace Bells, Peace Clocks, eternal flames, and plaques of every size and description, etched in Japanese with the English translation printed directly beneath. It is surprising how soon the monuments went up, one of them being dated in 1951. New York City had better stop arguing and get to monumenting. Hiroshima was wiped out like no city had been wiped out before, and yet they managed to come to grips with it and put up a memorial to their dead in relatively no time at all.
The third and perhaps most sobering thing about visiting Hiroshima is how absolutely naive and foolish the people are who visit it. I'm not talking about the Japanese. If you want an exercise in how to face your own past and perhaps a few inner demons, I invite you to visit the children's memorial. It's about three hundred yards away from ground zero. It stands thirty feet high. It is fairly nondescript: a cone of concrete, a couple of statues at the top, one of them a woman with arms spread, vaguely reminiscent of the cross. In the center of the cone, a bell. People are invited to ring the bell, and say a prayer for the children who were killed in the bombing, as well as pray that children will be safe from such acts again.
While the tourists gawk and the cameras click, the Japanese say their prayers. They handle the tourists with the panache of an old Hollywood star: they ignore them completely. There's nothing particularly solemn here. The Japanese don't rope the area off, give the evil eye to a tourist that chews gum, or tell anyone to keep quiet.
I watched as an old man approached the bell. He had two children with him, a boy and a girl, both under the age of five. The man who designed the children's monument must have had a sense of humor, because the rope for the bell ends four feet above the ground, well out of the reach of small kids. The old man dutifully picked the little boy up, and the boy rang the bell. He put the boy down and they said a five second prayer. Or rather, the old man did; the kid seemed to be complaining that he wanted to ring the bell again because he's a kid, and ringing a bell is fun, if you'll recall.
Next, the little girl. Heartbreak time for everyone watching. It's a touching sight, seeing a very old Asian man stoop over at the waist, pick up a beautiful little girl, and hold her against his chest. He turned her around to face the ropes, her tiny blue dress riding up and showing off her diapers. The girl reached out her little arms and grabbed the ropes. The old man said something in her ear. The little girl grasped the ropes tightly. The old man rocked his body back and forth, helping her. There was a solemn gong. The kid loved it. Smiled, laughed. The old man put her down. No, no, no, and back up again, the old man holding her out to the ropes and gong, one more time. Then they stood side by side and the man prayed for a few moments. The little girl looked up at him and clapped her hands together beneath her chin, mimicking him. Then they walked away.
The dignity in that act was astounding, and it was repeated over and over throughout the morning, men and women hauling boys and girls up to face the ropes and ring the bell. The dignity lay not in their faces or their prayers, but in their very concept of the site. If this had been Canada, the US, Egypt, or any other country besides Japan, there would have been velvet ropes, and a guide to keep order, and sanctimonious worshipers whose only purpose for being there was to be there: to be seen worshiping, and to revel in that worship. The Japanese don't mind the cameras, the tourists, and the noise that comes with them because those things just don't matter. They are irrelevant.
For the Japanese, this worshiping of the dead and the past does not seem to have the rest of the world's affectation of 'look at us mourn, look at us pray.' The memorials in Hiroshima are not a Wailing Wall, a Mecca, or a tomb of an unknown soldier. Not much happens here beyond prayer. Nobody's protesting anything. It is, to those of us used to watching violence mixed with remembrance on the TV news, boring.
It took me a while to figure out why the Japanese are better at remembrance than we are. It didn't take long. Listening to the Westerners around me, I learned that most of us are pretty dimwitted when it comes to matters of history and death.
There was the woman who told her friend that they bombed Hiroshima because the Enola Gay was flying around and it was a clear day over the city. Not too much planning went into it. There was the man who said that if more people came to a place like this, there would be peace on Earth. There was the European who told his American friend "This is all your fault, you know." There was the American man who said, "Isn't it amazing how forgiving the Japanese are?"
No, not really. I don't think the Japanese even look at it as a matter of forgiveness. The very fact that they have so many monuments here tells you that they teach to truth in school: Pearl Harbor was a bad idea. Perhaps when they pray to the dead, they ask forgiveness for themselves.
And they look at WWII for what it is: history. They've erected their monuments, and they pray for their dead, but I get the impression from the way they pray that they know two things: they got themselves into a conflict a long time ago, and it was an act which led to massive death and destruction on the homefront. The second thing I know is that they harbor no grudge, they want no re-match of any kind, and never have. They live with their history, they hold their children up to ring its bells. They don't hide from it, and they don't use it as pretext for hate.
It is refreshing to see a people that can get on with their lives. It is alarming to see us visiting their monuments and blaming our own peoples for acts which the Japanese no longer look at as political. Someday, maybe, we will let ourselves off the hook for being right once in a while, and for doing the right thing. The Japanese today are a beautiful, gracious people, but the atomic bomb wasn't dropped on them. It was dropped on people that cut off the heads of innocent civilians and downed pilots, that used brutal slave labor, that bayoneted POWs in the stomach for the dishonor of surrendering, that made the Bataan Death March three of the most vile words in the language.
"This was a tragedy," a man said to me as I was ready to leave the memorial.
"No, it wasn't," I said. "It was a victory."
And it's in the past.
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Flyboys - Review
Director: Tony BillWriters: Phil Sears/Blake Evans/D. Ward
Starring: James Franco/Jean Reno
Runtime: 140 minutes
A friend of mine said something interesting at the movies the other day: we've reached the age where a movie can be good simply because it's a "time waster."
He has a point. If you've seen enough movies, read enough scripts, and even dabbled in the making of a few films, you pretty much know what is coming down the pike as soon as the previews are over and the lion roars.
Take Flyboys. Utterly predictable, at times embarrassingly cliche, and yet...an okay time waster. A movie where you can pick and choose the good moments, and instantly forget the bad ones, then convince yourself that the movie was "all right."
Flyboys is about America's first fighter pilots. It takes place during WWI, prior to US involvement. It follows the trail of a half-dozen or so American boys who join the Lafayette Escadrille and fly bi-planes for the French. It's an interesting premise, one that could have made an excellent film. Instead, as with most things Hollywood these days, we get a pretty shameless retread of everything that has come before.
See if you can recognize these:
1) The broke rebel who joins up because he has nowhere else to go and because his family are all dead.
2) The cocky guy who freaks out and loses his nerve....but gets it back just in time.
3) The black man who is slighted in a bar, punches the guy out, then proves himself in the air.
4) The pudgy dude that has something to prove to his father, because his father thinks he's a wimp. In a time-saving move, this guy is also the southern racist who overcomes his bigotry so he can respect the guy in #3.
5) The veteran warrior. His friends are all dead, and he is staying in the war to kill his arch enemy: a German bad guy who flies a black plane and has no honor.
Most of the above takes place in the first fifteen minutes of the film. Following the screenwriter handbook, Messers. Sears, Evans, and Ward check their courage at the door and make sure they introduce all of the main characters as fast as they can. That done, they move onto the 'training montage,' where we watch the boys learn to fly in about five minutes. Then we meet the love interest.
And here's where you're slapping your head. Because James Franco as the rebel Rawlings is not a bad actor, and Jennifer Decker as Lucienne the French Maiden is absolutely superb. George Roy Hill once said that to make a great movie, all you have to do is cast it perfectly, and make the screenplay as good as it can be. After that, the movie films itself.
The scenes with Franco and Decker and very good. Sure, another cliche smacks you in the face as Lucienne is afraid to fall for Rawlings because he's going to die in the war. But after that, their relationship is pretty poignant. Director Tony Bill has the guts to let the actors act: Lucienne can't speak English, Rawlings can't speak French, and the director keeps it like that. And it's not hackneyed, parlez-vous giggle acting, either. It is so good compared to the rest of the dialogue and acting in the film that Bill either let them improvise, or one of the three writers was brought in specifically to write those scenes. (It's an old movie axiom that if you see two writers in the credits, get nervous; if you see three, leave the theater, because something was fundamentally wrong with the story and they started platooning writers to try and save it).The scenes with Lucienne and Rawlings made me wish they had called the movie Flyboy, singular, and simply followed the story of this young pilot and this interesting girl. Similarly, Jean Reno turns in some good work (when doesn't he?) as the straight-laced commander of the unit. It would have been interesting to see more of him in the film, rather than watch him push the plot along.
But it's a 21st century action movie, where you can't go deep. I dig that, and by now, I've learned to accept it. And the action scenes are fairly good. I wouldn't be surprised if Tony Bill admitted that he'd heard the story of how George Lucas, short of time and cash, had used old war footage in the rough cut of Star Wars, just so he could show the pace of the film. The footage might have looked a lot like Bill's: fast, loose, close-ups of bad guys and good guys gritting their teeth, a giant Zeppelin as a Death Star, a black airplane for the Germanic Darth Vader.
Many of the explosions and special effects are a bit lame. Maybe the budget was tight. Don't expect Black Hawk Down's booms and plumes. The airplanes are mostly digital, which is a sad state of affairs in movies these days. No matter how good the computers get, it is very, very hard to fool the human eye, so you feel a bit silly watching movies like Flyboys because you might as well be watching a flight simulator video game. Still, the work is passable, and the actors do a good job of being scared (the bad guy's on my tail), angry (I can't believe he shot down my friend), morose (what's this all for, anyway?), sad (I can't believe he shot down my other friend), vengeful (I'm going to kill him for shooting down my friends).
Leaving the theater, I went with my friend's take: an okay time waster. It gave me a chance to look forward to Jennifer Decker's next film, because I think she's got something, and it gave me a new appreciation of James Franco, whom I believe can separate himself from the other young, good-looking types once he gets some more seasoning.
And no, I'm not a heartless movie snob: it gave me an appreciation for the men who fought and died before their country even asked them to go. It wouldn't matter if you made a soap opera about them, because it wouldn't change a thing. They gave all, and they deserve the glory.
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