VOLUME 12: SEPTEMBER 2004

12.8: WHO WANTS A DEMOCRATIC IRAQ ANYWAY 92.26.2004

Last week, in an egregious and obvious (well, not to those cipher Republican faithful) political attempt to buttress his campaign Bush invited Iyad Allawi, the Ahmed Chalabi substitute, to come a read some lines for the American media. Allawi is the latest Thug/Puppet for American interests in Iraq, having been given the level of powers that Saddam once arrogated to himself, including the death penalty and expulsion of unfavorable new media, the twisted logic being that you might have to act rather un-democratically when you're trying to install a democracy.

So Allawi joined in Bush campaign drumbeat that this is all about planting democracy in Iraq, which in the neo-con cream world will then pollinate the rest of the Middle East. The people will run their government, the dream goes on, not religious fanatics like the those running the Republican Party. And it just might work. Keeping the electorate terrorized with the prospect of another attack on our shores, soccer moms turned “security moms” increasingly convinced by Republican suggestions that Al Qaeda wants Kerry to be elected, could well keep Bush in office.

The other incessant rhythm in the drumbeat is that Iraq is free and will become a democracy in January, or a partial democracy(?) according to flip-flop Rumsfeld. On the stump Bush is relentless in his portrayal of Iraq as liberated, ignoring questions of its being closer to anarchy, to being so unsafe that journalists are fearful of kidnapping and being beheaded, and that Mr. Allawi, a former Baathist, has no control over several cities, and is approved of by only 2 percent of the populous. To get him in office the Republicans might have to ship over their Florida chad and voter registration manipulators, and Antonin Scalia,for good measure. So why not bring him over for a little Edgar Bergen-Charlie McCarthy routine about how things are going so well.

Who wants democracy in Iraq, anyway? Does this administration really want democracy in Iraq? Beyond how it plays to dim-witted American voters, it wouldn't have much value for American interests. Look at the numbers and the likelihood is that a “free and fair” election would produce a Shiite domination, with the likelihood of sharia law. So the Islamic fundamentalists surely do not want anything approximating an American democracy, which, after all, is run by its own religious fundamentalists. Do we really want to deal with another Iran, or the prospect of what the French feared in Algeria? Better to get our known Thug/Puppet in there; that's the way we can keep our military bases in there, make sure the oil flows in the right direction, and keep the “reconstruction” money flowing into the Halliburtons and Bechtels. A “democratic” Iraq might be no more welcome to the non-democratic regimes in the Middle-East than would the re-installation of Saddam.

So Thug/Puppet Allawi has been packed off back to Iraq, still muttering the lines he was fed, but knowing full well that he might not even make from the airport to his quarters in the Green Zone. It will be like waking up from a neo-con dream.

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12. 7: EXTREME COMMUNING WITH NATURE 9.23.2004

It's a Jungle out there, Part 2

Urbis MediaProductions

Sooner or later, in a world whose popular tastes are arbitrated by media and fashion designers, everything gets a chance to be chic . Jeans were originally created from crude canvas for sailors; other than aboriginals, were the only one's who sported tattoos, which now disfigure a goodly portion of Generation X. One major designer displays advertisements with models with an unmistakable resemblance to those gruesome photos from Holocaust death camps. At various times in recent years it has been chic or in to have been abused by a parent or spouse, or abducted by an alien. For the consummate addict to the zeitgeist the worst fate is to be on the outside,

even if to be chic or in is intrinsically ludicrous.

The most chic or in thing these days in travel is “adventure travel”. And the most chic or in thing in adventure travel is to be “extreme”. If you don't have a face splattered with mud, knees and knuckles with scabs or fresh blood, if you are not about to be engulfed by a surging rapid, or aren't hanging precariously from a vertical rock face, flinging yourself off a mountain on a snowboard or mountain bike, grabbing a Great White Shark by the genitals, or base-jumping from a cliff into a rain forest . . . well, you just don't have bragging rights at your sports bar or display that “No Fear” logo on your sports utility vehicle. And the extreme de l'extreme ? Like a rock star earning his or her “immortality” with a lethal overdose of a controlled substance, the most chic thing one can do in extreme adventure travel is to. . . how might a real extremer say it—“screw the pooch”. Death: it's the ultimate trip, dude.. .

There's an amusing little scene in the 1990 film Mountains of the Moon , portraying a perhaps apocryphal meeting between the great 19 th Century British explorers of Africa, David Livingstone and Sir Richard Burton. These two giants of the age of exploration meet, appropriately, in a room in the quarters of the Royal Geographical Society in London. This was a time of great rivalries among explorers. It was also a time when there was still some “incognita” left on the “terra,” and “discovering” some of it for king, country, or God (who should know it where He put it in the first place), or personal aggrandizement, could confer instant fame and fortune. The film recounts the rivalry between Burton and John Hanning Speke over being the first to discover the source of the Nile. It was also a time when almost any travel was difficult and dangerous, and travel into the unknown was exponentially so.

Facing one another with the combination of wariness and aggression that the adventurer needs to survive, Livingston asks Burton about a large scar on the latter's cheek. “Somali spear,” Burton replies tersely, referring to spear that in fact did pierce his face, taking out some teeth en route.

Seemingly unimpressed, Livingston then pulls up a pant leg exposing a wicked scar of his own: “Nile crocodile”.

They proceed, tit for tat, pulling off their shoes and shirts, dropping their drawers, a litany of the ravages of diseases, parasites, infections, and beastly encounters, including a lion's bite mark on Livingstone's buttock. He would have to take Burton's word about the tympanum in one of his ears that was dinner for insect while he slept in his tent.

Burton and Livingstone were, of course, legendary “explorers,” tough ‘earthtrekkers' who went “where no man has gone before” and came back to write about it and regale the reporters and attending members of the Royal Geographical Society. Some of the earliest and most interesting “travel writing” has been by those whose interests, scientific or otherwise, required or compelled them into unknown territory, not the least of these Burton, Darwin, Scott, and other great geographers and naturalists. Many a young boy of recent generations, inspired by more than those photos of nubile breasts (a subject, by the way, on which Burton had written a treatise and was a ‘hands-on' authority') in the pages of the National Geographic , has hankered for such chances for adventure.

It's a smaller world now, and in many of the locales that once aptly qualified for description as ‘dark continents' and terra incognita a wannabe Burton or Livingstone might as likely be run down by a tourist coach as a charging rhino. These days one is able to see more of the dark continent watching a cable channel than Burton or Livingstone ever saw, and with global positioning devices and satellites most of the remaining “unknown territory” is extra-terrestrial.

These days it is also safe to say Nature has become, like so much else, a commodity. And Nature has become the place where an increasingly popular form of travel is taking place: Extreme Adventure Travel. A cable channel shows extreme skiers who are helicoptered to almost vertical mountain peaks from which they fling themselves with seeming abandon, one falls and tumbles for what must be thirty seconds, like a rag doll, careening off rock out-croppings, and finally sliding to a lifeless stop. Other skiers try to out race avalanches that they themselves have started. On another program a daredevil travels to the top of a cliff in a South American country that overlooks a mile deep gorge. He has brought his mountain bike and a parachute to this remote place, where he will ride off the cliff as a “base jump” and, if he not flung into the side of the cliff on his descent, he will let out a whoop of victory over the dangers of Nature. He lives to tell the tale.

One writer has written at least two books on the most dangerous places kin the world to travel. Many are politically dangerous, but in others the danger is more “natural.” A current best seller was written (maybe dictated) by a solo rock climber who got his right arm stuck under a huge rock and, after six days without rescue, decided to cut his arm off with a Swiss Army knife to free himself. An abundance of new books about people freezing to death on the slopes of Everest, diving with sharks, challenging perilous rapids in remote places, and trekking through jungles in Borneo and across desert expanses. Perhaps a sure sign that a new human activity has reached a “critical” mass is when insurance companies take notice. Call it “extreme actuarialism.”

Just what motivations impels these “dare-Nature-devils” to there derring-do? Well, there is that drug of self-productions and self-absorption, adrenalin rush . the body's way of shooting up when it is stressed. Adrenalin junkies is what some of the extreme adventurers proudly call themselves. Then there are the bragging rights among the peerage of peril.

Maybe everyday life in the burbs and offices and on freeways is too tame for a growing number of contemporary travelers. It is possible to have an “adventure” while traveling without intending to. Travel always has risks, ranging from accidents, to political violence, to the perils of unfamiliar food and medical problems. Most travelers prefer to return home carrying their bags, not being carried in one. This was not the case with eleven would-be summiteers of Mt. Everest who are now permanent residents of the icy slopes, a couple of gorilla voyeurs killed in Uganda on a high-end adventure tour (bringing the Uganda total to eight), and six dead in the waters off Australia, among other losses. Trekkers and adventure travelers have been abducted in Kashmir and killed in Yemen. To these most be added the un-tolled numbers of injuries from coral stings to snake bites and bear attacks.

Despite the fact that a certain amount of danger is present in many travel situations the new trend is to intentionally raise the risk quotient.

Crossing a fast running river is not enough, the extreme traveler has to get in a rubber raft or kayak and “show that river who's boss.” Climbing a mountain is not enough of a thrill, hauling oneself up the most precipitous face by one's fingernails, now that's “extreme”. Skydivers have tried everything in their from the unimaginable to the unmentionable, to increase the flow of adrenalin. Canyons, cliffs and waterfalls are no longer wonders to be passively viewed, but challenges for bungee-jumping, base-jumping, or kamikaze kayaking. Hence, one gets the impression that, while these are great risks to the person, there is little chance that the quality of the gene pool would be diminished if Nature decided to extinguish a few of these endorphin-soaked brains

The popularity of extreme adventure travel might be the seeking after “life-changing experiences.” Testing oneself, going higher, faster, further, deeper, sets one apart from all those stay-at-home softies and weenies who don't get bragging rights at the local fitness club or sports bar. It is a form of travel that, like leaping on a sleeping lizard, seems to be challenging Nature with sports-bar bravado. If for some Nature is a playground, for others it's an existential event; for some it is to be ‘communed' with, for others Nature needs to be :"bitch-slapped" to assert Man's self-exalted place in the cosmos.

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12.6: BRER BOOSH AND THE TAR BABY 9.18.2004

Walt Disney Pictures and UrbisMediaProductions

Question: Is Osama bin Laden smarter than Boosh?

Of course he is; a cherrystone clam is probably smarter than Bush. (And a cherrystone clam is probably more willing to show up for his National Guard duties than Boosh. But we'll get into that another time.) In fact, I think bin Laden just might be a genius, and more than just a genius of terror. And that's extra scary.

Thanks to some dirty tricks and Justice Scalia, a dim-witted man becomes president of the Unites States. That's the same U.S. that supplied OBL with arms to fight he Ruskies in Afghanistan. But that was before the U.S. sniggled into Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War and has been hanging around defiling sacred Muslin ground and backing up those pesky Israelis. OBL and his ilk don't like that he wants to put some hurt on us for that. Some of my friends are of the more apocryphal perspective on that – “they hate is and want us all dead” paranoia point of view – but that's a lot of stuff that falls out of the back end of bulls. If the “they” are the Muslim extremists, that may be true; but the they are neither a nation, a people, or a faith.

But, OBL needs to think of how the U.S. might respond if he does something really horrific. He has to consider who's going to make that decision. And lo and behold, Allah delivers him an arrogant fool from Texas. Someone who the Republicans will think that The Holy Ghost has provided them with a Davidic champion right out of his failed oil fields in Texas who will smite the infidel from those more copious oil fields in the Middle East. Someone with the hubris to believe he is the anointed one. OBL knew that the Boosh could be counted on not to understand the complexities of the cultural clashes because there is no chapter in The Hungry Caterpillar that covers that subject. Somebody who sees the world in black (them) and white (us), and “with us or agin' us”.

And the evil genius of terror unleashed his “home made WMDs” on 9-11.

And, so, after leaving his kindergarten disciples to read for themselves, on the third day the W one arose from his rabbit hole in Nebraska ready for the “crusade.” Meanwhile, OBL descended into his Afghan caves and waited for the W to make his move. The Boosh, as expected, came after OBL, and might have ended this contest of wills, but let the Muslim out of grasp. But flush with his victory over the despicable Taliban the Boosh headed off to vanquish another Middle East nasty fellow. Having cooked “intelligence” to justify his long hankered for war with Saddam, and having ignored the counsel of wiser minds, the Boosh ensnared himself in his own deceptions and vaulting ambitions. He had “broken” two nations and now he “owned” them both and had to fix them.

And OBL smiled in his cave. Brer Rabbit had punched the Tar Baby and now he was good and stuck. With insufficient troops to do either campaign justice, the Boosh would get his country involved in the fruitless “nation-building” he had disavowed as a candidate, sapping his own country's resources, both military and fiscal, sewing deep and acrimonious political divisions within it, and between in and other nations, and diverting attention and funds from its own homeland security. OBL had only to watch and wait. OBL's intel was not cooked and self-deluding. He knew what happened to America in the Vietnam War. He had participated in the equally long and divisive Soviet-Afghan War that helped bring down the USSR. It was a good bet, he figured, that a man who not only avoided Vietnam, but doubtless avoided reading about it, was no match for a battle-tested war veteran like himself. His legions of martyrs would show those camo-suited kids from West Virginia a thing or two.

And so OBL could re-organize and recruit, abetted by photos of Boosh's troops torturing Muslim prisoners. He would be freer to orchestrate acts of terror elsewhere while the Americans terrorized themselves were terrorized by their own leaders, with code oranges, destroying their airlines, causing the intelligent, creative people who used to flock to its universities and corporations to seek friendlier nations. He could join in the growing Iraqi resistance to American “occupation” and conduct a guerilla insurgency, picking off their confused and ill-equipped troops, almost at will. He would keep his mission “un-accomplished.” He could, without much expenditure at all, watch America debilitate itself militarily, economically, and spiritually. Even now the Boosh has slipped, betraying what is in the back of his mind that the “war on terrorism is not winnable.” His own intelligence people have said as much in their reports But like the August 2001 PDB, “Bin Laden Determined to Attack US,” he ignored any good advice and went off to consult his Bible. Allah had delivered OBL a stubborn religious zealot, who believes he never makes mistakes.

So now, what must OBL do? If he signals for another act of terror on American soil will it deny the Boosh's his re-election, or insure it? Will it bring into office Kerry, a man of equal or better height and intelligence, and like himself, one who knows war first-hand? What will serve the ends of humbling the world's most powerful nation better? Perhaps better to allow the fool to remain in office, stuck to the Tar Baby of his own making. After all, he still has one arm and one leg. Yes, from his cave, he can almost feel, ironically, that he , OBL, not the Boosh, is really the President of the United States. That the Boosh is only his puppet.

Perhaps better to leave things be. Unless, of course, the American people decide to elect as real leader, one who fights, rather than politically exploits, terror.

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12.5: IT'S A JUNGLE OUT THERE, Part I

This piece begins what will be a short series of articles on Nature and Travel. Nature-based travel, such as “eco-travel” or trips based on rafting over raging rapids, of scaling sheer rock faces, are gaining in popularity for active travelers who are bent on challenging Nature as well as themselves. As it has throughout history, how we “commune” with Nature can tell us a lot about our own nature.

Aussie guy fondles the breasts of a female kouloumoongi

The Aussie guy on TV dressed in the beige Boy Scout outfit is being followed through the brush framed in the herky-jerky sights of a handheld video cam. He stops and squats down on his haunches; the camera settles down, too.

He glances back into the lens and whispers in a thick ‘Strine' accent: “The kouloumoongie loikes t' cool ‘imself unda th' leaves of the froobah boosh. So we hafta be vewwwy, vewwwy quoiyet.”

The camera focuses up ahead, following his pointing gesture. We can make out a thick, brown tail of a creature that protrudes from under some large leaves of a low bush. It's not moving.

The Aussie guy creeps toward the bush, stopping to motion back toward the camera. His upheld palm signals the cameraman to hold his place. Now both the Aussie guy and the—what the hell did he call it, a kouloumoongie !?—are in the camera frame. There is only the slight rustle of dead leaved as he moves in closer to the bush.

Then! He pounces on the bush and its sleeping resident, rolling it over in the dust, tail flailing, and claws ripping at the air on what we can more plainly see is a whacking-good-sized lizard of some sort!

With the camera jerking as it is moved in closer, and the furious action, it is difficult to determine just how big the animal is. But clearly it is large enough reptile to erase any notion you might want to leap on such a beast, or for that matter remain in the same postal code with it.

However the Aussie guy wrestles the lizard into a submission hold, pinning it on its back as though the dusty outback were his living room and the lizard were a fluffy cocker spaniel.

“Naw be keerfull,” the winner cautions as an assistant now comes into frame to throw a net over the panting beast, “the kouloumoongi sometimes plies at bein' deed, but those shahp claws can spring inta action at any moment an' do some real damage.”

But his delivery and attitude almost convey that he does this sort of thing before breakfast every day, and we see now that his boyish face and tousled blond hair remind us of the urchin in every grade school we once knew: the daredevil who was always catching snakes and frogs and letting them loose in class.

The Aussie guy has become rather famous as The Crocodile Hunter, and I have seen him several times as I surf my television channels fruitlessly searching for something decent to watch. He presents himself as some sort of animal biologist and conservationist, but each time he is pouncing on a crocodile, grabbing a dangerous viper by the tail, or otherwise conducting himself like a fearless naturalist, or a complete jerk, depending on how one regards this sort of entertainment.

Nature shows, which used to show us the great outdoors and its denizens in a comparatively passive mode, have evolved in the direction of extreme games. Several other pseudo-naturalists have joined in the sweepstakes of this form of entertainment, trying to out do each other by poking sharks in the private parts, fondling venomous vipers, or letting spiders crawl all over them. It gives a whole new meaning to the “exploitation of Nature.”

On my childhood television the only persons who messed around with dangerous and exotic animals were Tarzan, who kept his inter-species encounters to trained chimps and elephants, or wrestled guys dressed in ape suits, ands Marlin Perkins of Wild Kingdom, who mostly got crapped-on by birds he was holding, or was once nipped by a weasel. After all, his sponsor was a life insurance company.

But the attraction of the new “nature” program is not Nature; it puts Man, make that Hubristic Man, in front of Nature, flaunting his “fear factor” and his sense of superiority for the amusement of his audience by needlessly provoking and taunts dangerous animals with the equivalent of waiting for a NASCAR pile up. Couch potatoes may be content to just sit there and leap on no more than a plate of nachos; but there are an increasing number of travelers who's idea of communing with nature is do go out there and kick some giant lizard butt.

I have to confess that, perhaps for other reasons, I would mind seeing that kouloumoongie take a good chomp out of the Aussie guys genitals, or a venomous viper put a fang-full of neurotoxin in his arrogant ass. “Ouch! That weely hurt. Now notice how the neuwowtoxin causes me to lose contwow of my bahdowee functions, like wesperwation. So I only have a few sencons weft to say that you should not try in your own jungo.” [to be continued]

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12.4: IT'S NOT THE G.O.P ANYMORE; IT'S THE C.R.R.A.P. 9.12.2004

The transformation of the G.O.P into the C.R.R.A.P. (the Christian Right-Republican Alliance Party) lie in the most significant social change in the history of America – the so-called Civil Rights Movement. But a couple of things ought to be said about that movement: one is that it has its impetus from WWII, as did that other, and arguably equally significant social change, the Women's Liberation Movement. This all came to a boil in the tumultuous 1960s, stirred and seasoned with the cultural divide of the anti-war movement. They were heady times, and there has been a lot of fall out from those days, most summarily a deeply sundered nation with seemingly little hope of ever finding future accommodation with itself.

But that part that I wish to take as the current theme is how these circumstances served to create what I will charitably call C.R.R.A.P. The C.R.R.A.P began with the chennanigans of Richard Nixon and his political henchmen. By contemporary standards things like his “enemies list,” his political retributions, and his approved Watergate break-in and attempted over-up seem rather innocent. These were, after all, the types political activities that were not without precedent in either party. I emphasize political because that is the way in which we conduct the resolution of difference in policy in our democracy. But the reason that I take my theme from the Civil Rights Movement is that it was the prime factor in re-ordering not only the political balance of the nation, but the cultural balance as well. And from that re-ordering was birthed the C.R.R.A.P.

The American South never quite got over losing the Civil War; but losing the Civil Rights was the last straw and the old Dixiecrats alliance with the Democrats could no longer be tolerated. One by one, they shifted parties to where their bigotry was more ideologically aligned, to the party that claimed the old ways of doing things and the old social order (read “conservatism” here) was preferable. The old, Eastern establishment Teddy Roosevelt Progressive Republicanism and Rockefeller Republicanism were out the door. No more clipped New England accents and New York dialects; the new Republicanism drawled and twanged.

But if the political was “techtonic,” the cultural shift was “volcanic,” the bubbling of the magma of Christian fundamentalism as the countervailing answer to all that licentious granting of rights to minorities and women, and maybe even one day to those homosexuals (read “liberalism here). So the Republicans shook hands with the devil, er, make that the Christ, and sold its soul to the Southern-based Christian fundamentalists for votes, thereby declaring not just political opposition, but cultural war. Indeed, no Republican running for national office can afford the loss of support from this increasingly powerful constituency. No legislation or judicial appointments can be made without the vetting of them through the litmus of their ‘godliness'. Public policy, such as the rights of women to control what happens to their own bodies, could now be characterized as “sinful”.

These new Christian fundamentalist Republicans care little for the notion of the separation of church and state, and so government, or at least its functions related to social change, became the “enemy,” along with Hollywood, and the U.N. Since they owned their prime allegiance to a “higher power” the Christian fundamentalist Republicans could actually run for office by running against “government.” Goervnment was interfering too much in our lives except as a means to put prayer in schools, the ten commandments in government buildings, and to build a proper Christian nation.

The egregious injection of religion in the political mix – by way of conflating reactionary religious values with so-called conservative political norms – has arrogated a righteous obligation to the C.R.R.A.P that it is no longer engaged in a secular debate about public policy, but a pitched battle for the souls of the polity. With such stakes in the outcome, so reason the worst practitioners of this logic, any and all tactics are justified, lies, deceptions, distortions, and more, because it's a war for the very soul of America.

“There will be Satanic forces . . . We are not . . . up just against human beings, to beat them in elections. We're going to be coming up against spiritual warfare.” Pat Robertson, Road to Victory , 1991.

“We need to find ways to win the war ” Karl Rove told the Family Research Council in March, 2002. The Family Research Council is one of the most powerful lobbying organizations of the Religious Right today. Rove was referring not to the war on terrorism, but the war on secular society.

“There is another war going on in this country [other than Iraq]. This one is far more insidious. It's one that you just can't go and attack. It's a war for the absolute soul of this country.” Alabama Govenor Bob Riley

Most recently, if the C.R.R.A.P gets its way, churches will be able to legally endorse candidates and lend support to campaigns just in time for November's elections . In a move designed to crush all opposition, House Majority Leader Tom Delay and House Speaker Dennis Hastert have joined with Rep. Walter Jones to attach the Houses of Worship Free Speech Restoration Act (Jones bill/HR 235) to the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 (H.R. 4520)

It is one of the ironies of the rise of the C.R.R.A.P that their ultimate aims—the obliteration of the secular state—and many of their specific policies—such as those related to women and homosexuals—are so similar to the Taliban and a Islamic fundamentalists they see a threat to America. It's not just an oily war; it's a holy war. It's what you get when you have too much C.R.R.A.P.

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12. 3: ON THE RIVER OF NINE DRAGONS 9.9.2004

Part 5 in a series of travelling among former enemies

I have a special affection for rivers. No natural earthly feature is more responsible for the emergence of urban civilization than these riparian givers of life to the land. All the first civilizations, and their cities, sprouted on rivers—the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Yangtse, the Indus, the Irrawaddy. But perhaps no river has played a role in the turbulent histories of more nations than the Mekong, originating in the mountains of Tibet, and descending through southern China, Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam before spilling into the South China Sea.

Most Americans probably couldn't identify the Mekong, which the Vietnamese call the Song Cuu Long (River of the Nine Dragons) before S.E. Asia got on their maps with the Vietnam war, including most of the Americans who were sent to fight and die there. Three decades ago John Kerry and other Swift Boat fighters plied the Mekong and the tributaries of its vast delta in search of Viet Cong who were so mingled with the local village populations that U.S. and South Vietnamese Army forces engaged in “search and destroy” operations from swift boats and helicopter gun ships that many innocents were killed, and large number of delta farmers fled north to Saigon.

The Mekong delta that I visited from My Tho, the provincial capital of about 90 thousand people, shows little after-effects of the war. The town sits on the northernmost tributary of the Mekong, and from here there are islands that may be visited that are lush with the growing of rice (enough to feed all of Vietnam and still make the country the world's fourth larger exporter of rice), coconut, sugar cane, and many fruits and fish and shrimp. I could not help wonder however whether there were lingering amounts of Agent Orange, the defoliant that was dumped by air on this area to expose the VC. It has returned, thanks to the Mekong, to its verdant lushness, but some American soldiers have claimed negative health effects from the stuff. Still, I saw no kids with antlers or webbed feet.

Thuy, our lovely guide to the nearby island called Tan Long, speaks surprisingly good English, but she is a little rigid, perhaps because the boat company that she works for is owned by the local party cadres. Sue and I are the only two one her boat today and as we head out over the milk chocolate expanse of the river she dutifully fills our heads with statistics and history. But when I ask her questions I am surprised that rather than being an attractive cipher she is quite knowledgeable and confidently and extensively answers to the point where I stop asking questions and offer to answer any she might have about my country. She is hesitant and I prompt her with a compliment about her good English and historical knowledge. Would she like to perhaps attend university in America, I ask. Nine times out of ten in Asia the question elicits a request for a letter of recommendation, a scholarship and room and board, but Thuy demurs. She really only wants to study about her country, she says, which she can best accomplish at a university here, and it becomes difficult for me to imagine her in a silk pastel ao dai , hair blowing in the breeze as she whirls between Saigon's night spots on a bright new Honda motorbike. My question leaves a chauvinistic taste in my mouth.

Tan Long, like the other islands is low and subject to flooding, so it is cut through with canals to assist run-off and lessen flooding. When we take a ride along one of the canals we appreciate the dilemma of the forces in pursuit of the VC. The labyrinth of narrow waterways are lined with high foliage such that one has to all but fall into one to know it is there. The low half-banana boats paddle easily and silently along them with scarcely width for two to pass. The VC could appear and disappear with suddenness in this environment, and it becomes clearer what pushed the defoliation decision.

We make our way past topiary dragons to a modest restaurant for some tea. It is little more than some thin walls and a roof over a tamped dirt floor, and it is difficult to distinguish where the living quarters of the proprietors leave off and the restaurant begins. In a room off the dining room a father sways in a hammock with his young son; in another a young woman squats on a table weaving the traditional conical hats. The dining room itself is a spotless as possible in a place with a mud-packed floor and walls that do not come down to it. I wonder about snakes. A calendar and a poster of a Vietnamese movie star serve as decorative art. There is something placid and timeless about the place. Only the serene but welcoming mother-proprietor is old enough to remember when black-pajammed VC and Americans soldiers made a hell of this place. She, and the Mekong.

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12.2: DOI MOI 9. 6.2004

Part 4 in a series of travelling among former enemies

It's a little like walking into a shop in East Jerusalem where you don't quite know whether to say Shalom or Salaam. In Saigon—ooops, Ho Chi Minh City—there is the abiding ambiguity blurring whose city this really is. If religious, or ideological, hegemony is the arbiter of such matters, it doesn't really do much against custom, or just the feel of the place. Then again, nobody's making a case to change the lyrics from On the Town to “Neiuw Amstrerdam, Nieuw Amsterdam, It's a Vunderful Town!”

HCMC was Saigon, and will always remain so in many minds. Even the communists seem to recognize this, splitting the difference by letting the central district of HCMC still be referred to as Saigon. That also reflects the tenor of the place as well; no one would mistake HCMC as a place where socialism rules. Consistent with the practice of market capitalism underneath the rubric of doi moi , a sort of perestroika that encourages “joint ventures” with foreign capitalists, HCMC comes off as a rollicking mercantile bazaar. In the bar of the somewhat venerable Continental Hotel, where Graham Greene penned much of The Quiet American , the discussion is no longer about the fortunes of the French versus the Viet Minh, but the fortunes that might be made in joint ventures. A couple of lounges over an assembly of western-suited Asians and a couple of Americans wheel and deal in Korean, Vietnamese, and English, with apparent cell phone mediated negotiations by a couple of interpreters. We try to eavesdrop surreptitiously, but there seems little concern that we might get the jump on a good development deal or a hot commodity for export, not more so than that there might be some government spook ready to blow the whistle on these Nguyen Van Trumps and Kim Sung Gates. They are not the only gaggle of entrepreneurs in the bar; knots of negotiation are in spirited progress in other corners and one wonders if some of the cell phone conversations taking place are between one group and another. What would Uncle Ho think? Heck, what would Graham Greene think?

The Vietnamese are clearly out to make a buck by getting into the SE Asian economic dragon sweepstakes. Americans, who clearly associate the country with its ill-advised war with them, will find little evidence of that past or interest in discussing it when there is a buck to be made. Doi moi might have had the intention to spur foreign trade and investment, but the little people took it as license to get a piece of the action and small businesses have proliferated. The proletariat knows, like their fellow little people elsewhere, that you are going to get screwed by whatever ideology is in power. The Vietnamese have gone for decades trying to find one good day and follow it with another, and this hiatus means to them to “make hay while the sun shines.”

Or while it doesn't shine. Binh and Minh are cyclo drivers, or more accurately “peddlers” of the rear bike powered rickshaws that ply Saigon streets among the throngs of motorbikes whizzing willfully in any direction they choose. So my friend Sue and I might have demurred on the importuning of Minh, the English-able of the two, to lay our five bucks and get what used to be called at Dinseyland, and E-Ticket ride through the Saigon streets at night. With me in Minh's cyclo and Sue in Binh's we charged intro the furious traffic of motorbike's overloaded with everything from furniture to entire families. I was interrogated about America by Minh, who had aspirations to study there and become a success.

Like the rest of two thirds of Vietnam's population that has been born since the end the war, Minh seemed to have little interest in discussing it. Only when we were passing the former American Embassy from which the last of us escaped to the roof and onto helicopters did Minh direct my attention to the most prominent icon of our ignominy and betrayal. But we were quickly off the subject of the war.

Both Binh and Minh live well outside the city, so they often sleep in the seats of their cyclos rather than peddle miles to the countryside. We chatted a while more when we got back to the hotel and the cyclo stand that they operate from. They were probably trying to increase the generous tips we gave them (equivalent to a Big Mac Value Meal, not supersized). I liked these guys and came out later in the night for another ride with Minh along the waterfront. He got another big tip and I threw in a little more for his buddy, Binh. I couldn't help think of them when I came across a sign advertising a plastics company; maybe they'll make it someday.

If Vietnam can keep the peace. For the present the past war is consigned to a musty outdoor museum of American military hardware. Aside from false dog tags, military Zippo lighters and “Hueys” sculpted from Coke cans, there is scant evidence or commercial exploitation of the war. If you're not a claustrophobe, and I am, you can climb through the former enemy tunnels near the airport. But the dusty museum's display of the history of the war is unambiguous on one thing: America was in the wrong, and America lost. When I went through the room there was one other person in there, another American. We looked at the fading newspaper articles, many from American papers, and other artifacts, impressed that photos we had seen before could be given such a different interpretation. On they way out the American, who was probably too young to have served in the war commented, with a wry smile: “Well, the winners get to write the history.” I realized that I had not been thinking about the Vietnamese as “winners.”

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12.1: CATCHING UP WITH UNCLE HO 9.4.2004

Part 3 in the series of traveling among former enemies

On the approach to Hanoi's Noi Bai airport I scanned the verdant landscape to see if there were any signs of the craters that must have been made by the B-52s that must have pock-marked it nearly thirty years ago. I thought I spotted a few craters, but they might have been fishponds or little irrigation reservoirs. Then again, they might be bomb craters that the industrious Vietnamese have turned into ponds and reservoirs. The Vietnamese are very entrepreneurial these days, darn “capitalistic” it seems for people who have offered up so many of their lives to make communism a winner in this war-ravaged land.

The Vietnamese are right in ideological synch; some might say denial, with much of Asia and So East Asia. “Asian values” is how Lee Kwan Yew, the leader of Singapore, put it. “Asian values” is a flexible term, but one connotation allows its devotees to shop form an amalgam of political ideologies and economic methodologies that might strike one as incongruous. The Chinese like to refer to capitalistic practice as such things as “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and other rationalizations. Deng Xiao Peng, the guy who said, “It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice,” put the philosophy in a folksy, aphoristic way.

But, as much as I would expect to be warmly welcomed for it, I'm not coming into Vietnam to infuse it with and investment of some non-explosive American bucks. This is a pilgrimage to the war that I missed.

It's the war I intended to miss. I still believe that it was a colossal mistake and an unnecessary waste of lives. That's not very politically correct these days in which we seem to tread the wobbly line of how to oppose inappropriate militarism and not seem unappreciative to those who, unbidden by many of us, are ready to sacrifice their lives to protect us and freedoms that are not very threatened. I didn't have too do much to avoid the war. Being married, with two kids, and of an age that put me low in a draft that never came for me, I didn't have to head for Canada or Sweden to avoid it. Yet, I still wonder today whether I would have gone to such extremes. There's a part of me that wanted to go, but it was not out of patriotism or out of a sense that this war needed to be fought. It is out of the same that impels me to travel, to put myself in unfamiliar circumstances, to have an experience and learn something from it.

Now I am coming to Vietnam as a tourist. I am coming to view the residue of a war that these people, who have spent most of the century at war, would prefer to put behind them and get on to a hopefully peaceful and prosperous future with whatever ideological cocktail will get them there the quickest. But they are no fools, and if they have to dip into the grisly history to extract some tourist bucks, then so be it. Was it not Bernard Shaw who said of Rome, that she “earns a living by exposing the bones of her dead grandmother”?

Although I don't have a lot of experience with communist countries there is no surer sign that you are entering one than the attitude of border guards and customs officials. Hanoi was no exception. I think that these people are trained to be fierce, threatening, and otherwise surly, maybe leftover prison guards, or interrogators. Either that, or having a flaming case of hemorrhoids, is a requisite for a job as a communist border guard. Border guards are not happy people.

The contrast once one gets beyond customs and immigration in Hanoi could not be greater. My first reaction was why are these people, who we bombed for a decade, so friendly? Would Americans be the same way? I doubt it. Sure, we tourists have a lot of bucks, and these people would like to have some of them, but it would take a lot more bucks than I am carrying to make me overlook ten years of B-52s unloading on me.

Unlike me, the Vietnamese are not dwelling on the past. Like their fellow Communist Chinese, they are in what might be called the post-Dengian frame of mind that there is no ideological hypocrisy in trying some market economics and lusting after some of the hard western currency and investment. After thirty or so years of war these people weren't about to waste much more time on anything that might keep them from perhaps become one more economic dragon of Southeast Asia.

But, in paraphrase of Shaw, the Vietnamese were also willing to enhance their touristic appeal by showing the world the bones of their dead “uncle.” Uncle Ho Chi Minh lies embalmed in his mausoleum in Ba Dinh Square a grassy cross between Red Square, where his co-ideologue Lenin, and Tiananmen Square, where Mao Zedong, are likewise recumbent and pickled. Visiting Uncle Ho, I was completing my pilgrimage to the ideological quartet of the Left. (Only Karl Marx is under ground, in Highgate Cemetery in the north of London.) Ho's mausoleum looks a lot like Lenin's.

Unlce Ho would have preferred to be cremated. He was a modest fellow by all accounts, and his residence, a rather modest, little compound with a stilt house of inviting open porches and a little pond, seemed more like the retreat of an artist or a retired professor than a political leader. He was, of course, quite the intellectual. The title “uncle,” an honorific in Asian countries, seemed apt for the skinny, determined leader with the wispy beard.

Our hotel was a new Korean-financed and built “five star” on the edge of the city, alongside one of the many lakes that give the city, influenced by French urban planning, an open feeling. A fleet of shabby little dragon motif peddle boats were moored at one corner as I walked along its banks. On the bordering street the sidewalks were overtaken with curbside barbers who shaved and cut hair al fresco , mirrors hung on street trees. The moped and motorcycle traffic is less furious here than in Saigon where the exhaust fumes would turn the barber chair into a gas chamber seat. If the urban atmosphere was one of a seedy dereliction it did not seem to have been produced by the thunderous ordinance of B-52s as much as the faulty economic system that now openly courts capitalist investment. Still, the Vietnamese are ready to upgrade their land use to accommodate the future. Alas, the infamous prison, the “Hanoi Hilton,” has been razed to make way for some more productive tenant.

Hanoi is the city that won the war, and the ideological fervor is more evident here. Children sport the little red “pioneer” scarves, although they do so with happy faces, and our guide seems careful and rehearsed in her descriptions of sites and historical events, although her “serious” demeanor owed more, we discovered at the end of our stay, to her bouts of morning sickness. She stoically posed for a photo with me in front of a stone gate at the Temple of Literature, where Vietnam's first university was founded in 1070, but her face looked about to eject her pho noodles. But she also is a young businesswoman and will combine her motherhood with making her travel business a success in Hanoi's burgeoning market economy. She might well succeed at such a capitalist venture, but her main competition will probably come from not from those capitalists in America or Hong Kong, but from that city down south. That's next on Dragon City Journal's itinerary.

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