Thang Nguyen 555

I got a chance to visit my parents’ graves over the Fourth of July holidays.

I can relate to those Illinois people whose relatives’ graves got exhumed, disembodied and reburied en mass so that

the empty lots could be resold (imagine the upcoming court battle between old and new “tenants”).

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-07-10-illinois-cemetery_N.htm

All for $300,000.  The culprits should be in the live body business (porn industry tops $13B), instead of dead body business.

Apparently, this scam has been going for some time, and they thought they have found a recession-proof business model.

When someone is dead, leave him/her alone. Period.

Yet, the exhibition by Dr Death has been attracting world-wide attention (the displayed bodies apparently signed a consent form so that they could travel to large cities they couldn’t have set foot to while alive).

I hate to add fuel into the fire, but what about some who held dear to “the resurrection of the bodies” tenet of faith?

This could be an interesting Supreme Court debate for the incoming Hispanic judge.

Next month, we will flip the channel and see all things Hispanic (should have been during May to top it off with Cinqo De Mayo): Lopez in comedy, and Supreme Court nominee before Congress takes off for their August vacation.

As a male, I can’t help admiring recent political female figures who had to juggle between family, faith and fame:

Hillary, Condi, Palin. The latest got quite a whip from Peggy Noonan (WSJ Op Ed, Sat July 11th, 2009).

At least, here is a female journalist taking on a female political figure. Someday, when it’s the Asian male turn to emerge in the national scene, I will venture to play the role of the watch dog, taking on him or them. It’s easy! All you need to do is to recycle the stereo types : family loyalty (corruption case of Diem, Marcos),  the lightness of being (Westmoreland commenting that the Vietnamese held low view of human life- what about the Illinois grave scam. There were no mention that a Vietnamese bad guy was involved) and maybe not enough heroic icons (are we forgetting Bruce Lee, Jet Li and lately Japanese American business icons such as Rich Dad Poor Dad author, or Kawasaki, the evangelist).

Life goes on this Saturday in July. The recession lingers on whether Obama is at home or abroad.

He is visiting Ghana, where I also visited back in 1986. A good friend from Grad School took me home to have dinner with his family. Joe was smart, articulate and friendly. He told me that even when greeting the crossing guard, just called him “chief”. I learned about the village culture there. About giving and “over”giving everyone the respect they deserve. That leads home to a Vietnamese saying “talk is cheap, so why not select words that elevate instead of putting people down”.  Another Vietnamese cultural aspect which I refuse to let go “honor your parents in life as in death”.

I wish there were no Vietnamese parents buried there in Illinois. The cries would punch holes in high heavens.

Loud enough to wake up Westmoreland. My sympathy to our black families in Illinois where the pain is taking place.

I am not a busy body. Just want to react in my own way to the new business of monetizing bodies, alive or dead.

We have “verb-ized” a lot of tech names: xerox, google; in essence, we turn the brand into a verb.

Pretty soon, we will “chrome” things i.e. from 0 to 65 miles in 6 seconds, getting to the on-ramp of the web.

The need for speed.” You’ve got mail ” now a thing of the past.Talking about the past.

40 years later, I saw coffee-table books on display, both about “man on the moon” (NASA) and

people on the bus (Woodstock).  I remember getting in long line, just to see the “back from the moon” rock display at the then, Vietnamese-United-States of-America Society. I am sure I was wearing bell-bottom pants at the time.

Rock music was part of our adolescence: The Beatles, then the Bee Gees.

Forever Young, as Dylan would ballad.

Or as Neil Young closes out his CD collection with “keep on rocking, for it’s a free world”.

Yet, it’s the same USA, but we have less confidence now than during  those two decade-defining events: we are not enthusiastic about new frontiers , nor do we participate in any of the “peace, love and music” type of gathering (where men are shirtless and  women in Renaissance dresses) .

That generation was more opened to both a new  frontier of the mind as well as of the universe.

I remember seeing a movie in which two characters keep talking the whole time, and the dialogue made sense.

Imagine  showing that flick to today’s 15-second commercial driven attention span.

We do need an O/S that helps us ramp up because time is running out on many of us who took time to ride the bus,

share the land, and “ask not what your country can do for you”. Man, nobody is wearing a watch any more (it’s included in the cell phone or smart phone). No wonder, they don’t bother giving anybody the time of the day. It’s not the watch.

It’s the conversation, the connection and the community of fellow human being on the bus to Eden reclaimed. I saw an U-Haul back stage of  Woodstock pictures. It started out by a college couple who wanted

to move one-way, and in need of renting a truck. In college, if we need to go home, we just have to look up rides on the Student Union Building bulletin board. And the driver might be a Ph.D. candidate from Korea, or  Maryland farmer’s son.

What matters is that we were young, courteous, and loved our college football team. Mine happens to be Nittany Lion.

And our god, Joe Patterno. And my classmates: the sleepy football players fresh from the field. Ask not what the team can do for you.

40 years ago, no housewife could figure out what to do with the Honeywell computers sitting on their kitchen counters.

Today, we don’t have enough computing power to satisfy our ever-increasing demand for streaming media and other new apps.

Over the past few days, I found out that McNamara brought more computing power to the Pentagon back then to “quantify” the war results. Apparently, he would have done the same thing had he stayed at Ford as one of the “whiz kids”.

Maybe due to having more computers at Defense, we ended up having the INTERNET as we know today.

So, let’s say by planning for the war , he ended up promoting peace (besides his later work at the World Bank).

We need the machine to be in service of mankind (energy exchange market, bio and nano tech invention, DNA studies and of course YouTube with some medical app’s and not the other way around (as in Prey).

Talking about machine. I remember distinctly that my colleague at Children’s TV International was driving a Civic back in 1979.  30 years later, I saw mostly Hyundai on route 95 as I was passing through North and South Carolina.

Who would have thought that one day the US would adopt automobiles from Korea (Remember the Greatest Generation?).

Technology, supply chain management, and globalization are doing their jobs well.

Even during the LA riot, the black customers and the Korean liquor store owners hardly came to an agreement causing Rodney King to utter “can we all get along”. Today, I notice the pride of black drivers of Korean-made cars.

Take history further down the road, I would venture to propose that the US should learn from each of the geographies

it got involved in e.g. Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Iraq and now Afghanistan. That way, we can collect all the competitive advantages of other nations (besides being a magnet to attract reverse brain drain as it has done up until the 9/11 immigration policy reversal). The lessons of those nations are now evident : Korea and Japan

illustrated the merits of  thrift, hard work and quality. Vietnam taught us that numbers (as in the case of Mc Namara) and reality don’t jibe. Iraq was about “look before you leap”. And now Afghanistan (on-going), maybe about unlearning the Russian lesson.

I just want to focus on computing power in this blog. But I always apply my observation to the real global situation we are facing. I am glad the White House appointed its new Asian community liaison, actor Kal Penn (something to do with “Penn” as in Sean Penn, also an activist).  Finally, we have a “suspicious looking” face walking in and out of the place of power.

I wish him luck and enough computing power to do his job. Because with enough computing power, you can get a lot done even if your computer is in the kitchen of rich housewives, or the basement of the White House. The age of  machine serving man is here. Take advantage of it, before we end up with the age of man serving machine.

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I didn’t have to buy it. The office people pooled the money and bought it for me as a birthday gift.

See, I was a volunteer interpreter for the Bureau of Child Welfare at Indian Town Gap, Pennsylvania.

It’s my first stop in America. While awaiting my own processing (getting my high school diploma and  birth certificate

translated and authenticated by the Red Cross), I might as well help unaccompanied minors to be placed in foster homes.

Nice social workers I dealt with: Greg, Steve and Mary Ann Pinskey.

They were nice and courteous, even if they had to commute all the way from Harrisburg, PA.

And the moment of decision finally arrived! Did I want to wait around to be placed in the Washington D.C areas, or just went ahead to go to Penn State. The choice was clear to me: I faced the challenges head on.

Armed with my Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, and a few change of clothes, I went to Penn State.

Of course, I wasn’t pre-enrolled, so while waiting around for Winter term, I started from the bottom:  working as a night janitor all throughout the Fall term.

When we face hardship in life, it’s good to go back to our roots. To see how far we have come.

I had a chance to be back to PSU in 1996 when MCI and CBS did some affiliated outreach together.

And it certainly felt weird to be on this side of the event tables while being on campus as a corporate rep.

Seeing how young the students, I could not help reflecting on my own college years.

Back then, everything fascinated me: from the first bite of a Mac Donald burger, to the taste of a Whopper (my blind- folded version of Coke vs Pepsi test), from an Arby’s roast beef sandwich to a  bag of Roy Roger’s french fries.

The snowy path on campus was so narrow that you couldn’t avoid saying “hi” a million times (Crocodile Dundee in NY)

in between classes. And of course, there was the disco fever, football fever and the Spring fever as displayed at the annual 3-day Spring Break concert.

I learned to analyze political speeches, deciphered all those acronyms like ICBM’s and even went out with nice Christian girls on the weekends.

But of course I had to deal with my long learning curve as a liberal arts major with no preparation except for that brief time working around the Child Welfare Bureau. Language did not come easy to me (but some previous French helped).

My language acquisition came via osmosis, in the language lab called Happy Valley.

And during my internship, I was thrown right away into the world outside, where nuclear reactors were on the verge of melting down (this reminded me of the monk immolation I had witnessed some years earlier in Saigon).

People in Middle town during the Spring of 1979 took as much cash as their ATM’s allowed, and ran out of town, while we, the media, rushed into town (for the scoop of the life time with WNEP-TV 16).

Choppers were coming and going to pick up raw footage, called dailies.

And our reporters delivered “stand-ups” to brief audience back home in Scranton about the scary development that

was unfolding. I finally headed home to Virginia where my family had resettled while I was attending Penn State.

But had I chosen VA from the outset, I wouldn’t have had all the excitement of a college survivor in  a place called Happy Valley. Those 4 years were indeed the happiest ones of my life: it’s when I learned to learn, with the college dictionary right besides me.

WSJ had an article on how a bank run affected the Amish community (Indiana).

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124640811360577075.html

I guess if anybody emerged unscathed during this long Recession, it would be the Amish people.

After all, they have been staying off the grid, much less finding themselves anywhere near Madoff.

But truth be told. even these “plain” folks have not been bystanders in this globally connected economy.

Believe me or not, while I got myself surrounded with technology (at the time of the Three-Mile-Island incident,

it was Electronic News Gathering)  and globalization (the Boat People risking for freedom), I spent some time

pondering about pacifism through the writing of Howard Yoder.

It’s the Amish policy of non-social involvement that both puzzles and fascinates me.

The fact that they can hold out this long throughout the entire industrial revolution, onto the information one is quite remarkable.

I first saw the Amish in Lancaster, PA during one of my memorable Thanksgiving trip at my then college roommate.

Life in the Amish community isn’t anywhere near the freeways of Los Angeles (or congested as Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon) not to mention Hong Kong.

Although my friend’s dinner wasn’t any where near the Amish one, I can imagine the warmth, and richness of simplicity

(in agricultural abundance setting). Maybe they wait it out to leap-frog to 4-G wireless generation to decide on a Palm.

By nature, they are an ethnic-religious group. But by all measures, they are American, just as the Mormons.

I am glad these “white” folks are around, and protected by the Constitution for whatever tenets of faith they held,

whether it’s pacifism, or the book of Mormon was it. At least, the Amish hold high self-respect: they don’t participate in the  Social Security safety net, then they are exempted from paying those taxes. Cool! Californians should learn from the Amish, after all, California has a large agricultural base that could sustain its whole population, with much left over for Arnold to replenish himself after his work out at Muscle Beach. Those volleyball girls in Venice sure don’t eat much.

Whatever the case maybe, let’s say CA goes “plain”, then leave Silicon Valley and San Fernando Valley alone (same principle of church vs state) because the former worships TECH, and the later SEX. Both are as much deified as any.

It’s hard to be “plain” in an age of perplexity. Actually, right now, we need both to simplify our lives, and to shop for more. What a paradox!

X-Vice President Cheney signed a book deal to “tell it all” about his bureaucrat career in Washington (and as CEO at Halliburton).

I hope he will devote a page or two to the (mis) shooting incident from his “point of view”.  And mostly about his sudden disappearance when the nation needed him most during 9/11.

Leadership by example?

If I were VP during that time, I would immediately chopper to the towers to defend my country. After all, I used to be Secretary of Defense, was I not?

Anyhow. The economy is sending out mixed signals: GE and Google CEO’s said the recovery was under way.

DoL meanwhile releases latest  unemployment figure which is at its highest level since 1983.

X Secretary of Labor Robert Reich said it’s more likely an X  and not V or U-shaped recovery.

X stands for nobody knows. It’s a mystery.

No wonder we are frozen like deers facing an oncoming head light. Some pain in the butt just won’t go away.

Dick Cheney’s guest at the ranch can well relate to (I am sure the wealthy patron is still experiencing it now and then).

And if he was deep into the Madoff’s scheme (I hope he were not) then, the pain would reach an unbearable level:

bullet pain and wallet pain!  Meanwhile, the shooter got away free to tell it all, at the price of $2 million a shot. Of course, being an open-minded person, I would read Dick Cheney’s memoir when it comes out. To see it from

his point of view, a politician survivor’s tale. Washington must be a place where careers are made and destroyed, just

as quickly as Wall Street. On a side note, in “Write this when I am gone”, President Ford was recorded as saying, ” I did order for those planes to pack as many Vietnamese as possible, yet they came back empty”

in referring to the insubordination of then Secretary of Defense during Operation Frequent Wings in 1975.

You can be a President, but sometime, your orders might not get carried out in the field. Might as well be a Vice President, writing a memoir and cashing out. He needs money for those heart surgeries, being a senior citizen like many baby boomers who served in Vietnam ( he got 5 draft deferments due to hardships) with no national health care.

Moses spent 40 years in the wilderness.

Honeywell computer debuted 40 years ago as a kitchen appliance.

and Woodstock was happening during summer 1969.

That year,  simultaneous demonstrations in  D.C. and S.F. to protest ( Hell no, we won’t go) against the war in Vietnam.

Now we start counting down toward the end of this decade, with ambivalence in our economic life (awaiting to be “stimulated”).

California couldn’t unlock its budget impasse. With an economy behind only 7 countries, it’s a country in itself.

I used to live in CA. And now West Palm Beach. I feel like I have been abroad for the past two years.

That’s how unique CA is to the rest of the country (it had its own protest 40 years ago, without having to join their counterparts in D.C.).

The whole world has been exposed to California scenery via Hollywood, the entertainment capital of the world.

California came up with an innovation. Wall Street finances it. And Washington regulates and taxes it.

California has Hollywood ( San Fernando Valley, porn capital of the world) and Standford (Silicon Valley).

I often wonder where  the baby boomers  ended up? corporate board room? or living in a ranch in Portland?

So much passion and desire for change. Will 40 years be enough to mellow them out? Or the 40 years  is just the normal wilderness experience for a kind of  “mountain-top” epiphany?

Show me the tablets! Thou shall not waste thy bandwidth? (Abundance or scarcity mentality – Chris Anderson, Wired).

Love thy “Facebook” friends as thyself. I thought I heard a voice that says ” let my people borrow”.

It’s been 40 years since Woodstock. Many of those half a million attendees are now nearing  retirement, i.e. turning off the engine and letting it slide into the deck. There will be a lot of “see me, tweet me”  (touch deprivation, not to mention social isolation) because as statistics show,

many  retired CIA employees died within their first year of retirement.

But these baby boomers are different, I guarantee, despite the  “Muzak”  (elevator speech given ways to elevator music) their predecessors are leaving behind ( My Way, in pure orchestra ?)

Their hair might not be there due to work place decency, but in private, I am sure the music lives on.

Many will return to their first love of summer 69: community, ecology, and respect for others, not the excessive

pursuit of things (how many TV’s must one have in one’s life time? what about the unusable plastic inside the old TV’s?

Of course they ship them to developing countries, where the bottom 1 Billion live).

Yesterday must be a day in court: first The Lower Manhattan court, then the Supreme court not to mention Encino court (Madoff, White Haven fire fighters and Michael Jackson’s children custody battle).

By the time the dust settled on the next Supreme Court nominee, we will have been overfed with legalese, just as we

have with financial jargon i.e. CDO’s, securitization etc… Let’s take a break. It’s summer. Where are Seals & Crofts?

Summer Breeze…..Where is “sealed with a kiss”? As human, we are endowed with limitless ability to cope with circumstances, even harsh ones such as what have been coming down (H1N1, financial hardship, and climate change).

Already we see the next generation of students getting into wind technology in Oklahoma (News Hour).

Ask them about their wide open space, they see the future. Just as 40 years ago, if you asked the Woodstock organizers, what did they see in that wide open farm space. The reply: three days of Peace, Love and Music.

The Earth is yours. It’s up to you. See me, tweet me…..behind you, I  see the million.