Thang Nguyen 555

Associated Press’ Richard Pyle called the Five O Clock Follies “the longest-playing tragicomedy in South­east Asia’s theatre of the absurd” as the US, Australian and South VN press offices gave their daily briefings on the war.

Rooftop of the Rex Hotel.

Then raw Network footages rushed to dark rooms in Hong Kong or Bangkok for processing. Voila.

The American TV audience, get their TV dinners and television war at the same time.

That’s the way it was (in contrast to viewing war propaganda on the silver screen).

The best we could hope for? a stalemate, per Cronkite.

At this stage in the war in Ukraine, the best we could hope for would be less territorial concession, and a curtailed human toll.

Musk first provided satellite internet. Now he wants Twitter.

People can crowdsource for documented war-crimes and atrocities.

Often in real time.

No delay broadcast, no waiting for the 6:00 Network news.

In Papers Soldiers, the author recalled how difficult it was to get at the truth during the Vietnam War.

MZ’s and DMZ’s on easel.

My brother, a medic stationed in one of the MZ’s, lost his first-born due to tetanus . I asked, you were surrounded by men of medicine. Yet your daughter died without medical help?

The toll of war. The talk of war. The (price) tag of war.

Bao Ninh was awarded with his “the Sorrow of War”.

Among the differences between then and now, besides press coverage, is the shouldering of responsibilities: during the first Iraq war, Bush was saying America was shedding the Vietnam syndrome.

For Ukraine, if President Johnson was still alive, he wouldn’t be able to say : “Asian boys ought to fight the war for themselves….(as opposed to him sending American boys to die in the jungle of Vietnam)”. April 1, 68 he said ” As I sat in my office last evening, waiting to speak, I thought of the many times each week when television brings the war into the American home. No one can say exactly what effect those vivid scenes have on American opinion. Historians must only guess at the effect that television would have had during earlier conflicts on the future of this Nation”.

And we can see – President Zelensky on 60 minutes, on CNN, transparent, lucid and forthrightly without delay or defer until …oh well, 5 o clock each day on any rooftop.

We are fully invited to buy-in the Ukrainian position and positioning…Southern then Eastern front. Ain’t quiet on the Western front? It’s all out, man and machine, civilian and volunteers. There might be a few “Papers Soldiers” but from what has been coming out, there ain’t no papers leaders or tigers. Bravo!

Where is the TV dinner BTW!

Moving is no fun. When you have to move your whole library, books become burden.

Today, I started that process. Yet I found myself surprised by joy. The joy of looting, of rediscovering why I had picked a certain title over the others. In short, new found love with authors and writings that have been there all along.

Scribes and scrolls, typesetting and typewriting, tweet and shout.

The little bird, Tweeting in Musk’s ears.

Our attention-span has never been shorter ( trending tweets as oppose to a whole library ). ”Organizing the world’s information” . As if we’re gods. Everything there is to be known, while in-fact our very existence are mere bylines or barely mentioned in passing.

Yet here we are: Multi-channeled, multi-media….The medium is the message. The tweet is the trend.

What once feared as “Future Shock” is now here. A divided country, whose fault-line is so obvious (No more Presidential debates, says the RNC). Nixon vs Kennedy, the networks vs their mass audience (before being un-massed by Culture Wars).

Narrow casting: talk-radio, blogosphere, tweet and trend. Preach to the choir, play to the base.

War and famine. The poor will always be with you (hence, Be Mary, not Martha).

Pay attention to the Logos, the Word, the story and the speech.

Be not like Audrey Hepburn or Mother Theresa. For the poor shall always be with you.

God wants you to be rich (BTW, share your wealth, give me some…at least 10%). Just lie your way through.

Mega phone and mega Church. Co-opting the world into the Church (calling it “Club”) and not as was originally called to be In but not Of it.

On the eve of Good Friday, the plan was to sell out his Carpenter-turned -Influencer, like a Godfather’s plot i.e. planting a gun behind the restaurant toilet – pointing him out, with plausible – not without a price – deniability, leaving him to die by a hammer i.e. wooden crucifixion.

We are all Judas and Peters. betrayers or deniers after leveraging our “friending” to extract a few bucks (at least Facebook did).

True friend? Debatable. Real enemy? Certainly.

We all fall short, everyday, in every way.

Just look at Zelensky. Forged in crisis. Standing still. Against the wind. Born, battered but not beaten in battle.

Real leader with real followers although I am sure there must be a few Judas selling him out.

But so far, his hiding has yet been bombed (60 minutes interview shows him OK).

Back to my more selected library.

This time, I vow to keep more History titles, like Robert Caro, Walter Lippmann than mystery’s.

More poetry (if not now, when).

And fewer “Future Shock” types. After all, we’re living out that “shock”. Need I list all the crises since the televised Kennedy-Nixon debate e.g. Bay of Pigs, assassination, rise and fall of “curtain” and “wall”, Great Society and Social Media (which put a nail on the Mass media coffin with start-stop- pause content.)

So much thrown at us. The more we are connected digitally, the less we are in control (hardly push “Pause”), the more shallow our connections. Scribes and scrolls, thesis and teleprompter. None of that offers an additional grain of wisdom. Bombarded in all sides with news, more fake than real. Infotainment and entertainment. Self-Prescribed and self-appointed experts and expats.

That said, should I leave behind my library or take them all with me. To rinse and repeat until my next overhaul. Time for self-care and compassion.

Meanwhile it’s fun to loot my own library. The books are now on the floor, on the shelves, or the table. Boxed or un-boxed – all screaming “Take me with you”. “I want to inform, entertain, enlighten you”. Befriend me. Unfriend me not.

Wisdom doesn’t come easy. First you must seek it, then earn it before dispensing it. Rodin’s “The Thinker” perhaps was pondering the same, like Steve Jobs “If you know you only have that much time left to live, shouldn’t you go ahead and do the very thing your heart has always so desired”.

The Biblical story we remember this day presents two responses: selling out or denying (Judas and Peter). Both followed the money/popular trending e.g. joining the crowd when stones turned into bread or when the donkey triumphantly rode on Palm Sunday.

Solomon would advise us to pick one over the other, just to paint us into a binary decision (The real mother, the one who has true love, would give up her rightful claim just to see her child live). True vs fake, truth vs falsehood (hypocrisy).

TIME has a piece by Richard Cohen about re-written History. Most time, today’s Peter was yesterday’s Judas (got rich on schemes, then taking up the high road to Sainthood). Pulling a Kushner right through the loopholes of the law. If any decency and conscience left, we should at least see our current Pope continue his round of public apologies for all the wrong done in Canadian boarding schools – atrocities committed in the name of our greatest Influencer, who had no need for a Twitter feed to spread his parables.

Come to think of it, the only wisdom I need to preserve is whatever our Lord was scribbling on the ground while people casting stones at the adulterous woman.

Judge not.

You can be up at 30,000 feet one moment, then find yourself buried in the jungle right after that. Sheer physics.

Gravity. Mechanical malfunction. Death by design or default?

But death, nevertheless.

To be searched and recovered along with plane wreckage and black box.

China Eastern flight. No survivors. No more hopes, fears and dreams for its passengers onboard.

Deaths in China, either by Covid or crash. Death in Sacramento, by mass shooting.

And of course, death in Ukraine as the Russian army retreated and boobytrapped on its way out.

Meanwhile, musicians sing on. Dream on. Romancing everything. “I need you”. “Love for sale”.

People die. Some mourn their death. Others commented with harsh words.

The best they can hope for is some lingering moments of memories, marks in history and leaving behind some residual money for loved ones.

We’ve lost a bunch of talented folks of late.

That leaves us with a new job: that of a curator of folks’ good memories.

Our life should be a sum of our contribution, of our values and of our un-choices.

People did not know that at times, living on is harder than dying off.

Yet we’re put here to finish the job. To be vocal and active in our full participation in this reality called life.

Those passengers trusted the Airline. The Airline trusted the manufacturer of airplanes. The manufacturers trusted its workers and government overseers.

We’re a link in this human chain, and chain reaction.

Until the beast nosedived. Flying toward the Sun. Melted. Reaching its limits. With speed always comes risks.

I have driven like a mad man of late. Cruising up and downhill, hugging those curves trying to drop my kid on time at her school curb.

Door-dashing.

Without the crashing.

Half way through this piece, she woke up and came out, Gave me a hug.

That’s what life is all about.

Those moments. Those memories. Those un-choices so we can have time for previously committed choices.

People don’t often realise, it’s those un-choices that make us who we are today e.g. pass those joints (or not inhale), stop at the second beer, or have someone drive you home when you know your speech starts to slur.

The plane plunged. People plunged. Death could come slowly, or suddenly.

But comes nevertheless.

It’s our choice or un-choice that buys us time. Death delayed but not death denied. It’s just is. Part of the package. The cycle that should keep us up at night, to be reminded and to be mindful during the day. and perhaps cause us to make some compassionate choices like giving a buck to the guy who holds the now-worn sign:”Need Help”.

There won’t be a lot of time as it used to be. To do good. To be good. And to exercise those un-choices.

The mark of a man is not so much the sum of his choices but the sum of his un-choices. His exercise of free will whether self-preservation or self-denial. You are here to do a job and to complete that job.

Gotta to take the kid to school on time. Promise to drive slowly and safely. Not wanting to join Eastern Airline passengers in China. Not desiring for anyone’s moment of silence, nor wanting to “pause” anyone from the work at hand.

Happy Friday.

To All. And I mean “all”, Ukrainian refugees included.

While at it, might as well send my “Happy Easter” ahead of time.

We’ve lost a bunch of good folks of late. Let’s hope the next wave of folks that are now washed ashore carry with them bigger and better dreams: a future for freedom and a future for folks everywhere.

War destroys and thrives on fear. Peace builds upon hope and dream.

The nuts and bolts of our life should be clear air and clean water.

Then rational thinking peppered with a heart full of empathy.

Can’t raise the level of compassion. Could only be demonstrated…as in “the Son of Man wept”.

By the river of Babylon, there we sat down.

Many Ukrainian, by the tune of 8 million refugees are joining our ranks.

My parents were displaced, slept in a downhill corner shack of my cousin’s huge tea farm (with two dozens or so imported cars). Then they turned refugees and immigrants. First-generation. Nomadic life-style. Au Courant, in the flow, on the road.

When Ginsberg and Kerouac drove cross-country, they became famous for “blogging” and boasting about their new vagabond adventure.

Yet, those who fled war for safety, became invisible. Unkown. Not even qualified as K-mart shoppers.

Just hand-me-down clothes, while China keeps making new ones.

The table has turned since the late 70’s when Kissinger was daily on the news.

Now, the theatre of war has moved on to the Eastern side of Ukraine (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan…distant memories).

Life goes on. The old died. The young think they’re entitled to more stuff. Shopping online, friending online, and paying tax online (if you can get through).

We used to be allergic to pollen. After covid, to people.

Such a sad affair. Playing solitaire. Rainy day Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

The lone man – Nighthawks – at the cafeteria counter, nursing his cup of coffee.

21st-century man. Macho man. Tattooed man. Rodeo man. Riding like a Lone Ranger down Pennsylvania Avenue.

Heroes of another time and place. Keep checking your phone, your wallet and and your bank account.

Meanwhile, 8 million souls only have their carry-on ; 100,000 will be receiving UNHCR plastic bags containing their “Guide to re-settle in America” – essential documents to the New World and New Life. Chances are, they will join other Ukrainian American, filling out job applications for Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, Walmart, and other big box companies. Just don’t work for the IRS (we can’t recruit ‘m).

Bonne Chance. I know. Been in your shoes. Crying my heart out. Jesus wept. The Son of Man, by the river of this new Babylon. Come, all ye who are wretched and poor, for the Kingdom of God belongs to you.

Happy Easter. Happy Friday. Happy New life here or elsewhere in Poland, Romania and NATO’s land. Fight on. Inspire us. Show us to appreciate this mundane and boring life of ours, on or offline.

I woke up this morning – still under the effect of NyQuil – thinking of the 3 million newly minted refugees.

I am one. So I know. Where to pee, what to eat (if any) and where to place your belonging (watching it like a hawk eye).

I started out with two sets of hurriedly packed clothing. And even then, I almost gave away one of two to a defected Air-Force neighbor who stood out like a sore thumb amidst a sardine-pack full of civilian refugees on the USS Blue Ridge.

He was a helicopter maintenance guy, who later opened and operated an auto shop in St Louis, MO.

I checked the Red Cross bulletin every day. For news from home, for news of friends who might have gotten out.

We’re lucky. After months of being adrift at seas, in Wake Island, we landed in Indian Town Gap, PA (my first encounter with something akin to Native American). Then graduated with a media degree after an internship covering the Three-Mile-Island incident.

I felt like I have had many lives: Vietnamese youth, American adult, and now, amnesia old-age.

Actors and writers I admire are dying off by the dozens. About time to go, myself. No need to fake it till I make it.

Then I woke up this morning, instead of turning the clock Spring forward, rewinding back to when I was 19. Adrift at sea. Uncertain of any immediate future. “Let’s confront it” – I blurted out at an academic advisor, regarding whether to take Speech Communication as a study major.

I gave a passionate speech for final, about cherishing your freedom, not to take it for granted….to a classroom full of Nittany Lions footballers (half asleep). That freedom was later taken away from their Defensive Coach, who took young children into campus locker room for a quickie.

Now, facing their future uncertain, the same millions might wish they had been dead by covid.

The living need help, as oppose to the dead who need no sympathy. And here we are, forwarding the clock, by one hour for daylight saving. I wish we could forward past this sad chapter of our current conundrum, fast forwarding for a month or two.

When there is still life, there is still hope.

I hope for a quick resolution to the situation in Ukraine. I hope for an eventual settlement of the three million who have fled danger. I hope for the healing of the children of war. I hope for music to be played again outside and in the hearts of many Ukrainians.

When the President – after his term – returned to his true calling: of making people laugh, instead of crying, then we have peace. Hope so. But the reality on the ground is just the opposite: bodies get maimed and marinated. Smokes get in their eyes. “Why do the birds go on singing…don’t they know, it’s the end of the world”…

Their bodies bagged and tossed into a mass grave. And the undertaker said “I don’t care which side is right or wrong, I just want this to stop”. Sounds like he has reached his limit. For an undertaker, that says a lot about a sudden war.

Betty Ford clinic?

Too late.

We need to press re-start. From the beginning. Again.

No way in this world, this time around.

Yes, if Putin, the bully, had his way, he would push all the way to “ends of Earth”.

His self-appointed “Great Commission”.

He should have been toilet-trained more properly: put the trash here, sit over there, and DO NOT hit your classmate.

Too late.

For re-parenting. Re-habitualize and re-form.

The only language bullies of the world understand is FORCE bigger and more painful than they themselves exert on others…like Ukraine, like Poland ( they missed it first time around).

We need more than 007 and Reacher.

We need the whole wide world coming down on them. Not just free fly zone. Not just NO MORE RUSSIAN OIL. Not just NO MORE CREDIT CARDS. Not just NO MORE Big Macs (Thomas Friedman’s theory of “any two countries with a McDonald don’t go to war” – well, came to a head).

The whole world, N Korea, China, Venezuela, India, Iraq….BTW, what are those Indian-decent techs driving Teslas quietly around Austin doing? Why don’t they pressure their own government to shun Russia? Can’t have a cake and eat it too.

For too long, we have allowed people, cake-eaters, to be cake-keepers.

Can’t do it. Unsustainable. It’s just physics. What is consumed transformed into compost to generate energy e.g. cow fart and s*it (ask UC Davis professor who has studied methane for two decades).

No way around it. Can’t rationalise it away.

I am heading toward my end my beginning. Not much fear left in me.

Wish I could join the Foreign Legion. The other option might be to google map the Ukrainian Embassy in D.C. , then hold a sign out front that says :

“Put PUTIN in rehab”.

On Sunday, God rests, then we close the book. Take a drive in the hill country.

Thinking the toilet-training has been done.. Until, the tanks rolled across the border, until the refugees fled across the border, until the nuclear reactors got occupied … Putin has been eyeing everything. His self-appointed Messianic complex and his Great Commission…”Go ye, unto the ends of Earth, subdue every nation, JEWS and Gentiles, under the Soviet 2.0 umbrella…”. Then we can have Woodstock 2.0 Peace on Earth as it is in Heaven.

Sit. Sit. Sit. Put the trash here. Don’t touch your classmates. DO NOT TOUCH anything. You’re grounded.

Even with doomsday scenarios unfolding, we should note that self-imprisonment is also hard to bear. For instance, one of Putin’s excuses for war was “de-Nazification”? What’s that? we had to google it. We thought it had been put to rest as an WWII ember. Yet it is making a comeback, even here in the US – Charlottesville. Like bell-bottom pants. Like that NYC black-out (in 7/77, per New York Post “even looters were being mugged”).

Putin is in prison of his own making. He thought by turning the clock back, he could return Russia to greatness. To the contrary, he instead paints himself into a corner: his judo title is being stripped off (honoring champion etc…), his amassed 10 Billion-USD account blocked i.e. no more horseback riding and bare-chested tanning. Just a self-subjugation after years of training in intense psychological manipulation ( e.g. lie detector in his KGB days!?!).

Instead, he might end up penning “papers from prison” in the Hill Country, Texas where he’ll join the old Nazi inmates – people he seeks to “de-Nazify” (bend over, newbie, says the warden, “in here yours is ours, Tsar or Messianic complex).

Couldn’t wait, he hurried to check himself into the prison of his Cold-War mindset, like a two-prong plug in a three-prong society, to steal an Andy Rooney’s expression.

At the start of START (the treaty), we all thought we could put behind nuclear arms. Today, it’s Germany who re-arms itself with an increased budget to 2% of its GDP.

As if we already forgot Dachau e.g. fenced-in, fighting for foods (scarcity) and getting tattooed – waiting for the liberating army? “Nous irons, au coeur du monde”…le jour le plus long.

It will be a long day for 3 million+ refugees, waiting to be fed, bathed, clothed (even in Moldova of all places).

There is the cold, the covid and the cover (nuclear bomb shelters).

World Wide War, with influencers like Sean Pence and Gomez (on instagram and tiktok per NYT’s Friedman – “We have never been here before”).

No precedence. The “Evil” Empire strikes back. Star Wars shield. “Tear down that wall!” Instead of drones in the air, it’s tanks on the streets. Black-out in the streets, but not on our screens (unlike the first Iraqi war, which CNN Peter Annett got an exclusive in the cover of night). This week, we watch the live press briefing by Biden, by the Ukrainian Foreign Minister – in long sleeves…we know play-by-play e.g. Russian tanks and Ukrainian resistance (a bare-hand man trying to stop a convoy of tanks, brings to mind the image of Tiananmen Square).

We know too much, acting too little and too late.

We’re immobilised by our own inertia. The black-out of the soul. Free soul. Who are you? ask Bonhoeffer. Are you free? ask Icarus before: Burn, baby burn!. Only when the self gets out of the way, gets burned up (by the Sun toward which we set our flight co-ordinance), that the soul gets blessed. Freed up to choose. Fresh choices. Clean slate.

To seize the moment in history, to own our new narrative (without the burden of ill-blessings from past parenting). Putin chose his KGB-like and soldier-like. We’ve yet figured out our choices and options. Wait, we deserve informed judgement, more information (dis-information), one more newscast, one more war, one more meeting before raising rates, raising kids or raising Hell.

Well, don’t wait. At the start of START (nuclear treaty), we all thought the same. That nuclear option would bring us to the brink of destruction (MAD). Well, the weed is growing back…like Jason of Friday the 13th, the sequence. Are you talking to me? (Taxi driver 2.0). Everything that is happening, happened before. It’s called a Deja Vu. It’s called a replication and repeat of history: our collective DNA, of collective amnesia, of collective self-imprisonment and sabotage.

Play your part Papillon! Play your part of French resistance (put on your beret). Back then, we’ve got intellectuals (Churchill and Bonhoeffer) to lead with courage and charisma. Lately, it’s Reagan and Zelensky. On selfie (never happened before until World Wide War).

Just make sure, when it’s black-out, history does not repeat itself i.e. the black-out are safe …well even for looters.

Growing up in Asia, I often had to stay indoors, since it was either rainy or dry season.

Downpour forces you to activities e.g. reading, singing and playing an instrument. I often looked out across the alley, past a curtain of waters, and watched a Franco-Vietnamese family of 9 playing among one another. Being the only kid left (after older siblings had flown the coop), I succumbed to loneliness and life reflection.

Bonjour tristesse!

Our ongoing war did not help. It made one pause, perhaps for a moment, before the tape started again: the rushing and bustling of a city bursting by the seams (taking in refugees almost daily). Inflation was a constant, drove the price of everything up (the Vietnamese dong couldn’t hold against war-time US dollar).

So let it rain, and “it” here stood for : PX’s black-market rations (still in Army-green wrappings), a-go-go bars, English schools and political upheavals. Newsweek and TIME were in. Old Chinese-language translated books, out.

Of all the things the war did to Vietnam, the worst was morale (on top of mortality). It had been (and still is) an agricultural society, a village society the size of California. Then boom! overnight, a new taxonomy, turned the 3-regions colonial country into a four-war-zones south of the DMZ, whose map fit neatly on an easel at the Five O clock follies press briefing, at which Western journalists ridiculed or refused to attend (unlike the interests showed today at Biden Q&A about Ukraine).

Women took up arms while men back and forth from the front, either via AWOL or R&R rotation. Everyone was on war-footing. Including us, me. We jumped classes, skipped classes and short-circuited men passages. We read about assassinations and resignations in the US, Nixon’s china card and Geneva/Paris Accord. Weren’t we fighting to hold the “domino” line? Then what’s with the handshakes and back-dealings?

Tell that to today’s Ukraine. Tell that to future fighters.

Tell that to everyone. Meanwhile, it rained. A lot as far as I can recall.

So we, kids, got restless. Hit the book (English idioms) instead of the streets to delay the draft. The inevitable.

So let it rain. The British Invasion and the North Vietnamese Invasion.

The invasion of the body snatchers and the invasion of the US greenbags.

Everything and everybody got invaded. No more norms. No more regular scheduling of the 6 o clock news program (“We interrupt our regular broadcast for breaking news”). War-time propaganda. Peace-time propaganda. Truth Social. Truth anti-social. Truth hard to get at. Multi-faced and multi-versed truth(s) ; to be aimed for but never attained.

Like animals,..by instincts, we aimed first for survival.

In apprehension and anticipation.

Meanwhile, it rains. Let it. Let it be. Let it pour. We got no choice as to the seasons of time, seasons of conflict and seasons of life. Growing up in war time, I had to juggle many balls in the air with only two given hands. Bonjour tristesse!

A hurried child, with only that much time to grow up: French? Vietnamese? English? which was which? Vietnamese dong? US dollars? Gold? Always living with your back packed (wished there had been such thing as granola bars). And bang. One day, it proved to be true. Couldn’t go on forever. Unsustainable. War has a beginning, a middle and an ending. Just like any story, sad one.

Mine had a sad ending. Not hopeful as I’d like to. You can’t bend history to your liking. You can’t cheat the rhythm of the rain. When it gets so dried, water gets heated up. What goes up must come down. Seasons in the Sun. War and Peace. Guerre and Paix. Chien Tranh va Hoa Binh. Dry and rainy season. Turn-taking to keep the world go round.

Let it rain. So I can lift my chin up – face uncovered – self unhindered; clearing the deck (they pushed a lot of helicopter steel down to the China Sea that day) and wiping the slate clean. “Finally, it’s over!” (the heat, the temperature, the unbearable lightness of being, of struggling, of wanting , of unfulfilled potential, of anticipation and apprehension).

Let it rain.