lessons from the french

i read the news daily. sometimes depending on my daily workplan, my deadlines and my desire to procrastinate, i skim up to seven newspapers. granted, it's mostly articles about eclectic things that interest me in the world like the destruction of culture & the extended family resulting from the Nation-State and its impact on elephants (though, could a quote from Fanon have hurt you? seems to me he discussed this in his clinical study "Colonial War and Mental Disorders" in Wretched of the Earth 1963. does anyone even read anymore?)

and then i see headlines like this Christian Science Monitor article that rile me: "How to fight insurgents? Lessons from the French" about the pentagonia using the Battle of Algiers as offering counter-insurgency lessons for the US occupation of Iraq. though the author gently implies that the french lessons from Algeria is the imperative of political support both in the occupier & occupied countries, this misses the larger lesson in history of occupation & occupied people's will-to-power. you cannot talk about french counterinsurgency tactics in isolation from the revolutionary independence struggle in Algeria and in France's other occupied territory Việt Nam.

that some pentagonian thought that french tactics in Algeria hermetically sealed from historical context could be a blueprint for Iraq, tells me this fool's favorite french movie about Việt Nam is that revisionist colonial belle epoque white man's burden mission civilatrice sentimental la-vie-en-rose drivel, Indochine, written-by-the-losers French film about this beneviolent creole rubber plantation owner (uuubiquitously French Catherine Deneuve) who inherits (ludicrous) an ingrate Vinamese princess (Linh Dan Pham) who not only steals her adoptive mother's boytoy French mercenary soldier lover (preposterous) but also dares to join the liberation movement to overthrow the French colonizers. along the way, homegirl gives up her eurasian baby to said adoptive mother to raise in France where he assimilates and rejects his Vinamese mother in favor of Deneuve after the Geneva Accords (incredulous). heavy on the histerical revision, pathos and metaphor. magnaminous French Mother rejected by the recalcitrant Vinamese Daughter. savais?|get it? like its calorie-free fiction-History loaded with corn syrup, hydrogenated fat, and chock full of preservatives and rose-tinted carcinogenic dyes. unlike most french arthouse movies though, there is no incest (unless you consider the sharing of the boytoy incestuous, in which case, then it does like all other french films involve some measure of incest).

it's pathetic when people get their history from movies. fictionalized history supplants what actually happened with romantic half-truths and out right lies, what i like to call Fictory (or Colbert would call truthiness) in the vein of Forrest Gump. about the only thing the movie got right was the Marie Antoinette gilded bubble of privileged ignorance and excess decadence of the French occupiers with their opium and congaie|mistresses, dehumanization of Vinamese, the callous murders by the French and the just rage for overthrowing French colonizer butchers.

(and while i'm on this tip, by the way, the Nguyễn dynasty sold us out to the French in the first place in addition to invading and conquering Laos, Kampuchea, and Champa. Gia Long was a ignominous traitor who turned to French missionary Pigneau de Behaine after the peasants got done being slaves, revolted in Tây Sơn and overthrew the decadent corrupt exploitative complacent dynasty. as we all know what colonizers bring to civilize the heathen savages, just flip the Cross and you get the Sword. missionaries & religious righteousness have historically been the pretext for military invasion and genocide in the name of the lord from the crusades on. now like any literate/literary person worth her salt, i've read the bible several times and i can't seem to find the commandment, parable, psalm, beatitude etc where god or jesus-the-prince-of-peace says "thou shalt kill in my name. blessed are the christians for they will dominate the earth. god hath given free will except for savages and heathens who art particularly dispensable when interfering with the machinations of capitalism. convert or die. peace." so, predictably, the imperial republic of France (liberté-egalité-fraternité!) invaded in 1858 to protect the catholics, persecute the buddhists, enlighten the savages with democracy, set up occupation shop for a couple hundred years, oh and turn a tidy profit in the process. religious righteousness & democracy are such convenient ideologies to rationalize invasion, domination, oppression, and exploitation. So all you Huế-imperial-superiority people can suck my little pinky toe. as my mama says lưỡi không xương|mealy mouthed fantacists. the last 150 years of Western violence in VN is your royal contribution to Vinamese history. thanks.)

Here's some fun life-under-the-french trivia for you:*

Rubber plantations were nicknamed nơi tàn sát|slaughterhouses because of their enslavement trickery of luring folks in with promises of wages and then starving, brutalizing , torturing and killing them in the process of extracting latex for Michelin among others. the Michelin man is morbidly bloated with depraved profit cannibalistically drained from the masticated marrow and blood of innocents. the only way to escape the rubber plantations was DEATH. or as it turns out, REBELLION--or what in today's doublethink parlance is dubbed "terror!sm" or "!nsurgency".

In the plantations, pregnant women--who had been raped & impregnated by the french overseers and owners--were ordered to dig a hole in the ground for their bellies before they were beaten for asking to use the bathroom. torture tactics borrowed from american slaveowners. in a sick parallel irony to today's article, the au courant news article in France at that time would have read "Comment pacifiions des coolies? Les leçons des américains|How to pacify coolies? Lessons from the Americans"

There was an excrutiating French tax on salt and alcohol to fatten the colonial coffers further. now you may dismiss this as no particular hardship after all, don't we pay an extra five cent "tax" on every bottle or aluminum can we buy (and recently plastic bags). so in the spirit of the Food Stamps Challenge take the seven day Colonizer Salt Challenge: go do some manual labor. alot of it. from dawn to dusk. then make your meal from thin rice gruel and jungle weeds and don't use any salt. not a drop of nước mắm to be had, nor soy sauce. not even the condensated saltine sweat from your own brow. then you'll understand what kind of suffering this is and why there are folksongs about the hardship of the salt tax. and on the upside, you'll lose some weight though you might have a heart attack in the process. there's a reason why gatorade is made with salt yo. salt is the foundation of civilization.

• now the alcohol tax was different. it was a gavage alcohol quota. each village was obligated to purchase alcohol and consume it or be punished with conscription in the coolie corps (those railroads & french colonial architecture got built somehow) or menfolk forced into the colonizer army or face imprisonment (aka the School of the Revolution). i guess the french were hoping to create a society of pacified alcoholics rather than belligerent drunks. lucky for vinamese people, our beer is weaker than Utahian beer. but our rượu đá|rice wine will burn a hole through your liver. in Eastern medicine, the liver is the seat of anger, so if your liver is looking like pâté de foie gras your concern is more likely to be your bequest than rebellion.
• Untold numbers of Vietnamese die under the beneviolent colonist regime (they didnt bother to count how many savages & heathens they threw in the mass graves). 2 million died of famine under the beneviolent Japanese (so much for "Asia for the Asians"). 1 million wounded, ½ million died resisting the beneviolent French back for seconds. over 2 million died under the beneviolent Americans, the number of wounded is still rolling exponentially as leftover landmines and agent orange continue to deploy three decades later. 25,000 died fighting the Khmer Rouge. 10,000 died resisting the 1979 Chinese invasion. not to mention how many perished in the re-education camps and as refugees. 5 wars in the space of 130 years. the price of liberation and independence. (though it begins to make sense why civil society would unravel...)

Revising history doesn't change that Việt Nam, Algeria, and all the other feral natives invaded, conquered, occupied and colonized by France got tired of being it's socio-political experiment under the doublethink banner of liberté-egalité-fraternité while being slaves to fund France's corpulent prosperity. we freed ourselves of the white man's burden and yes it was by any means necessary. Điện Biên Phú suckas. twas the shot heard round the colonized world. with all its la sale guerre|dirty war counterinsurgency tactics (or in today's doublethink "bringing Freedom & Democracy to other people"), its Sûreté|Secret Police, its army of African & Southeast Asian colonized peoples and its army of professional euro legionnaire mercenaries, France lost. badly.

France lost in Việt Nam. France lost in Algeria. major military and moral/political losses. and so then, it gave up the Empire lest it hemorrhage to its own death. people under occupation and domination will never give up the struggle for liberation and independence no matter what the counter-!nsurgency tactics. that's the real lesson from France. the Western world would do well to remember that lest they be condemned to repeat it...

*oooh, Book Learning about the French in VN. don't just take my word for it.

• Before the Revolution: Vietnamese Peasants under the French by Nguyen Vinh Long
• Red Earth: A Vietnamese Memoir of Life on a Colonial Rubber Plantation by Tran Bu Binh

irony is the new black

Fatworld is a new web game in which hyper-anime characters court morbid obesity. for fun.

There are some calorie-free class politics including the surfeit of subsidized, processed foods and a lack of parks/gyms in poor neighborhoods in this virtual world of convenience stores and high calorie meals. it's nutritious for your brain! or not. this takes the gamer god-complex--which omnipotent obsession the reverend doctor Andrew Greeley already explored in the novel God Game in 1986 back when BASIC was the o/s, computer screens were camo black & green and the cursor was called "Turtle," Logo anybody?*--to a whole new american level discourse writ in code the decadent bipolar ethos of excess consumption (bulimic impulse, tract homes) and of protestant ethic of ascetic control (anorexic impulse, martha stewart).**

There is a Choose-Your-Own-Moral™ in here somewhere. i mean i spose i could go on a rant about processed foods, toxic chemicals for consumption and morbidity. but eh, its sunny outside so if people want to put cheetos, big macs, cokes devoid of any nutrition and chock full of preservatives and poison in their body and choose slow cellular death, weo, shrug. i have better things to do. ironic, right?

*the last time i programmed it was a pythagorean theorem program on a floppy that single-handedly delivered me from an 'F' in Geometry class.
**i completely forget the anthropologist lady (Orbach?) who wrote an insightful article about the dual ethos of capitalism and its cultural manifestation in eating disorders. She predicted/called out how anorexia is more socially acceptable even admirable as manifestation of personal control than bulimia which reads as a lack of control, based on the Durkheimian treatise of the Protestant Ethic of Capitalism which fundamentally undergirds american society.

mapping genocide

Google earth is now mapping the genocide in Darfur.here's the Wired article
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2007/06/google_darfur#

and here's the Darfur mapping website
http://www.ushmm.org/googleearth/

for your karaoke pleasure

a certain vinamee Prince impersonator thug friend o'mine asked me to translate the opening lyrics of Purple Rain. ever eager to evade work in favor of (un)productive creativity, i complied. i was surprised to find that a translation does not yet exist, at least on the web. so i present for your karaoke pleasure, the first stanza installment (thanks to mimi n. for her "never" poetic suggestion). i will update as i get a chance to translate, so refresh often...

Mưa Tía* Nhạc sĩ PRINCE

Purple Rain his Purple Majesty

mình đâu nào muốn làm cho ta buồn tênh

i never meant 2 cause u any sorrow

mình đâu nào muốn làm cho ta đau đớn

i never meant 2 cause u any pain

mình chỉ có muốn một lần trông thấy ta cười tình

i only wanted one time 2 c u laughing

mình chỉ có mong muốn trông thấy ta cười tình trong mưa tía

i only wanted 2 c u laughing in the purple rain

Mưa Tía, Mưa Tía

Purple rain, purple rain

Mưa Tía, Mưa Tía

Purple rain, purple rain

Mưa Tía, Mưa Tía

Purple rain, purple rain

mình chỉ khát khao thấy ta tắm trong mưa tía

I only wanted 2 see U bathing in the purple rain

* * * * * * *

*anthropological note: while the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity was shown to be overly linguistic determinist, while the human arbitrariness of color classification and the existence of 11 basic color categories had universal saliency as demonstrated by Berlin & Kay (1976). as of last year, it is understood that the closer a people exist to the equator the less likely they will distinguish between green and blue due to ultraviolet radiation. indeed in vinamese there is only one word xanh to indicate blue and green . in order to differentiate, one has to indicate xanh như nước biển (like the ocean) or xanh như lá (like a leaf). in looking at chữ nôm--the cangjie-based Vinamese script from 10th to 20th centuries--for etymological purposes,though tím is used in contemporary vernacular to signify purple, it is more accurate to say it refers to dark blue, reddish while tía (as in tía tô-perilla leaf) refers to the extraspectral color of purple, violet, amethyst . Therefore, for etymological reasons and the fact that there is a new tango of indeterminate relation
by Trần Thái Hòa with the name Mưa Tím, i have chosen to translate "Purple Rain" as Mưa Tía. And i like the poetics of it.
**after consideration, i changed the subject in the pronouns to be gender neutral without losing the intimacy connotated. for more on that, refer back to one of my other blogs where i go on a long tangent about pronouns in Vinamese.

googling Prince

now that google has debuted Street View and conquered the world and enabled all of us to voyeuristically enjoy Big Brother surveillance, i petition the powers-that-be to add Paisley Park to their omniscient purview. my fellow gemini is turning 49 today.

food stamps

Congresswoman Barbara Lee (California 9th District) is living off of $21 a week.

Did Congress suddenly decided to rollback on their self-determined wealthy wages of $165k/yr starting salary plus lifetime pension?

nope. she is taking a House Hunger Caucus' "Food Stamp Challenge" because the program is up for re-authorization this summer. $21/week is the national weekly average benefit for a family on food stamps. it's not the first time that Congresswoman Lee has subsisted off foodstamps. so she's keepin' it real.

my family was on food stamps play money after my parents split and we moved from waikiki to san D, trading ma'ona pua truck, sho pao & li hing mui for public assistance, while my mom worked at the Cannon towel factory, and up until my mom got her GED, some english language skills, & a clerical job where she's been underpaid for the last 25+ years. this challenge reminds me of all the crappy processed poverty food (velveeta, powdered milk, uncle ben's, instant macaroni & cheese, spaghetti, margarine, jelly, genero-genero) that was my introduction to mainland american cuisine back in the day before there were vinamese groceries in 'Dago. and creating unhealthy childhood nutrition patterns that i'm still trying to unravel in my adult years.

now see, this integrity and Congresswoman Lee referencing the Tonkin Gulf resolution in her sole (and vindicated) opposition vote against the Authorized Use of Military Force resolution (2001)
is why i actually go to the polls after a five year boycott of the Nation-State's dog & pony show

thunder-thunder-thundercats

Variety has sounded the deathknell for Thundercats. at least it will be CGI.











pray that it is nothing like this nightmare parody. yes, that is McConnaughey.

happy birthday

folks welcome to the world, my birthday gift--
Tristan Keahi J., 7lbs 7oz. 20.2in
my nephew (in vinamese) or my cousin (in american)
and for the record, i called this back before my wedding when Brandee told me she was pregnant! psychic!