Mediocrity

a story of and about mediocrity, and dribs and drabs of drudgery

broken words and mirthless laughter,

free-floating feelings of muffled anger 

demanding a solution of some kind, 

but unsolved murder requires a pretty mind

that is not in thy possession.

so staying away is not really compassion, 

but a reflection of incompetence 

or an unripe madness.

a self-impressed woman confessed 

she wasn't impressed by people with a sense of superiority.

apparently she hasn't heard of thee

or read enough Shakespeare or tasted Wittgenstein.

sparkling bright minds always shine

like wild fires in the dead of the night.

Wissai

Today is your birthday, your second and official one. You were born twice. Not in the same meaning of the overwrought and overused phrase "born again Christian". You were born right the first time. There was no need for you to be born again, submerged in some stupid ritual bullshit to signify that you accept an illiterate, delusional, radical rabble-rouser in the Palestine as your messiah. You are too smart and too informed for that kind of bullshit. Ignorant, stupid, logic-deficient, and gullible simpletons may willingly swallow that kind of nonsense, but not you. After all, you read and study religion and philosophy. You treasure your human dignity and you possess a first-rate mind and uncommon metaphysical and emotional courage, unlike so many intellectual and emotional slaves around you, their college "degrees" notwithstanding. 

Your mother was carrying you and having contractions when the French Legionnaire troops arrived in your village, shooting at people and livestock and burning down houses. Terrified, her contractions stopped. She and your father and three elder siblings hid in the nearby canal thick with water palm trees and floating vegetation. They had to periodically submerge in water and held their breath and noiselessly came up for air. Miraculously, the invading pillaging, plundering French troops, made up largely of African mercenaries, didn't detect your family members in the canal. Your family watched their thatched hut burned down (about 16 years later, stupid American troops did the same thing with South Vietnamese peasants' houses when the troops went on a rampage looking for the VC). 

You were born seven weeks later in a hastily rebuilt, yet another thatched hut, in a late Sunday afternoon. Your mother said at the time of your birth, the river tide was coming in strong, the canal was overflowing with beige color water, the water palm trees were swaying with brisk winds, the mangy mongrel was barking furiously while your elder brother, the oldest in the family and twelve years your senior, tried to hush it in vain. You didn't arrive in this world in the midst of peace and serenity. The local midwife was the only "health professional" present in the hut, assisting with the delivery. Your father was away, visiting his relatives in the nearby village. By the time he came home, it was already dark, and you were crying your heart out because your mother, malnourished and beset of war terrors, didn't produce sufficient milk. Your mother said you came out with thick hair, long, and skinny, feisty, fussy, and crying. For the first few months of your life, you subsisted largely on the drained gruel of rice and sugar. Somehow you survived. You overcame pneumonia at the age of one and typhoid fever at eleven. Your body refused to stay down when it was down. It wanted to live, to assert itself, to make its presence known. You possessed a ferocious will to triumph over adversities, even at young age. Your parents had 14 children, only 8 made it past childhood. You were one of the stronger ones. Death was a constant visitor to your household. 

The story your mother told you about the burning down of the thatched hut of your family has stayed with you, and largely explained your antipathy to colonialism and Christianity. If one is really suffused with Christian love and charity, one doesn't go around invading other countries and burning down the huts of poor peasants. You had an impression at an early age that religion was a farce and a con game. That impression has not changed with the passage of time as your book knowledge and reasoning expand. 

From your father, you inherited the looks and respect for facts, knowledge, and logic. From your mother, you got the gambling impulses, the defiance of authorities, the pride and the arrogance, and the love for kinsmen. Your father was being trained at Teacher's College with full scholarship (room and board), but was kicked out of school in the second year after a roommate tattled on him for reading anti-French political tracts written by Vietnamese nationalists. He didn't help the situation by arguing with the French school administrator and accusing the French were invading his country. He went back to his native village in the Mekong Delta, thinking that his wealthy land-owning father would easily support him. He was wrong. His father viewed his being kicked out of school as a disgrace and a severe disappointment. A marriage was soon arranged with a young daughter of another wealthy landowner in the nearby village so that the young man would have to get out of his father's face. The young couple received some land in the bride family's estate, where the woman taught her husband how to be a farmer who heretofore only knew how to handle books, not hoes. A thatched hut was built on the bank of a canal. The erstwhile teacher-to-be turned reluctant farmer barely made enough money to support his growing family. Luckily for him, his wife adored him. She was proud of his looks and education and the connection his family had (his maternal grandmother was the daughter of a mandarin whose mother received a special proclamation from the Emperor Tự Đức. The mandarin, Bùi Văn Phong, was an attorney general and a friend of Phan Thanh Giản, former de facto viceroy in South Vietnam and Imperial Court-appointed negotiator with France). She opened a convenience-store type in the village and also baked sweets. Your parents loved each other intensely and they got by and on with life with the fruits of their labor. 

The war against the returning French troops who tried to reclaim for France her prized "possessions" in the Far East was going on in full swing. Many farmers were forcibly conscripted by the Viet communists, but your father was spared because by that time he was already having a reputation of not being normal. He liked to climb up a tree in front of his hut and stayed up there, talking to himself in French and singing songs. When he was on the ground, he would embarrass his wife by often walking into neighbors' houses uninvited and helped himself with food. In moonlit nights, he would march by himself, military style, to and fro in front of his thatched hut for hours on end, singing repeatedly La Marseillaise. Everybody in the village knew he was kicked out of school for talking back to the French administrator so his singing La Marseillaise in the thick of a communist-controlled village was further proof that he was deranged but functional. 

Anyway, you grew up with stories told by your father of how the French used the pretext of protecting the French missionaries and their Viet converts in order to conquer Vietnam, with the strange and absurd myths associated with Catholicism, and with your father's own absurdities. You discovered philosophy at the age of 15 and thought about the issues of truths, life's meaning, and mediocrity. 

You determined that life was more than just getting food on the table and having children. Any animal, any sub-human animal, can do that. Humans, on the other hand, if they have any pride, struggle and compete for superiority, power, and lasting recognition. All human dramas are played with these pursuits in mind. What sets apart the contestants is their level of honesty in playing the games of life. Real humans, not simian scumbags, must determine if there's a God that takes an interest in human affairs and to Whom humans can "pray" (read: beg, beseech, and entreat) to; must establish what they live for: themselves only or for the larger group and tribe to which they belong and of which they share common heritage; and must assess if they are mediocre, run-of-the-mill garden variety folks or they are rare, special, and endowed. 

The tragedy with most so-called humans (read: true simians and monkeys with human appearance) is that they believe in a Personal God with Whom they play a game of self-deception and make-believe; they live only for themselves; and they fancy they are not mediocre simply they have a job and save money for retirement while waiting to die and go to heaven! But from time to time, Reality interrupts their viewing of Fox "news" and sneaks into their rare moments of consciousness and self-confrontations. Reality would then tell them they are mediocre and absolute nobodies. Their lives have no impact on society as if they didn't exist at all. All they did was to pass on their own mediocrity to their offspring while they rag on and rage against the "black" President Obama. But at least Obama made history and left a distinct legacy, a real impact on people's lives: Obamacare, while his mediocre detractors left a bad smell of mediocrity and cheap hatred and envy. Obama did something very few people were able to pull it off: getting himself elected twice as the President of the United States, despite his humble beginnings. Obama decidedly and decisively was not mediocre. Just as Lincoln was remembered for abolishing slavery and preserving the Union, Lyndon Johnson for civil rights legislation, Obama will go down in history for Affordable Healthcare Act (Obamacare). 

A certain detractor of yours is decisively mediocre and very likely to die as an unknown. He's not going to leave anything behind associated with his name besides a cheap reputation as a liar, an ignorant blowhard, a shameless braggart with a pathetic command of the English language despite graduating from an English-speaking college. He had the stupid audacity of mocking your English-language poems and your rendition into English many well-known and difficult Vietnamese poems while he himself has not been able to write a single stanza of poetry. How could he write verse when he still has difficulties with prose? 

You have struggled against mediocrity all your life. You know you are not terribly smart. You couldn't understand a thing when you read Wittgenstein. Your IQ was only 135. You couldn't recognize patterns section in the IQ test. On the other hand, you also know you have a sense of aesthetics, poetic sensibilities, rich imagination, incredible memory, and a flair for languages (you can navigate comfortably in 4, and have a smattering knowledge of another 6). You have a sense of history, and wide knowledge from your reading. You can reason. And so far, as far as you know, nobody can translate from Vietnamese poems into English as well as you do. There may be 4 or 5 persons in this world who could do a better job than you do, but you don't know for sure. You have put up your translations on the Net as a challenge and as a way to find out if there is anybody out there, but so far only silence. Furthermore, you have about 10 poems written by you in English that you are very proud of. Last but not least, you have had 19 girlfriends who told you that they loved you, but only two who really did. You have no problems attracting women, even now, at the age of 64. Yes, you are full of braggadocio, but no lies. Lies are for assholes.

So, are you mediocre? Yes, in many aspects, but in some you are way superior to most monkeys you have met. The moment they open their mouths and speak, you know right away where they come from and what they are made of. You are usually not in awe of anybody, except the geniuses (Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Russell, Wittgenstein, Newton, Einstein, Hawking, etc...) and the thinkers and writers you encounter in books. Ordinary people you meet everyday bore and irritate you, except in moments they unwittingly make you laugh at their foibles and ignorance. 

On the night of your birthday, you had a strange dream. You and two others (a woman and a man) were condemned to death. All three of you were forced to drink a concoction of poison. You were told you wouldn't feel a thing. You would just pass out and that was it. You were the third person to take the drink. You watched the other two falling asleep almost instantly right in front of your eyes. Then it was your turn. A white elderly guy in white lab coat gently told you, "Have no fear. Just drink it. Sorry, but you have to do it, just like the other two. There's no escape. Don't make me wait. I don't want to call the guards in and forcibly pour the drink down your throat. Drink it like a man". With a sigh, you put the drink to your lips. Sure enough, you felt asleep. You remembered the time was about 3am. When you opened your eyes, you saw the other man was up also. The woman had turned into a kindly looking, old Christian nun, with a big silver cross hanging in front of her habit. You had a brief conversation with them:

You: Where am I? Am I still alive?

Man: Earth. Sure, you are. Me, too. And so is she (pointing to the nun).

Nun: Yes, we all are. Aren't we lucky? 

You: I don't understand. Weren't we supposed to die?

Nun: Yes, but we got a "reprieve", a second chance at life.

You: Really? I am so happy, really happy. My goodness!

Nun: The point is Roberto, you must also give people a second chance. You must not be too hard on people. And stop fixating on thinking of killing those who made you mad. Just stay away from them. That's good enough.

At that point, you woke up. The clock showed 6.27 am. The market was about to open in 3 minutes. You had slept for 3 hours, but you felt like 3 minutes. Time was relative. Despite the brevity of your sleep, you felt refreshed and recharged. You called Omar up and told him of your dream. Omar told you:

Roberto, for some people, and you are one of them, dreams are the way their consciousness, their mind was trying to communicate with itself. This dream was very important. It told you to forsake violent thoughts and embrace compassion and forgiveness in their stead. You would live longer if you do. 

Wissai

October 15, 2013