Stupidity Aplenty

You looked at what some assholes and scumbags wrote and you would not believe how stupid and uninformed they could be. Then it got worse if they got angry. They became incoherently sarcastic and resorted to cheap, trite, worn out cliches and expressions of insult.

You glanced at her exposed breasts in the low cut dress. She didn't bother to cover them with a bra. They were a bit droopy but rather big and not in bad shape. The skin tone on her chest was good. You looked up at her face. The slightly simian features with cunning eyes made him him feel wary. He was not interested in jumping into the hay with her, he decided. Her cheap, predictable mode of seduction depressed him and made him think of Laura. He was going to show her he was not all hormones. And then his thoughts turned to the leper. Her skepticism of his past wealth amused him. The sarcastic, strong words from the bitch strengthened his resolutions. He then felt a wave of lasstitude and cynicism washing over him. And he felt numb and dead inside as far as the hormones were concerned. You could take a monkey from the jungle, but you can't take the jungle out of the monkey. Once born a monkey, stays a monkey. Stupid humans are no different, you can try to educate them, teaching them to read and write, but you cannot really remove the stupidity from them. They would continually say and do the most stupid, outrageous things. Stupidity, not wisdom, is in their DNA. Stupid is as stupid does. He only speaks when he has no other choice. That's why a wise man keeps his mouth shut most of the times. He becomes laconic and taciturn and reticent. He knows the value of scarcity and mystery.

Taciturnity

You got to be taciturn. Your new persona must be that of a strong silent type. The less you talk, the more mysterious you come across because nobody would no longer know what you think.

Vietnam is on fire and yet scumbags and assholes are amusing themselves with sex-related riddles. The coward conveniently forgot that he once professed indignation at a curse word used in a work of fiction. Now he is enjoying posting emails with double entendres about sex. A few weeks ago, he obliquely talked about vaginas while pretending to talk about the size of portholes of cruise cabins. What a disgusting hypocrite!

Today is Valentine's Day. Instead of receiving tender, loving words, you got expressions of ungracious sentiments which were better left ignored. You are going to relate a true story. An American man in late 30's, tall, smart, and quirky, met an illegal immigrant from Dominican Republic. He fell in love with her and put up a lot of money to fight the INS so she could stay. He had no success. She was deported. She tried to cross the border the second time. She was caught in Arizona, with a broken leg, dehydrated, and almost died. She spent two months in an Anerican hospital in Arizona. Her hospital bills were footed by Homeland Security. She was sent home after her recovery. She crossed the border the third rime and finally made it. She has been living with him for nine months in his house. I know he loves her. And I think she loves him. I am not so sure, but I am not going to be crass and tell him to be careful. I am going to be taciturn and mind my own business. Tonight, I am going to read a story about infiltration and deception which has nothing to do with love. Love is an overused word, especially on Valentine's Day.

Inner Transformations

I don't pretend to be a self-proclaimed scholar on anything, least of all on the subject of Inner Transformations, but that does not deter me from putting forth my views on it. Shyness is not in my DNA.

Unlike lower forms of life whose behavior is largely governed by instincts and little by learning, humans have a wondrous ability to be morally what they want to be, barring any organic injuries to or abnormal formations of their brains. In other words, humans don't have a fixed nature (essence). We are what we want to be. We can transcend instincts. We can consciously choose to be celibate or vegetarian. Likewise, we can choose to transform ourselves from evil and greedy individuals to kind and unselfish citizens. 

History was replete with such transformations. Emperor Asoka in India and Saul on the road to Damascus are well-known examples. Buddhist folklore has a story about a repentant robber who offered literally his own heart to a passing monk who promised to take it with him to some kind of destination where the robber's sins would be forgiven. After a few day of travel, the heart putrefied and attracted flies, causing severe discomfort to the monk. The monk didn't keep his promise. He threw the heart away. The result was that the soul of the robber was saved while the monk's was not. Buddhist teachings stress forgiveness and love as antidotes to hate in order to break the vicious cycle of hate generating hate. As far as I know (and I could be wrong) there are no Buddhist doctrines associated with revenge and "justice". Christian and Islamist doctrines talk about God of Wrath, besides God of Love and Allah the Merciful. 

Inner Transformations could be expedited if the "sinners" and evil doers are not confronted by people with hate in their own hearts. We all know the VC, especially the leaders. are evil-hearted and selfish people. I submit that the VC themselves are aware of their own unsalutary character. But I refuse to believe that every single VC is incapable of change for the better, especially if they are exposed to love, kindness, and forgiveness. If the anti-VC groups cling to an unyielding, rabid, revenge-minded, and self-righteous attitude, they are not in fact any better than the VC. They would put the VC on the defensive and for their own survival, the VC would fight the anti-VC groups to death, thus weakening Vietnam forever. Fratricidal conflicts were what weakened Khmer people, causing loss of territory to Thailand and Vietnam. We must regard the VC as our wayward brothers, and not implacable foe. Our true enemies are and always have been the Chinese from the North.

Hate is an impetus to actions. But Love and Forgiveness can accomplish much more. My views are not an empty exercise in rhetoric. They come from personal experiences. Up until recently, I subscribed to the philosophy of seeking justice and settling scores. But I came to realize such a philosophy didn't elevate me. While I will continue exposing lies, ignorance, and falsehoods, I will not allow myself to be mired in the misery of hate. 

Wissai 

Meaningless Sound and Empty Fury

You woke up this morning and reached for your iPhone. Surely enough, as expected, various emails were awaiting you with their usual meaningless sound and empty fury. The thoughts contained therein were vapid and full of trite, worn-out stock phrases. There was not a singular originality displayed, a coherence assembled, or honesty detected. That reminded you of the time you showed your massive effort of writing a memoir to a friend. She got back to you after four days. Here was what she said:

"Roberto, the last four days were the most painful days of my life. I promised you I would read carefully of what you had written since you asked me to, and I am your friend. But I've got to tell you I suffered. Your words made me suffer. First, you should not call it a memoir. Just call it a novel and people would assume you were writing about yourself. Besides, by calling it a novel, your family and your friends wouldn't get upset or angry. Second, tell me what your purpose was in writing what you just did? To get a catharsis so you wouldn't go out and start shooting? To prove you could string words together in a foreign language? Or to leave an indelible mark, an unforgettable statement in this noisy world? If your aim was the last one, then you had failed, and you had failed miserably because I was not moved or transformed after reading your piece. Rather, boredom reigned supreme throughout my reading it. What you should have aimed for was to create a susurrant but persistent sound, a voice so fresh and haunting that the reader couldn't put it down. Also, the language employed had to be such that it read like poetry in prose, and magic in print, where words flowed, cascaded, and carried the reader from one wondrous moment to the next, without end until it was really over, and then he came back and read it all over again, savoring every sentence, every word on the page. He then wondered what you would look like and he wanted to know everything about you and what had driven you to write the way you did."

Tone and Choice of Words

You thought she no longer touched you, no matter what her tone and choice of words would be, but you were wrong. Then it hit you that the insolence came about because of the discrepancy of you knew what. And a shudden ran through you. You wondered if you really should retire early. You should not be that stupid and altruistic.

You then had another thought about survival and real honesty about yourself. It's time to cast aside the farce and the folly and be really in touch with the real existential situation. You thought about silence, your current silence, and the insulting silence of a bloke whom you have friendily extended an invitation to join your club. You are not angry, not yet, just annoyed and perplexed for now. You are thinking of the necessity of prudence and moderation and of the ignorance, false pride, crudity of some animalistic humans and you are telling yourself that you should not be like them, even in anger. Your words must reflect your basic honesty in a dignified manner. You have expressed express contempt for sophistical cowards. Don't be like one of them. Respect truth and civility. You can continue showing contempt, but you must do so in a civil manner.

Fear, Truth, Dignity, and Survival

The above words keep flying into and out of your mind. You struggle to stay sane and relevant in an insane and meaningless world where scumbags lie in order to look good, where cowards hanker and hunger for power. One douche bag told you he wanted to be a writer when he was through with earning his daily bread as if the disclosure of that grandiose wet dream would somehow impress you. Shit, one writes because one has to, not waiting for the moment when one has the time. We make time. Writing is a necessity like breathing. There are so many phonies and assholes in this world, motherfuckers with average intelligence and talent yet fancy that they are all geniuses. There are so many ignoramuses pretending to be scholars, mouthing off nonsense in a vain effort to gain respect.

You read a story about a prostitute being blackmailed by one of her clients. The story was good until the author, a woman, tried to be fanciful and went for a complicated ending whereas the simpler ending hinted at earlier would be a dynamite. You felt cheated. Why the fuck she was not content with simplicity? She had a good plot. The language was controlled. Everything was heading towards a rare satisfying conclusion, then bam, she changed her mind and opted for an unrealistic, pedagogical phony ending. The author was no better than a whore herself, all fake and fanciful, instead of simple and direct and enduring like Hemingway when he was at his best. In any story, the ending must make sense, not far-fetched or contrived. The hardest part of the narrative is the ending, as any story-teller would attest. Say, you were young and came from a poor family. You met a plain-looking, but smart and rich girl in college. She approached you. You, fresh from getting no where with having a crush over another smart but not so rich girl, went out with this girl. Lo and behold, you found yourself liking her more and more as time went on. She one day said she liked you, too, but she and you woukd have no chance to have a future together because her mother would not accept you because of your humble background. You said, fine, no problem and you bid her farewell. But the next day, she came to look for you, saying you misunderstood her, and she cried. Then she and you went out for three years. Meanwhile there were other girls who were interested in you, but you were faithful with her. Then one day, she met somebody new and she dumped you like a sack of rotten potatoes. Now, as a story-teller, how are you going to proceed? Are you going to tell the truth, the farce, and the folly of the adolescent love cruelly violated and betrayed, the hurt and disappointment that almost destroyed you and in the end turned you into a poet and a philosopher who refused to let go of the bittersweet memories? Or are you making up some nonsensical, artificial ending of the story? No, you are opting for unfulfilled love and eternally sad recollections whenever a certain song, a certain phrase, a certain desire that comes from nowhere and reminds you of her. So, that's what love is all about. The memories, the anger, the hurts, and the inability to forget because you wouldn't want to get hurt ever again. There is a certain part of you shut off from others.

Poetry and Performance of Politics in Cairo

CAIRO — It was a few minutes after midnight on Sunday, when an unaccustomed rain washed Cairo’s somnolent streets, as Ahmed Abdel-Moneim walked with friends across a bridge that was a passageway to a parallel capital in Tahrir Square, an idea as much as a place.
Multimedia


“My vision goes a lot farther than what my eyes can see,” he said.

Egypt’s revolution is a contest of ultimatums — chaos and revolution, freedom and submission — but its arena of Tahrir Square becomes quieter at night, the cacophony of rebellion giving way to a stage of poetry, performance and politics.

Be it the canteen that prepares cheese sandwiches, the volunteers who ferry tea to guards at the barricades, the pharmacies that are overstocked with Betadine or the artists who bring their aesthetic to the asphalt, their Cairo begins as the city sleeps. The weary collapse in exhaustion, but no one else seems willing to surrender a moment that feels imbued with the idealism of defiance.

“Everyone here is awake,” Mr. Abdel-Moneim said as he passed an army checkpoint where a soldier urinated on his tank. “I might be weary, but when the morning comes, I can breathe freedom. What I’ve seen here is what I’ve never seen in my life.”

Or, as graffiti on a tank put it, “The revolution is in Tahrir, no sleeping in bed.”

On any day, the Arab world’s greatest city staggers, its 18 million people joined by a million more from the countryside. Staccato horns bring a cadence to a rush hour that lasts all day, overwhelmed only by the din of one of the world’s most crowded cities. The assault on the senses that the city represents has long given rise to a nostalgia, the glimpses of an older, more rarefied capital captured in black-and-white Egyptian movies.

Tahrir is that, longing and novelty.

As the night unfolded, vendors ambled through peaceful streets, past couples holding hands and men still wearing bandages from their fight with government supporters trying to overrun the square. “Tea for an Egyptian pound!” one cried. Volunteers handed out bread sticks. “My man, eat it!” shouted Ahmed Khater, to a gesture of polite reluctance. “Just take one. We came for you.”

Down the street, men took their seats on the wet pavement, to a performance of colloquial poetry by a man in a wheelchair, speeches by a brawler draped in an Egyptian flag and slogans led by Mohammed Mahmoud, a 16-year-old with a knack for words.

“God reigns over the crisis, and that guy has the mind of a shoe,” he cried of President Hosni Mubarak as he stood under a drizzle. (It rhymes in Arabic.) “Oh Mubarak, you coward, we’re the people in the square” went another. (It rhymes, too.)

A speech followed. “Finally the decision is in our hand,” it ended.

“After we get rid of him, we’ll clean the square, we’ll cherish the square,” said Azza Khalil, an oncologist who has worked around the clock at a pharmacy set up near a line of tanks. “It will be a symbol of making something new.”

She walked by box after box of bandages, lotions, disinfectant, inhalers, intravenous solution and even insulin — what she called “nearly a pharmacy” — provided by donations and organized by Dr. Khalil, who is a secular Muslim, as well as her veiled counterpart and a young Christian. Men healing from the clashes slept under lean-tos next to the tents the women used. In two days, Dr. Khalil had left for only a few hours.

“Some people go but come back quickly because it’s so ugly outside,” she said.

Protesters have called this “the Week of Steadfastness,” and there is plenty here. But there is a sense of siege, too, with a lurking fear that the optimism of the people here may eventually succumb to grimmer realities. Near fires offering more smoke than flame, men debated whether Mr. Mubarak would leave tomorrow or the day after. Neither is probably the answer, as the government begins to gain its footing in the face of a 13-day uprising.

“Who knows what life will be like after Tahrir,” said Mohammed Ali, one of the protesters. “I don’t know if we can win or not. They have power, but we’re not weak.”
“The words of people,” he added, “are stronger than guns.”

At 3 a.m., words infused the square, in the form of songs from the 1960s and 1970s. “Oh Egypt, our numbers are still great, don’t be scared of others’ might” goes one song. Mohi Salah strummed the oud and sang another to the crowd. “If I die, mother, don’t cry,” his song went, “I’ll have died so that my country can live.”

Political debates raged, as a gaggle of hundreds deliberated, by microphone, whether Egyptian television should be banned from Tahrir and effigies should be taken down from traffic lights. (Both proposals were rejected, by a show of hands.)

Everywhere there was humor, for which Egyptians are famous. “Mubarak, please leave” went one man’s placard. “I’ve been married for 20 days, and I miss my wife.” Someone else joked that Mr. Mubarak immolated himself in protest over his people.

“Where can I find the Facebook youth?” a peasant from southern Egypt asked.

As dawn approached, youths typed away on computers, perusing Twitter and Web sites of Arabic satellite channels by way of Internet connections unlocked from apartments surrounding the square. Men waited for two hours in lines to the square’s sole bathroom in the Omar Makram mosque. Two tents were set up for lost and found. Other tents housed artists, one of whom declared that Tahrir was the Revolution of Light. There was something fitting in the description, an idea of the ephemeral and fleeting.

“God has cured my ailments here,” said Ali Seif, 52, a photographer who has been here since the uprising began, and who said he had diabetes and heart problems.

“That’s what freedom feels like,” said Ibrahim Hamid, standing next to him.

A little after 5 a.m., as the softest glow filtered across the sky, the call to prayer rang out. “Prayer is better than sleep,” the muezzin cried. Men and women awoke, joining their community, as the call intersected with a medley rising across a capital known as the City of a Thousand Minarets. For a moment, Tahrir was tied to Cairo again.

Mohamed Farouq stood at the entrance to the Kasr el-Nil Bridge, the passageway to Tahrir.

“You feel like this is the society you want to live in,” he said.

Written by Anthony Shadid in New York Rimes, February 06, 2011.

It is ironic that Egypt originally was not an Arab state. It only became Arab after being invaded by the Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula. Now Egypt, because of its big population size where the the majority speak Arabic and its centers of learning, commerce, music and filmmaking, it is considered the heart and soul of the Arab world, supplanting Saudi Arabia where the population is much smaller and the people seem to be governed by rulers of medieval mindset.

It appears that where Egypt is heading, the rest of the Arab world (Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Yemen, Qatar, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Northern Sudan. There are other Arab states, but the above are what I can recall on top of my head) will follow. That's why what's going on in Egypt is very important for the region. Reading about how the demonstrators regard their trend-setting, revolutionary ways is very moving to me. To live fully is to seize the historic moment, without fear. History and Future belong to the bold and the brave and the ones with heart. Meanwhile those with crippled hearts in their chests and safety on their minds limp along for a free ride while congratulating themselves for being smart and practical.

I know nothing about the Arabic language, but I have heard that its poetry is exceptionally moving. Arab poetry had its roots in the early days of the nomads reciting poetry around campfires at night.

Vietnamese poetry has been uncommonly good since 1920's (French influence finally bore fruit in the 1920's in Vietnam with the emergence of romantic poetry tinged with French romanticism happened a century prior). Let's hope our people will survive and continue speaking Vietnamese and produce Viet poetry and music. It would be a tragedy for the Viet people and for world heritage if 100 years from now, nobody speaks Vietnamese in the land with the shape of the letter S.

I read again the NYT report and was blown away by the poetry itself of the article, a very fitting vehicle to describe the poetry and performance of politics in Tahrir Square.

To be able to write like that, the author must first feel deeply and then he must search for the right words in his memory bank to capture what he has felt.

After a man dies, what he leaves behind worth remembering are his deeds and his words. His deeds could recede to the retreating recesses of failing memories of those who remember him, but his words live forever if they resonate.

Wissai