Saturday, March 18, 2006
NAFIQAVED
National Fisheries Quality and Veterinary Directorate - hee hee say that five times fast with a Vietnamese accent!
Friday, March 17, 2006
My Small World
It's the map of where I've been. Here's to many more to come ... Look at all the places I haven't been! Wow, so much to see.
American Vertigo
With no further blithering on my part, here are some quotes which I found notable. Doesn’t mean I agree with them, only that I found them notable…
On the American view of nature
For a European, one of the most enigmatic characteristics of the American ethos is its relationship with nature.
The Floridians don’t tame nature; they push it back. Instead of subjugating it, they drive it away. Florida is vast, and space is of so much less importance than in Europe, that there’s room for both city and nature.
There are the remains of a pioneering spirit that for centuries has accommodated itself to a sense of temporary habitat, perched, as it were, on the side of the road, pressing forward with the frontier, and by definition precarious.
But there is also, anchored deep in the mentality of the country, a slightly supernatural, almost superstitious relationship to what Americans, even the secular ones, are prone to call Mother Nature. As if omnipotence found its limits there, reached its rational confines.
No pity for our enemies, the American of the twenty-first century seems to be saying; no mercy for terrorist, certainly, or even for opponents of the country’s economic supremacy. But let Nature take her best shot.
On a Colorado ghost town and ‘rooted-ness’
Poetry of these ruins. Beauty of these stranded wrecks from the past.
And beauty, especially, of this people so faintly attached to their roots – beauty, once again, of the prodigious freedom with which they treat their places.
America is the place both of the most extreme uprooting and of the most single-minded territoriality; that it’s the one country in the world where you move, change places, change your home most often, and the one where, at the same time, you remain the most strongly attached to your point of origin and childhood.
On Guantánamo
There are two possibilities. Either we believe that America is at war – in which case these detainees must benefit from prisoner-of-war status and from the protections accorded by the Geneva Convention. Or we subscribe to the End of History, to police treatment – and then all the rights normally granted to prisoners by common law need to be recognized. But this intermediate condition, the fact that Guantánamo’s prisoners, having neither the rights of combatants nor the rights of criminals, finally have no rights at all … I have not heard it denounced clearly enough.
On ‘American Empire’
One is confronted, then, with the extreme unconventionality of a model that gathers its sturdiness both from the conviction among the dominated – including China and India – that it’s in the U.S. banks, the U.S. financial system, and the dollar that the best return on their assets lies, and from the other, linked conviction that the rest of the world must continue to send its elite, its researchers, its future executives, its businessmen, to be trained, until further notice, in American universities, scientific institutions, and companies; in short, this paradoxical system, unique in history and, in reality, extraordinarily fragile, that makes America’s strength dependant on the strength of the confidence that is daily invested in it.
On privatization of the prison system, and the death penalty.
“For me, there’s a before and an after; before I was living like a dog, no one cared about me, but the advantage was that they no longer thought about executing me; today the food is better, the cell is cleaner, but I think they’re going to come looking for me.”
The negative side: the abandonment, when the state resigns and the law of profit reigns, of any kind of reform project. These outcast men – or in this case, women – whom the body politic, and thus the community of citizens, may forget to punish but with whom, at the same time, they have utterly lost contact. This is the height of abandonment.
On the Amish, from Iowa incidentally, not where I come from
The real and final pioneers. The only ones who haven’t given in, haven’t summed up their religion as the “In God We Trust” of banknotes.
The silent witnesses (truly silent, since, unlike the Indians or the blacks, they don’t say anything, don’t demand anything, and, above all, don’t reproach others for anything) – the silent witnesses, then, to the values that were those of America but on which America has turned its back since it sold itself to the religion of commodity.
America’s living bad conscience but, once again, silent.
Just here. We don’t criticize anything. But we are Amish. The profound, hidden, forgotten, denied truth of America is alive in us.
On creationism
There are two theories, and you have a choice: that’s the formula of an enlightened obscurantism; that’s the principle of revisionism with a liberal and tolerant face; that’s the act of faith of a dogmatism reconciled with freedom of speech and though; that’s the subtlest, most underhanded, most cunning, and at bottom most dangerous ideological maneuver of the American right in years.
On religious fundamentalism and secularism
What I reproach these churches for is their banality. It’s their propensity for turning God into some kind of “good guy,” friendly and reassuring, free of problems, watching over a sterile universe, bereft of anguish or negativity. It’s the idea of an insipid God, devoid of mystery, whose aims, although previously impenetrable, are now becoming as familiar as those of a near neighbor or friend.
What, after all, is secularism? It is not, as we know, agnosticism. Nor is it atheism. It is the command given to every state not to favor one faith over another.
France has fought for secularism. It has won its secularism after centuries of confusion and wars of religion. The Americans did not need to separate from anything. The wall of separation, to speak like Jefferson, was raised from the beginning. They were born secular, whereas we French had to become it.
… the compromise negotiated by the Founding Fathers is resisting the slings and arrows of time fairly well – never forget that the God mentioned in the Republican and Democratic conventions, the inaugural speeches, the houses of Congress, is a purposefully abstract God, almost deistic, and at core, consensual, recognized by all American faiths, Christian or not.
Signs of vertigo - Obesity
Another sign: obesity. Not the obesity of bodies, obviously
A social obesity. An economic, financial and political obesity. Obesity of cities. Obesity of malls, as in Minneapolis. Obesity of churches, as in Willow Creek. Obesity of parking lots that, in these malls and churches, sometimes grow so enormous that they generate a full-fledged miniature society, an entire way of life with its own rhythms, spaces, distraction and rest areas, cafeterias, shuttles, even – and this takes the cake – specially organized shuttles so that, once your car is parked, shoppers or worshippers can be loaded into yet another vehicle, thus saving them the trouble of walking.
The obesity of enterprises subject to the law of forced growth … “Greed is good; greed is right; greed works; greed clarifies.”
The bigger it is, the better it is, says America today. Large is beautiful, it repeats over and over in a kind of hysterical reversal of the 1960’s slogan.
A synopsis
…this magnificent, mad country, laboratory of the best and the worst, greedy and modest, at home in the world and self-possessed, puritan and outrageous, facing the future and yet obsessed with its memories…
On the American view of nature
For a European, one of the most enigmatic characteristics of the American ethos is its relationship with nature.
The Floridians don’t tame nature; they push it back. Instead of subjugating it, they drive it away. Florida is vast, and space is of so much less importance than in Europe, that there’s room for both city and nature.
There are the remains of a pioneering spirit that for centuries has accommodated itself to a sense of temporary habitat, perched, as it were, on the side of the road, pressing forward with the frontier, and by definition precarious.
But there is also, anchored deep in the mentality of the country, a slightly supernatural, almost superstitious relationship to what Americans, even the secular ones, are prone to call Mother Nature. As if omnipotence found its limits there, reached its rational confines.
No pity for our enemies, the American of the twenty-first century seems to be saying; no mercy for terrorist, certainly, or even for opponents of the country’s economic supremacy. But let Nature take her best shot.
On a Colorado ghost town and ‘rooted-ness’
Poetry of these ruins. Beauty of these stranded wrecks from the past.
And beauty, especially, of this people so faintly attached to their roots – beauty, once again, of the prodigious freedom with which they treat their places.
America is the place both of the most extreme uprooting and of the most single-minded territoriality; that it’s the one country in the world where you move, change places, change your home most often, and the one where, at the same time, you remain the most strongly attached to your point of origin and childhood.
On Guantánamo
There are two possibilities. Either we believe that America is at war – in which case these detainees must benefit from prisoner-of-war status and from the protections accorded by the Geneva Convention. Or we subscribe to the End of History, to police treatment – and then all the rights normally granted to prisoners by common law need to be recognized. But this intermediate condition, the fact that Guantánamo’s prisoners, having neither the rights of combatants nor the rights of criminals, finally have no rights at all … I have not heard it denounced clearly enough.
On ‘American Empire’
One is confronted, then, with the extreme unconventionality of a model that gathers its sturdiness both from the conviction among the dominated – including China and India – that it’s in the U.S. banks, the U.S. financial system, and the dollar that the best return on their assets lies, and from the other, linked conviction that the rest of the world must continue to send its elite, its researchers, its future executives, its businessmen, to be trained, until further notice, in American universities, scientific institutions, and companies; in short, this paradoxical system, unique in history and, in reality, extraordinarily fragile, that makes America’s strength dependant on the strength of the confidence that is daily invested in it.
On privatization of the prison system, and the death penalty.
“For me, there’s a before and an after; before I was living like a dog, no one cared about me, but the advantage was that they no longer thought about executing me; today the food is better, the cell is cleaner, but I think they’re going to come looking for me.”
The negative side: the abandonment, when the state resigns and the law of profit reigns, of any kind of reform project. These outcast men – or in this case, women – whom the body politic, and thus the community of citizens, may forget to punish but with whom, at the same time, they have utterly lost contact. This is the height of abandonment.
On the Amish, from Iowa incidentally, not where I come from
The real and final pioneers. The only ones who haven’t given in, haven’t summed up their religion as the “In God We Trust” of banknotes.
The silent witnesses (truly silent, since, unlike the Indians or the blacks, they don’t say anything, don’t demand anything, and, above all, don’t reproach others for anything) – the silent witnesses, then, to the values that were those of America but on which America has turned its back since it sold itself to the religion of commodity.
America’s living bad conscience but, once again, silent.
Just here. We don’t criticize anything. But we are Amish. The profound, hidden, forgotten, denied truth of America is alive in us.
On creationism
There are two theories, and you have a choice: that’s the formula of an enlightened obscurantism; that’s the principle of revisionism with a liberal and tolerant face; that’s the act of faith of a dogmatism reconciled with freedom of speech and though; that’s the subtlest, most underhanded, most cunning, and at bottom most dangerous ideological maneuver of the American right in years.
On religious fundamentalism and secularism
What I reproach these churches for is their banality. It’s their propensity for turning God into some kind of “good guy,” friendly and reassuring, free of problems, watching over a sterile universe, bereft of anguish or negativity. It’s the idea of an insipid God, devoid of mystery, whose aims, although previously impenetrable, are now becoming as familiar as those of a near neighbor or friend.
What, after all, is secularism? It is not, as we know, agnosticism. Nor is it atheism. It is the command given to every state not to favor one faith over another.
France has fought for secularism. It has won its secularism after centuries of confusion and wars of religion. The Americans did not need to separate from anything. The wall of separation, to speak like Jefferson, was raised from the beginning. They were born secular, whereas we French had to become it.
… the compromise negotiated by the Founding Fathers is resisting the slings and arrows of time fairly well – never forget that the God mentioned in the Republican and Democratic conventions, the inaugural speeches, the houses of Congress, is a purposefully abstract God, almost deistic, and at core, consensual, recognized by all American faiths, Christian or not.
Signs of vertigo - Obesity
Another sign: obesity. Not the obesity of bodies, obviously
A social obesity. An economic, financial and political obesity. Obesity of cities. Obesity of malls, as in Minneapolis. Obesity of churches, as in Willow Creek. Obesity of parking lots that, in these malls and churches, sometimes grow so enormous that they generate a full-fledged miniature society, an entire way of life with its own rhythms, spaces, distraction and rest areas, cafeterias, shuttles, even – and this takes the cake – specially organized shuttles so that, once your car is parked, shoppers or worshippers can be loaded into yet another vehicle, thus saving them the trouble of walking.
The obesity of enterprises subject to the law of forced growth … “Greed is good; greed is right; greed works; greed clarifies.”
The bigger it is, the better it is, says America today. Large is beautiful, it repeats over and over in a kind of hysterical reversal of the 1960’s slogan.
A synopsis
…this magnificent, mad country, laboratory of the best and the worst, greedy and modest, at home in the world and self-possessed, puritan and outrageous, facing the future and yet obsessed with its memories…
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Monday, February 27, 2006
Sunday, October 30, 2005
Northwest
GREEN
WET
HOUSE OF TEA
THIRSTY
SMILEY
NOT THIRSTY
NOT RAINING
NOT SUNSHINING
NOT SMILING
CHIN LOW
CROSSING RED IN BLACK
Friday, February 25, 2005
Saturday, May 15, 2004
Monday, August 25, 2003
Endnotes
Well, nobody ever reads endnotes, so maybe I should think of a new subject. Anyway, I think the last update on my wanderings was from Kenya. There was a beach with nice sand and Masai warriors selling jewelry, and camel trains and scrumptious food at the hotel. Safari in Masai Mara Park was thoroughly amusing, lots of animals and tourists and the two seemed to be about even in entertainment value. African water buffalos are a lot bigger, uglier and unfriendlier than Vietnamese ones. Lions are lazy and cocky – we saw one sleeping on his back in the middle of the trail, he didn't even wake up when we drove past. So I got out and quietly put ice cubes in his armpits and ran away laughing : )
Anyway, then we flew to Chad. After a few days in the capitol N'djamena we rented a vehicle and driver for the not-pleasant-but-could-have-been-worse 17 hour drive down to Sarh, where my sister lives. I spent nine days in Sahr - that is the longest I have been anywhere from the beginning of June until now. Not that there is so much to see in Sarh - I spent most of my time trying to keep my nephew happy and attempting to recover from a cold which I seemed to have gotten in the airport in Ethiopia between flights. Go figure.
Then I had to leave. This is the long part of this email. There are no airplane flights to Sarh normally. People do charter small planes there sometimes, and luckily there was one of those flying back to the capital the day before my flight out of Chad, so I reserved a seat. Well, I thought I did. We went to the airport at the appointed time, sat on a step overlooking the rather longish field (the airport) for awhile, eventually going home to call the company that was supposed to be flying in but our phones weren't working so we went somewhere else to call and discovered that the flight had been cancelled. Woops.
My brother-in-law’s friends drove me all over town looking for a car that would be going to N'djamena that day. Bad planning! There was a UN car (read that - car with real seats with not much more than one person per seat and real a/c) which had just left, but we were too late. Paying for a seat in an NGO car is the best way to travel around there. I can say that because there were no NGO cars going where I wanted to go, so I paid some paltry fee for a seat (most of a seat anyway) in a 'public' van. It was a smallish Toyota van, with about four feet of stuff piled on top of it and a bunch of bicycles and a couple motorbikes on top of that. Under all the stuff, in the van, was all of us - 24 of us all going to the same place. I got a seat in the back, with my knees in someone else's back and someone's elbow in my kidney and me squashed up against the side of the van - that was the same side of me that was hanging off of the end of the seat.
In the front seat there was some guy toting along his AK47, he seemed to be very helpful in getting us quickly through all the police checkpoints that come up like every 30 kilometers or something. Our trip from the capitol down to Sarh was 17 hrs, so I was trying to prepare myself for a long ride, we left at 1:30 in the afternoon. 40 minutes after we left Sarh, we had to stop at a checkpoint and they said the road was closed due to rain. Rainy season - dirt roads - why do you think that no one takes overloaded Toyota vans to mud bogs? After a couple hours we could keep going - whether or not the road was any drier after a couple hours I do not know. That little process was repeated innumerable times before we got to N'djamena.
The driver eventually collected the tickets after several hours on the road, it seemed that having a pile of little receipts from the transportation company helped us get through the checkpoints with less hassle. At one checkpoint they magically picked me out of the van. It is hard to hide a white face, even in a van that full! The guard, who looked to be about sixteen, took me inside a little concrete building where all his friends were (about five young teenagers with guns - but the one guy with a uniform shirt was the ringleader) and demanded my 'carte d'identite'. Not really caring to dig out my passport packet with my last US dollars in it, I gave them my Pennsylvania driver’s license. After a very long process of examining it, he asked me if that was my ID card. After being assured about that, he asked me if I spoke English (this was all in bad French, before this). Naturally I said yes. He asked me that three times, but that being the only sentence he had memorized I guess, it didn't go much farther than that. Then he asked me where I was from. Upon learning that I was American (the ID card fiasco was just for show since it was rather apparent that he couldn't read it) he promptly gave me back my license and told me to get back in the van and go. I decided at the next checkpoint I should give them my university ID card - it has a nicer picture on it! Fortunately, none of the other checkpoints needed to see any ID from me. We stopped several times for prayers - everybody spread out their mats beside the road. Apparently not everybody agreed about where exactly Mecca was, because they weren't all facing the same direction, but I guess it is the thought that counts.
We had a flat tire, which was changed fairly quickly. Later stopped to fix the first tire, and put it back on. Then it went flat again, and the spare went back on. Later on that one went flat too. There was another spare, but it was the wrong size, so for the rest of the trip every time we hit a big bump (bout every 10 feet) it scraped on the inside of the fender. The fuel filter clogged up a couple times, which involved the driver crawling under the fan, taking it off, blowing through it and I suppose cuffing it under the left ear a couple times, and putting it back in. Eventually he started cursing at it (I can deduce that by the tone of voice even if I don't speak Arabic) and threw it across the road into a field and just hooked the hoses together. He did stop later at a town and got another one.
After dark we stopped at one barricade and I sat under a tree (it was raining) listening to a big uproar around a fire a couple hundred feet away in the village there. Later on the uproar changed and became a drumbeat and everybody started dancing, so I guess they were all friends. The stars are amazing when you are in the bush. We stopped in yet another tiny town after midnight, and everybody rolled out their mats and curled up went to sleep on them. Me being mat-less and unprepared, I went to what I think was a market (in the daytime) down the street and found a table, but the table had leftovers all over it, so I slept on a bench slightly narrower than a Chinese sleeper bus bed, but longer and with plenty of fresh air. There were so many stars the outline of the tree next to me was like a silhouette. Some 'village dogs' came by and sniffed at me cause I smelled funny, but there was enough Chadian dirt on me that they weren't too suspicious. We were there about four hours, then got up and left again before daylight.
We got to N'djamena the next evening, 30 hours after leaving Sarh, and precisely two hours before my flight to Paris took off. I did succeed in getting a room with a shower (no small task in Chad) and cleaning up a bit before getting on the plane. After bribing my way back out through customs, I was directed out to the runway where I went through Air France security (all of it imported with the plane) and found myself inside one of those airport fences, in a little circle on the runway that was designated to be a piece of France for an hour or so. They had Le Monde and Le Figaro on a news rack there, they had chairs that were nicer than anything else I sat on in the whole country, and getting on the plane the stewardess said bonsoir and stepped on a stowaway Chadian cockroach running in the door. So I said goodbye to Chad.
Had a wonderful and comfortable week in Sweden with my friend there, although it was all a bit surreal, then came home. America is such a funny place. And that is the end of my year of collecting stories and experiences from far away - I hope all my friends reading this are well and stay in touch!
Zaijian, tambiet, , kwaheri, au revoir
Anyway, then we flew to Chad. After a few days in the capitol N'djamena we rented a vehicle and driver for the not-pleasant-but-could-have-been-worse 17 hour drive down to Sarh, where my sister lives. I spent nine days in Sahr - that is the longest I have been anywhere from the beginning of June until now. Not that there is so much to see in Sarh - I spent most of my time trying to keep my nephew happy and attempting to recover from a cold which I seemed to have gotten in the airport in Ethiopia between flights. Go figure.
Then I had to leave. This is the long part of this email. There are no airplane flights to Sarh normally. People do charter small planes there sometimes, and luckily there was one of those flying back to the capital the day before my flight out of Chad, so I reserved a seat. Well, I thought I did. We went to the airport at the appointed time, sat on a step overlooking the rather longish field (the airport) for awhile, eventually going home to call the company that was supposed to be flying in but our phones weren't working so we went somewhere else to call and discovered that the flight had been cancelled. Woops.
My brother-in-law’s friends drove me all over town looking for a car that would be going to N'djamena that day. Bad planning! There was a UN car (read that - car with real seats with not much more than one person per seat and real a/c) which had just left, but we were too late. Paying for a seat in an NGO car is the best way to travel around there. I can say that because there were no NGO cars going where I wanted to go, so I paid some paltry fee for a seat (most of a seat anyway) in a 'public' van. It was a smallish Toyota van, with about four feet of stuff piled on top of it and a bunch of bicycles and a couple motorbikes on top of that. Under all the stuff, in the van, was all of us - 24 of us all going to the same place. I got a seat in the back, with my knees in someone else's back and someone's elbow in my kidney and me squashed up against the side of the van - that was the same side of me that was hanging off of the end of the seat.
In the front seat there was some guy toting along his AK47, he seemed to be very helpful in getting us quickly through all the police checkpoints that come up like every 30 kilometers or something. Our trip from the capitol down to Sarh was 17 hrs, so I was trying to prepare myself for a long ride, we left at 1:30 in the afternoon. 40 minutes after we left Sarh, we had to stop at a checkpoint and they said the road was closed due to rain. Rainy season - dirt roads - why do you think that no one takes overloaded Toyota vans to mud bogs? After a couple hours we could keep going - whether or not the road was any drier after a couple hours I do not know. That little process was repeated innumerable times before we got to N'djamena.
The driver eventually collected the tickets after several hours on the road, it seemed that having a pile of little receipts from the transportation company helped us get through the checkpoints with less hassle. At one checkpoint they magically picked me out of the van. It is hard to hide a white face, even in a van that full! The guard, who looked to be about sixteen, took me inside a little concrete building where all his friends were (about five young teenagers with guns - but the one guy with a uniform shirt was the ringleader) and demanded my 'carte d'identite'. Not really caring to dig out my passport packet with my last US dollars in it, I gave them my Pennsylvania driver’s license. After a very long process of examining it, he asked me if that was my ID card. After being assured about that, he asked me if I spoke English (this was all in bad French, before this). Naturally I said yes. He asked me that three times, but that being the only sentence he had memorized I guess, it didn't go much farther than that. Then he asked me where I was from. Upon learning that I was American (the ID card fiasco was just for show since it was rather apparent that he couldn't read it) he promptly gave me back my license and told me to get back in the van and go. I decided at the next checkpoint I should give them my university ID card - it has a nicer picture on it! Fortunately, none of the other checkpoints needed to see any ID from me. We stopped several times for prayers - everybody spread out their mats beside the road. Apparently not everybody agreed about where exactly Mecca was, because they weren't all facing the same direction, but I guess it is the thought that counts.
We had a flat tire, which was changed fairly quickly. Later stopped to fix the first tire, and put it back on. Then it went flat again, and the spare went back on. Later on that one went flat too. There was another spare, but it was the wrong size, so for the rest of the trip every time we hit a big bump (bout every 10 feet) it scraped on the inside of the fender. The fuel filter clogged up a couple times, which involved the driver crawling under the fan, taking it off, blowing through it and I suppose cuffing it under the left ear a couple times, and putting it back in. Eventually he started cursing at it (I can deduce that by the tone of voice even if I don't speak Arabic) and threw it across the road into a field and just hooked the hoses together. He did stop later at a town and got another one.
After dark we stopped at one barricade and I sat under a tree (it was raining) listening to a big uproar around a fire a couple hundred feet away in the village there. Later on the uproar changed and became a drumbeat and everybody started dancing, so I guess they were all friends. The stars are amazing when you are in the bush. We stopped in yet another tiny town after midnight, and everybody rolled out their mats and curled up went to sleep on them. Me being mat-less and unprepared, I went to what I think was a market (in the daytime) down the street and found a table, but the table had leftovers all over it, so I slept on a bench slightly narrower than a Chinese sleeper bus bed, but longer and with plenty of fresh air. There were so many stars the outline of the tree next to me was like a silhouette. Some 'village dogs' came by and sniffed at me cause I smelled funny, but there was enough Chadian dirt on me that they weren't too suspicious. We were there about four hours, then got up and left again before daylight.
We got to N'djamena the next evening, 30 hours after leaving Sarh, and precisely two hours before my flight to Paris took off. I did succeed in getting a room with a shower (no small task in Chad) and cleaning up a bit before getting on the plane. After bribing my way back out through customs, I was directed out to the runway where I went through Air France security (all of it imported with the plane) and found myself inside one of those airport fences, in a little circle on the runway that was designated to be a piece of France for an hour or so. They had Le Monde and Le Figaro on a news rack there, they had chairs that were nicer than anything else I sat on in the whole country, and getting on the plane the stewardess said bonsoir and stepped on a stowaway Chadian cockroach running in the door. So I said goodbye to Chad.
Had a wonderful and comfortable week in Sweden with my friend there, although it was all a bit surreal, then came home. America is such a funny place. And that is the end of my year of collecting stories and experiences from far away - I hope all my friends reading this are well and stay in touch!
Zaijian, tambiet, , kwaheri, au revoir
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