Assorted Notes

FRIDAY, 12 APRIL 2019

It is almost a full-time job these days to keep abreast of all the issues buzzing in the media if you want to express your opinion every now and then and not sound stupid. There’s nuclear power, human-related global warming, immigration, right to privacy, freedom of speech, gun rights, use of antibiotics on humans and animals, Donald Trump and Brexit, use of chemicals in agriculture, genetic modification, elites against populists, tax policy, gender politics, people who were born with a Y chromosome and developed into adult males who currently identify as women and participate in sports against other people who were born without a Y chromosome and developed into adult females.

Who can keep up?

Strange thing is, you can’t even talk about these topics, or start expressing an opinion without first making sure which of the basic rules that were accepted until recently in dialogue and debate are still applicable. Does scientific research still matter? Does it matter if ideas have been tested according to accepted scientific methodology, have yielded certain results, have been re-tested and yielded similar results? Is there still room for logical reasoning? Can one still say something is true, or not true?

TUESDAY, 14 MAY 2019

Connections between my native South Africa and my adopted homeland of Taiwan

The United East India Company established a re-supply and layover station in the southwesternmost tip of Africa in the mid-seventeenth century. The family trees of millions of South Africans (including my own family) have ultimately grown and branched out from the original Dutch fortress to the rest of Southern Africa.

The very same United East India Company had already established a presence in southern Taiwan, then known as Formosa, in the early seventeenth century.

There’s one big difference between the two places. The Cape of Good Hope was in the middle of nowhere – which is why it was a good place for a refreshment post. Taiwan, on the other hand, was the centre of commercial activity: Tokugawa Japan to the north, Ming China to the west, and Spanish Philippines to the south. Then there were the Portuguese in Macau, and the waters between the places were infested with pirates who in some cases had lucrative relations with the Dutch, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Spaniards, and the Portuguese.

One similarity between the two Dutch fortresses: local people who had to quickly figure out how to deal with the pale faces with their long hair, and their tubes blowing deadly balls. In the Cape it was the Khoikhoi (also called Khoekhoen) – nomadic cattle farmers, and the San – who were hunter-gatherers. In Taiwan, there were about two dozen Austronesian tribes who were mostly hunters, and occasionally traded with Chinese visitors to the island (before the Dutch arrived).

Another difference is what happened to the Dutch. In South Africa they, and other Europeans, formed the foundation of the white population of present-day South Africa. The Dutch language in the form of Afrikaans, as well as European religion and culture are to this day part of the South African nation. In Taiwan, Dutch control of mostly the western coast of the island was challenged by Ming loyalist Chen Cheng-gong a few decades after their arrival. By 1662, the Dutch had finally lost the battle. Nearly all the survivors, except for a few women taken hostage by the new master of Taiwan, left the island. Only a small number of buildings and some stone walls from the era remain standing to this day.

WEDNESDAY, 9 OCTOBER 2019

I, like most people, fear bad news. It will deprive me of my happiness, I reckon, undermine my sense of general well-being, even deprive me of my right to happiness (“How can I be happy if …?”).

Three points about this:

1. It is a proven fact that you find more effective solutions to problems, and better prepare yourself for setbacks, if you maintain a good baseline for personal happiness most of the time.

2. Your baseline happiness will take a hit when you hear bad news, but it will eventually recover.

3. In every city, town, and hamlet in the world people get bad news on a daily basis – especially the kind you don’t recover from overnight, such as the death of a loved one. If enough people believed that it would be inappropriate for them to ever experience happiness again, it would have a similar effect on the community as a deadly virus. Within a few short years there would only be a minority of people left who would still be considered entitled to happiness (difficult to say how even that would be possible, given how connected people are to each other these days).

FRIDAY, 22 NOVEMBER 2019

I would have to address the issue at some point that I was attracted to socialism for a period of my life, even after realising in late 2003 that my personal beliefs are more in line with classical liberalism than with Marxism/Communism.

The key thought: For me, a socialist state was a world where you wouldn’t feel like a loser just because you weren’t good at “making money”. And for a long time in my life, I thought of myself as exactly that person.

THURSDAY, 28 NOVEMBER 2019

In my mid-twenties and early thirties … I was always looking for seeds that I could plant, something that could bring me a return. “If I could only get the right seed, I’ll prosper!” I thought. Lots of seed came my way, more than I could ever plant. I spent money on seeds, thinking that the seeds you buy would be of better quality than the seeds you get for free. Then I’d plant the seed, and not much would come up (“what am I doing wrong?”). Or the yield was too meagre, or the plant died.

Was the seed bad? Some of it was, but enough was of high enough quality.

The problem was the soil. I never prepared the soil for the seed.

How should I have prepared the soil – myself and my mindset – for the seed from the beginning, from my early twenties? I should have quit smoking, eaten healthier, gotten enough rest and exercised every day. I should have expanded my skills – another language, business writing, basic psychology, persuasion skills, basic web design, graphic software … not necessarily to make money with it, just to prepare the soil.

TUESDAY, 3 DECEMBER 2019

Years after you made mistakes or walked down the wrong paths, you’re still stuck with the result – with the scars, and the crippled legs or crooked arms. It’s like Morgan Freeman’s character in the film Shawshank Redemption said to the parole officer after a few decades in prison: “There’s not a day goes by I don’t feel regret. Not because I’m in here, or because you think I should. I look back on the way I was then: a young, stupid kid who committed that terrible crime. I want to talk to him. I want to try and talk some sense to him, tell him the way things are. But I can’t. That kid’s long gone and this old man is all that’s left. I got to live with that.”

What do you do? You accept responsibility for your actions. You then continue to live as someone better – not as the same person who made specific mistakes or committed transgressions. You do better. You live better. You work hard to be a new person. Every morning when we wake up, each of us has the opportunity to renew ourselves mentally, and to start a physical process that could later be regarded as nothing less than a rebirth.

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SUNDAY, 17 NOVEMBER 2019

Sometimes you become interested in something, and then, once you start learning more about it, you lose interest. The Vietnam War (1955-1975, or more specifically 1962-1973) is not such a historical theme. My interest in the war was initially aroused by the 1982 Sylvester Stallone movie, First Blood, about the veteran struggling with the local authorities in a small town in America. The main character, John Rambo, experiences flashbacks of his time in Southeast Asia. He remembers booby traps and ambushes in the dense jungles of Vietnam, as he tries to survive in a similar environment outside a fictional town in Washington state.

In time, information drifted into my teenage brain that America – the strongest military power in the world – had lost the war in Vietnam – a country of mostly poor peasants.

My interest was aroused, to say the least.

By the mid-eighties, there was the Oliver Stone movie, Platoon – which I didn’t quite understand, other than that everything was messed up and that the Americans couldn’t work out what went wrong. A few years later, the series, Tour of Duty, showed on South African television translated into Afrikaans as Sending Viëtnam (Mission Vietnam), with as theme song the ominous Rolling Stones number, “Paint It Black”.

For me as a teenager, with music from the era with which I identified more easily than with 1940s music, the Vietnam War felt closer than the more well-known World War II we learned about in school. Add to that the mystery of the American defeat, with half of America supporting the war, and the other half marching furiously through the streets, and later even veterans of the war growing their hair and beards and protesting against the war, and it’s no surprise that the Vietnam story became a glowing lamp for the moth of my interest.

Although the old Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh City, is only a three-hour flight from where we live in southern Taiwan, I never strongly considered going there until recently. Maybe I reckoned that post-war Vietnam with its billboards advertising Coca-Cola and with commercial districts filled with modern office buildings would be somewhat of a disappointment to the serious student of History.

Nevertheless, by mid-2019 we decided the time had come, and by August our tickets had been booked.

* * *

I have read quite a bit about John F. Kennedy and the war, and Lyndon Johnson and the war. I read about the background of the war including the French colonial period; the period during World War II when Japan finally took control, and then withdrew; the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union; the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis. I read about Ho Chi-Minh and the quest for national liberation, and about the legendary victory Vietnamese nationalists achieved over the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. I read about the Diem regime, about Buddhist protests against the South Vietnamese government, about the monk who set himself on fire in the middle of a busy intersection in Saigon in 1963, and about the Dragon Lady who said if more monks wanted to set themselves on fire, she would gladly provide the matches. And I read about Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon in the last years of American engagement, when everyone already knew that America had made a colossal mistake to get involved in Vietnam (and that it was, to put it simply, a monumental fuck-up).

Having said that, my interest was always more audio-visual than academic: Images of rice paddies with peasants in conical hats bent over in the hot sun; American soldiers walking in a line on the wall of a rice paddy, machine guns ready for any incident; huts with thatched roofs in small hamlets set on fire by an American soldier; soldiers with panicked faces in a jungle; the Vietcong in black pyjamas flashing through the dense vegetation, only to disappear seconds later into a tunnel network; helicopters flying nose forward over rice fields and jungles, with a gaping open door, and a soldier leaning on a machine gun. And then of course the music from the mid to late sixties, and the early seventies.

* * *

On Sunday, 10 November 2019, I enjoyed my usual breakfast in our apartment in Kaohsiung, southern Taiwan, like any other morning. By Sunday night, N. and I were in Ho Chi Minh City. We arrived that afternoon at Tan Son Nhat International Airport, which at one point was one of the busiest military bases in the world.

The process of going through immigration and customs was more laboured than one might be used to. We had to download a form from a webpage two weeks before our departure, fill it in and email it back – on which we received another letter showing our names with our passport numbers along with the names of two or three dozen other people who would also go through immigration that day. After landing, we had to hand this letter – which we had to print out – with our passports and twenty US dollars cash to someone behind a counter. Our names were called after fifteen minutes, and then we were allowed to join the long queue to get stamps in our passports.

After immigration we got SIM cards (very easy, and cheap), and walked straight to a bus stop where the correct number bus happened to be waiting. And we were on our way – through busy streets full of motorcycles and scooters and taxis and buses and brightly-lit shops. More or less in the vicinity of our lodgings, we wandered through the streets for about fifteen minutes, and after finding our hotel in a colourful alley, we enjoyed our first dinner.

Monday morning we hit the streets. First stop was the War Remnants Museum – where tanks, aircraft and helicopters abandoned by the Americans on their withdrawal in 1973 are on display. The museum also has numerous items and photographs of the cost of the war – not just in material terms, but the terrible costs paid by ordinary men, women and children.

Next stop was the Independence Palace, built in 1963 at the behest of the then South Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh Diem, after the previous building that served as presidential residence was partially destroyed by two bombs intended to get rid of him.

The palace is a time capsule – furniture and carpets from the 1960s and 1970s, maps on the walls of war rooms where generals and politicians discussed strategy, books in the library, telephones and other communications devices that gather dust in rooms in the basement that served as a bomb shelter.

There’s even a helicopter on the roof at the back of the building that still seems to be waiting to transport the last president of South Vietnam to safety. That the helicopter is still on the roof is a testament to the fact that the last president, Duong Van Minh, the third president in ten days and in the hot seat for only two days, refused to flee, even when North Vietnamese tanks and troops finally burst through the gates on 30 April 1975.

To round off the visit, we viewed a separate exhibit on prominent Vietnam leaders over the past 150 years or so, and then went to take photos at two tanks parked near the gates that were so unceremoniously flattened in April ’75.

The next day was gentler on the mind: the old Saigon Central Post Office, inaugurated in 1891, and the Notre Dame Cathedral, about ten years older than the post office.

Then it was the turn of the Gia Long Palace – now the Ho Chi Minh City Museum. The palace was built in the late 1880s to serve as a museum, but for decades had been used as an official residence by various civil servants.

The exhibits were interesting enough, but my interest was more the events of late 1963. On 1 November of that year, a group of South Vietnamese generals launched a coup against the government of Ngo Dinh Diem. Diem and his younger brother and main advisor, Ngo Dinh Nhu, their older brother, Ngo Dinh Thuc, and other relatives had lived in the Gia Long Palace since Diem ordered the Presidential Palace (the old colonial governor’s residence) to be demolished and rebuilt in 1962. By late afternoon of November 1st, the brothers were aware of developments, and escaped the palace through a secret tunnel.

After the palace, we checked in at the Saigon Metropolitan Opera House (dating back to 1897), stopped for beer and sandwiches, and then walked the two kilometres or so to the Vietnam History Museum via Google Maps instructions.

On Wednesday we were up early to join the two-hour tour to the Cu Chi Tunnels – part of an extensive network of tunnels used between the fifties and the seventies to smuggle weapons, troops, food and other supplies into South Vietnam. As it befits a tourist attraction, there were refreshments and souvenirs for sale.

For me this was quite an important experience: after so many films and TV shows about the war to stand in a real piece of Vietnamese jungle.

For a price you could also play soldier and pull the trigger a few times on one of the weapons used during the conflict: R40 ($2.60) per bullet for M16 and AK47; somewhat cheaper for other weapons.

After going for a light lunch back in Ho Chi Min at the Ben Thanh Market, it was time for a bit of a pilgrimage for me. I had been fascinated for some time by the act of protest of the Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, who set himself on fire at a busy intersection in the then Saigon on 11 June 1963. For years, there had been strife between the Diem government and the Buddhist majority population, and Duc’s self-sacrifice made front page news worldwide. I had been under the impression that the incident occurred in the city of Hue (that’s where his blue car is still kept), so when I read the previous night in my Wikipedia research that it did indeed take place in Saigon, I knew I had to see the intersection for myself. As it happened, the intersection was only about ten blocks straight down the road from our hotel.

That night we strolled around the commercial district and walked past the Rex Hotel – another iconic war-era building. The first guests, 400 US troops, signed in in 1961. They were the first company-strength soldiers to arrive in Vietnam, and stayed in the Rex for a week until their camp was ready. The hotel was also where the US military leaders held their daily press conference during the war. And the rooftop bar was where military officials and war correspondents hung out every night. In 1976, it was also at this hotel where the reunification of Vietnam was announced.

On Thursday, I dragged my travel companion to another place of importance only to people with a somewhat extreme interest in either the former South Vietnam or the Vietnam War, or both.

As mentioned earlier, the two Ngo brothers were aware of a coup attempt against their rule in November 1963. After escaping through a secret tunnel, they were taken to the Chinese business district in Saigon. They spent a few hours at an ally’s house, then went to the St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church. Here they sat at the back of the church while an early service was underway. Shortly afterwards, they were recognised in the courtyard of the church, and by 10:00 in the morning an armoured personnel carrier with two jeeps stopped in front of the church. The two brothers were arrested. The plan was to take them to military headquarters, but when the convoy stopped at a railroad crossing, the bodyguard of one of the coup leaders first killed one brother, and then the other in the back of the vehicle (it is still not clear exactly what happened and why).

Seeing that I was knee-deep in sixties politics and South Vietnam and the war by this time, it made sense to pay a visit to the church where the brothers spent their last moments before their downfall.

After the church, we walked a few blocks to a Tao temple.

Then we returned to modern Ho Chi Minh where we enjoyed lunch in the Bitexco Financial Tower.

After lunch we took the elevator to the viewing deck.

Our last attraction for the day was the Ho Chi Minh City Museum of Fine Arts. The main building was constructed between 1929 and 1934 as a residence for the Hua family. The museum moved to the premises in 1987. There are several rooms with beautiful and interesting works of art, but what attracted my attention most were the architecture, the rooms themselves, and things like the staircases, the shutters and the stained glass windows.

Friday morning we were on the sidewalk early to take a bus back to the airport. Like when we arrived, the bus was on time and very comfortable. At the airport we had to stand in another long, winding cue. We rewarded ourselves with a pleasant breakfast in the Duty Free section. About an hour after our designated departure time, a bus dropped us of at an airplane with a photo of a Vietnamese woman with a bottle of Coca-Cola in the hand. Strange concrete structures on the edge of the runway were a last reminder that this piece of land and the country itself were just a few decades removed from one of the most brutal conflicts of the twentieth century.

Two hours after we landed, I was already back in a class in Taiwan. And Saturday morning it was breakfast again at home – like any regular weekend.

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To view more photos, please visit my Flickr albums:

War Remnants Museum

Independence Palace

Gia Long Palace

Museum of Vietnamese History

Cu Chi Tunnels, Vietnam

Ho Chi Minh City Museum of Fine Arts

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TUESDAY, 29 OCTOBER 2019

12:48

I am working on the piece “Poisonous plant in the Garden of your Thoughts” from March 2019:

“But what’s easy, and what’s difficult?” came the question again. I knew it was important to answer because for decades I believed it must be hard to make money, to be successful, to make your dreams come true. It must be a struggle. But how difficult? When has one struggled enough?

“The answer you’re looking for even though you haven’t asked the right question,” emerged the thought from the part of my brain that hadn’t actively been talking out loud in the shower, “is that you’ll never make it. That was your actual programming. The struggle part is just because you have to do something. You have to try. Otherwise, what are you doing with your life?”

I thought: It’s almost as if two cosmic characters have been observing what I do over the years, with one asking the other, “Shouldn’t we just tell him?”

“What?” the other guy asks. “That he’s just a machine executing his programming, that he’s not supposed to make it? No, let’s not. His struggles give him something to do. It gives meaning to his life. What else is he going to do – sit around and watch TV all day, get fat, get sick, and die? The struggle gives him hope. Hope gives him something to live for.”

12:57

“Wow, how much longer do I have to struggle? Why is everything so difficult for me? Why does it seem like I know what to do, but I don’t do it? ” asks a fictional version of me from the not-too-distant past.

One of my cosmic observers suddenly shrugs his shoulders, and looks in the direction of the balcony where the other observer is staring into the distance.

“What?” the fictional version of me asks. “Do you know something I don’t?”

The cosmic observer widens his eyes. His eyebrows go up. His head tilts. “Well …”

“Come on! Out with it!” I prompt.

The observer slowly shakes his head. “I can get in trouble for this,” he begins. “I’m not supposed to tell you anything.”

“But you’re here now, and we’re talking, and the other guy is on the balcony, and I already know you want to say something.”

“Okay,” the observer sighs. “The fact of the matter is that you’re not supposed to make it. Sorry … You’re supposed to struggle all your life, and then you die. It’s your programming.”

“My programming?” asks the fictional version of me from the not-too-distant past shocked. “What does it mean? Everything I do is in vain?”

“Well, not quite. You see … you’re basically a machine that’s only executing your programming. All your efforts and projects and struggles … give you something to fill your days with. I mean, what else would you do? It gives you something to believe in. It gives you hope for a better tomorrow. And it’s better to believe in something and hope for something than to have no hope and faith, is not it?”

“So I’m just a machine that follows my programming, and then I die?”

“Well … it may sound strange, but the truth is more complex. To be honest, it’s much better, and much more hopeful than that. It’s just – and all the cosmic observers agree – that most people just follow their programming, live more or less happy lives – some by nature much happier than others, and then they die. So, you’re like most people in this regard. And you are happy most of the time, aren’t you?”

“But there’s so much more I want to do, so much more of life I want to enjoy, so much more I want to experience. And if I can do it … I know how to explain things to other people so they can also have a better understanding, so that they can also solve more of their own problems, and live better lives, and enable their children to live better lives.”

“Well,” the cosmic observer starts again, “nothing has been determined here. That’s what most people never realise. Most people live their lives without ever realising that they can reprogram themselves. There is no central point or figure in the cosmos that programs everyone, and then they just have to slavishly follow their programming. People program each other. Parents program their children. People in positions of authority program people who look to them for guidance. And so the world goes on. Us cosmic observers just keep an eye on everything. We control nothing. You pull your own strings. Most people just never break through the thin paper wall that stands between them and the fuller life that can be theirs at any time. Believe me, you are not the only person with flawed or problematic programming. I mean, there are people with problematic programming when it comes to romantic relationships, when it comes to alcohol and drugs, when it comes to relationships with people who don’t think or live or believe like them. You don’t want to know how many people die every day as victims of their problematic programming. And I’m not saying it’s always easy, but people can look at their own programming, and they can change what’s not working. People have enormous capacity to transform themselves and live lives that are fuller than they could ever dream of. But most people are, sorry to say, to a large extent machines that most of the time just execute their programming. It doesn’t have to be this way. You have access to the keyboard and the interface to change your programming. Nothing is predetermined. You are in control of your own life.”

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MONDAY, 7 OCTOBER 2019

I don’t care what the skin colour, gender or sexual orientation is of the state president or any national leader, as long as they are competent and have the interests of the republic and its citizens at heart.

I don’t care what the skin colour or sexual orientation of the players of any national sports team is, as long as they are the best players the country can offer.

I don’t care what the skin colour, gender or sexual orientation is of the mayor, or the members of the town or city council, or the representatives of the community in parliament or any other council, as long as they are competent and know what they are doing, and carry the interests of the people they represent at heart.

I also do not care what the skin colour, gender or sexual orientation is of my boss, or manager, or supervisor, as long as he or she is competent, and has the interests of the business, the customers, and the employees at heart.

Lastly, I don’t care what the skin colour, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, language or cultural background is of the commercial farmer who supplies the food I buy in the supermarket – as long as they continue to provide food.

After all, what white person would not care if an incompetent, corrupt person is in charge of the national government or the local municipality, or the town or city or province’s water or garbage removal or infrastructure or health services or schools, as long as the person is white? What person in their sanity would want that? Any reasonable person would say: Give the position to the most competent person who will look after the interests of the community, regardless of their skin colour, gender, or sexual orientation.

Why, then, should one be careful when complaining about incompetent people in leadership positions, just because the person you are complaining about is black? Incompetent is incompetent, corrupt is corrupt, dishonest is dishonest, and deceptive is deceptive, no matter if you are white and the person you are complaining about is also white, or if you are black and the person you are complaining about is black.

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