Category: scene report

Powerful argument against the current push to ban books (emphasis added):

When I was 12 or 13 years old, I was not prepared for the racism, the brutality or the sexual assault in Larry Heinemann’s 1977 novel, “Close Quarters.”

Mr. Heinemann, a combat veteran of the war in Vietnam, wrote about a nice, average American man who goes to war and becomes a remorseless killer. In the book’s climax, the protagonist and other nice, average American soldiers gang-rape a Vietnamese prostitute they call Claymore Face.

As a Vietnamese American teenager, it was horrifying for me to realize that this was how some Americans saw Vietnamese people — and therefore me. I returned the book to the library, hating both it and Mr. Heinemann.

Here’s what I didn’t do: I didn’t complain to the library or petition the librarians to take the book off the shelves. Nor did my parents. It didn’t cross my mind that we should ban “Close Quarters” or any of the many other books, movies and TV shows in which racist and sexist depictions of Vietnamese and other Asian people appear.

Instead, years later, I wrote my own novel about the same war, “The Sympathizer.”

Congratulations on the latest entry into the “10thumbs Hated Phrase Hall of Fame”:

Do Your Research.

Seen (frustratingly) here in a NYT article about how to find a quality mask. Frustrating because I literally was doing my research by reading this article. Why must I go do more research?!?

The term is also used in conjunction with making “choices” like which health insurance plan is “right for you” (hint: none are right for you — we should get rid of them all and have a national health insurance system that covers everyone from craddle to grave.)

Previous inductees include: Messaging, shortening Communications to “comms”

On the way to our morning hike, I played Democracy Now’s special on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The first part was a 20 minute excerpt from his 1967 “Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence” speech at NYC’s Riverside Church. In addition to being intrigued by Dr. King’s cadence — and the core thesis that “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism” were (and still are) the greatest threats to our society — I was struck by this section (emphasis added):

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

The idea that deaths come in threes gets a boost this week. First Bob Moses, then today I learned that Bill Onasch (longtime labor activist and a Labor Party stalwart from Kansas City) lost his battle with cancer last month and that Richard Trumpka passed away yesterday. That freedom banner got a bit heavier.