Gerard Sasges's Blog, page 2

an automotive Gini coefficient

It may seem odd for someone whose mantra these days is “I hate cars,” but truth be told I spent a large part of my adolescence reading, re-reading, then re-reading again my brother’s collection of Road and Track and Car and Driver magazines from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.  I was car- and motorbike-crazy, and would happily rattle off the 0-60 time of pretty much every car ever built, tell you exactly when Ferrari switched to fuel injection on the 308, and take quiet pride in the fact that our family’s school-bus yellow Volvo 144 had Weber carbs instead of the standard Strombergs.  Part of what made my car-mania so much fun was the belief that some day I might actually be able to own one of the cars I dreamed of:  the intriguing Porsche 911, maybe, or the giant-beating BMW 2002 tii, or the gorgeous Ferrari Dino.  Sure they were expensive, but with a decent job, an understanding domestic partner, and a little luck on the used-car market, I thought, it might just happen.

I don’t think that’s possible any more, even if I wanted a car (and had the understanding domestic partner).   Over the last twenty years as neoliberal policies have redistributed the world’s wealth, so too have they reordered the world’s cars.  Not only has automotive styling taken on a markedly fascist flavor (see pretty much any SUV), but also it seemed to me that the increasing concentration of wealth was driving the high end of the automobile market ever higher.  Witness the reinvention of luxury brands like Bentley or Aston Martin, land yachts like Rolls Royce or Maybach, or the indescribably stupid Bugatti Veyron.  It’s hard not to think of the sort of automotive art produced in another era of stark inequality, the 1920s and 30s, when brands like Bugatti, Bentley, Aston Martin, Rolls Royce, and Maybach had their original heydays.

A few nights ago I decided to put my theory to the test and see if the automotive world might give us proof of an increasing gap between the rich and the not-so-rich.  My idea was to compare the MSRP of a “everyman’s car” with a supercar circa mid-1960 and then do the same for today.  If the ratio stayed constant, I’d give up, admit that neoliberalism was a good thing, and devote the rest of my life to undermining unions and dismantling socialized medicine.

For 1965, I chose the Volkswagen Beetle (the original one, thank you very much), which apparently sold for $1769 or thereabouts (East Coast).  Its distant cousin, the just-introduced 911 sold for a whopping $5,990 and a ratio of 1:3.38.  Fast forward to 2012.  A base Volkswagen Golf (sorry, the Golf is more “everyman” than the New Beetle) goes for $17,995, while a base 911 goes for $79,000, for a ratio of 1:4.4.   [2012 prices from the Edmund's website, 1960s prices culled from various sources, and in fact the Porsche price is from 1965 while the Beetle price is from 1967]

I was actually surprised to see that the ratio hadn’t increased more.  That is until I remembered:  no one buys the base model.  Back in the 1960s, options were limited.  Or, more precisely, non-existent.  But it’s a different and luxury-hungry world today, and the MSRP of a base model doesn’t tell us much about what people are really spending.  So, I figured, let’s option both our 2012 cars to the hilt and see what happens.  A 2012 Golf with every available option will set you back 22,195.  The 911?  Well, a 911 GT3 RS 4.0 will apparently set you back a cool $185,000.  Suddenly the ratio is 1:8.33.

I know this automotive Gini coefficient is a little rough-and-ready, but I still think it’s indicative of something.  Had I been wealthy in the sixties, I would have had the choice of filling my garage with a brand-new top-of-the-range Porsche, or 3 Volkswagens.  In 2012, my choice is between a Porsche, or 8 Volkswagens.   Something has changed here, and it’s not just the size of rich people’s garages.

workers of the world, congregate!

A few years ago, a friend of mine invited me to give a lecture on the Industrial Revolution in her class on “World Civilizations,” at Hanoi University’s Faculty of International Studies. I’m not sure if she knew what she or her students were in for. In addition to questioning how she was teaching “World Civilizations” as a story of the ineluctable and natural rise of the “West,” and deconstructing the conventional depiction of the Industrial Revolution as flowing from the combination of technology and free markets (i.e. why the “West” is so great and everyone else sucks), I also had her students read that great theorist of the Industrial Revolution, Karl Marx. Blame my twisted sense of humor, but I do find it curious that Vietnamese university students, who’ve spent hundreds of hours learning about Marxism and Scientific Socialism, have almost never read anything written by Marx himself. So I chose some excerpts from the Communist Manifesto, printed them in both English and Vietnamese, and gave them to the students (both versions available from www.marxists.org).

This was the first time I’d read a translation of Marx in Vietnamese, and I was struck by how bland it was. Granted, the English version wasn’t written by Marx himself, but it was translated with the help of Engels, so I have to assume it captures the flavor of Marx’s original German. And for me, at least, that flavor is pretty damn good, combining powerful images with incisive critique in prose that verges on poetry. I mean, how can you not be struck by something like “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”  But compare it with the Vietnamese. “Tất cả những quan hệ xã hội cứng đờ và hoen rỉ, với cả tràng những quan niệm và tư tưởng vốn được tôn sùng từ nghìn năm đi kèm những quan hệ ấy, đều đang tiêu tan; những quan hệ xã hội thay thế những quan hệ đó chưa kịp cứng lại thì đã già cỗi ngay. Tất cả những gì mang tính đẳng cấp và trí tuệ đều tiêu tan như mây khói; tất cả những gì là thiêng liêng đều bị ô uế, và rốt cuộc, mỗi người đều buộc phải nhìn những điều kiện sinh hoạt của họ và những quan hệ giữa họ với nhau bằng con mắt tỉnh táo.”  Call me crazy, but I don’t hear the music anymore.

It’s not just me: the students agreed that while the Vietnamese version was ho-hum, the English version was, well, surprisingly cool, and surprisingly relevant to their own experience of “Development.”  Why is this? Is it really impossible to translate the meaning and the poetry at the same time? Or does somebody out there want to put Vietnamese to sleep before they can begin to understand the power of Marx’s ideas? I don’t know, but I can only conclude that the first generation of Vietnamese Communists was reading their Marx in French, German, or Russian. Because if they were reading it in Vietnamese, they would have dozed right through the Revolution.

Vietnamese traffic police and the rule of law

Vietnamese traffic police [Cảnh Sát Giao Thông, or CSGT] are renowned for their venality. Anyone who drives in Vietnam will have at least one and quite probably dozens of stories of paying a bribe after being stopped for a minor or even non-existent infraction. The fact that the expression phạt tại chỗ, or “fined on the spot,” is part of everyday language illustrates just how widespread the practice is. In recent years, however, the proliferation of mobile phones with cameras has given ordinary Vietnamese a means of contesting this abuse of authority, and embarrassing footage of officers carrying out their “duty” has become a mainstay of print and online media over the past few years. While it may not be corruption, I find this amateur footage of a chase during which a traffic cop shoots two unarmed motorcyclists particularly compelling; before you get too appalled, though, note he was using rubber bullets.

In early August, its officers having been caught in the act one too many times, the CSGT issued a decree making it illegal to film an on-duty officer without first asking permission. Public reaction was immediate and fierce, even if the underlying issue of endemic corruption remained largely coded in the language of “inadequacies” and “negative behavior” (see for example article “What’s the CSGT doing that’s such a big secret?”. Even more interesting, by the end of the month, the Judicial Ministry (sorry if that sounds unwieldy, but it’s the literal translation of Bộ tư pháp, and one which avoids any reference to justice, or công lý) had weighed in to say the decree was unconstitutional. Thanks to this unexpected intervention, Vietnamese today are still free to film officers of the CSGT, whatever duties they may be carrying out.

On one level, this is simply another amusing episode in an epic story of administrative incompetence and corruption. Yet it might also tell us something about where we should locate Vietnam on the spectrum between “rule by law” and “rule of law.”  In a country where “rule by law” prevails, laws are simply a convenient means of governing. This sort of rule can be either principled, where the state drafts laws in the interests of its citizens, or despotic, where the laws simply serve the needs of the state and its officials. In contrast, “rule of law” is one where the state itself serves a prior law, whether of “natural” or historic origin, enshrined in documents like a Bill of Rights or a constitution, or some combination of the above. In this system, neither a branch of government nor its public officials are above the law.

Critics of Vietnam typically see it as a clear example of “rule by law.” But this little episode may show that Vietnam isn’t quite as far to one side of the spectrum as these critics would have it, just as recent revelations about American surveillance programs might raise similar questions about the American government. And at the very least, it shows that we need to be very careful about making generalizations about the Vietnamese state, and instead ask which branch of the Vietnamese state is doing what, where, when and how. Or maybe I’m overanalyzing. Maybe at the end of the day, somebody in the Judicial Ministry just got pissed after paying one too many bribes to traffic cops.

Motorcycle explorations

After I’d lived in Hanoi for a few years, people used to ask me how to make the most of their time in the country. My advice was simple: learn Vietnamese, eat street food, and get a motorbike. This last one was not advice I gave lightly: I knew all too well the dangers of riding a motorbike, dangers made even more acute as new riders adapted to the unwritten laws that govern how people really drive in Vietnam.

Yet not riding a motorbike meant being cut off from so much of life in Hanoi. Taking responsibility for your own mobility meant having to learn the city, its streets and alleys, districts and neighborhoods. It meant getting caught in a downpour and feeling your shoes slowly fill with water but not caring because the weather was warm and you’d dry out soon enough. It meant exploring the city at 3:00 AM and noticing the telltale signs of its illicit economies: a line of motorbikes still parked on the sidewalk, a security guard standing sleepily outside a karaoke bar, dim blue lights still on at a haircut om. It meant riding aimlessly along the Red River and discovering private ferries operating much as they had a century ago before the construction of the Long Bien and Chuong Duong Bridges.

I’d been slow to take my own advice since living in Singapore. I live a 15-minute walk from my office, the public transit system is superb, and taxis usually plentiful and always cheap. But as time went on it began to bother me that I had very little understanding of the city. For me, Singapore existed as a series of isolated neighborhoods linked only by MRT or bus rides. Even worse, I didn’t know where to go if I needed a bowl of prawn mee at 5:00 AM. And so I spent last Friday afternoon at the Traffic Police office in Bukit Batok getting my Singaporean license. The nice aunties at the counter thought they were just giving me a license to drive, but really they were giving me permission to make their city my own, just like I had Hanoi more than a decade earlier.

Teaspoons and everyday life

I once read an entry in Georges Perec’s posthumously published notebooks that said simply, “Interrogate your teaspoons.” I couldn’t help thinking of Perec’s words several years later when, waiting for my luggage after a flight back to Hanoi, I found the conveyor belt to be occupied not by the usual bags, boxes and suitcases, but rather by a solitary teaspoon. It circulated contentedly, secure in the knowledge of the chain of events that had placed it on a luggage carousel at Noi Bai airport at two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. I watched it for the next 20 minutes or so until my bag arrived, wishing there was some way I could get its story.

It’s the desire to interrogate the things, people, and processes that make up our everyday that underlies my work. Whether in my books, articles, or blog posts, I’m interested in uncovering stories and figuring out what they might mean. Some of the stories are textual and some visual, but all of them are part of an ongoing attempt to understand our world a little better.

Image copyright Mai Huyền Chi