The Committed (The Sympathizer #2)

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

As for America, just think of Coca-Cola. That elixir is really something, embodying as it does the addictive, teeth-decaying sweetness of a capitalism that was no good for you no matter how it fizzled on the tongue. But it is not charming, not like freshly brewed dark coffee served in a thimble-sized cup on a miniature plate with a doll’s spoon, delivered by a waiter as assured in the value of his profession as a banker or an art collector.

The American Way of Life! Eat too much, work too much, buy too much, read too little, think even less, and die in poverty and insecurity.

Colonies were a pearl choker adorning the alabaster-white neck of the colonizer.

It had not occurred to me until now, blind man that I was and surely still am, that the serpent was Adam’s own uncontrollable penis, which the writer of the Book of Genesis had detached from Adam and flung into the grass.

Those who believe in revolutions are the ones who haven’t lived through one yet.

Now your only choice is capitalism and its pseudo-democracy, its trickery of false choices. For if communism is bad, then capitalism must be good, yes? No! Capitalists love to point out how tens of millions have died under Stalin and Mao, all while conveniently forgetting how hundreds of millions have died under capitalism. What were colonialism and slavery but forms of capitalism? What was the genocide of the natives of the Americas but capitalism? But let’s forget about those nasty contradictions of capitalism and focus on what the communists have done!

You are upset because I made you see yourself. You like to think of yourself as just a man, not a white man, unless you call yourself white, with a certain kind of self-aware irony. But for me to call you a white man is unacceptable, downright racist, even if you yourself and all white people routinely say of someone “an Asiatic woman” or “a black man,” as if a black man were not just a man as you are just a man. So what if I noticed your whiteness—how unforgivable! I suppose the only thing ruder would be to notice your penis.

You don’t need to ask for forgiveness for me to forgive you, I said. I don’t want your forgiveness! he shouted. Fuck you and your forgiveness! You don’t have to want my forgiveness. I am just giving it to you.

Here he read the classics, rowed crew, and prepped to become a shock trooper of American exceptionalism, which is how Americans delicately refer to “American imperialism,” a phrase that one must never say to Americans, who sincerely believe, as all imperialists do, that they have taken over the world for its own good, as if imperialism were a kind of penicillin (for the natives), with power, profit, and pleasure merely being surprising side effects (for the doctors).