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Your father was a colonizer and a pedophile, which go hand in hand. Colonization is pedophilia. The paternal country rapes and molests its unfortunate pupils, all in the holy and hypocritical name of the civilizing mission!
The danger with worshipping human beings, of course, is that eventually they reveal their flawed humanity, at which point the believer has no choice but to kill the fallen idols or die trying.
No, boat people were victims, objects of pity fixed forever in newspaper photographs. Part of me, my mama’s baby, wanted that pity.
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.
A Honda Dream? Was I dreaming? The Japanese, after proving that they could make transistor radios and tape cassette recorders, were now making dreams, too? I had never heard of such a dream until this dream, but now that I had heard of it, I wanted that Japanese Dream, too! How dreamy! It must be so much better than an American Dream! The American Dream was so simple and so optimistic that it required no psychoanalysis, no deep-sea diving. It was as shallow, boring, and sentimental as a bad television show that had somehow become a hit. The Japanese Dream, however, must be really kinky.
Prospero’s response was self-serving: “I’ve tried to save you, above all from yourself.” There, the civilizing mission! And then: “I shall set aside my indulgent nature and henceforth I will answer your violence with violence!” There, the cannons of civilization! And blaming the colonized for a situation the colonizer created.
And just as the French did everything with élan and finesse, both terms that they coined, so must those of us who are professionals in “intelligence” carry out our tasks with skill.
“Their Vietnam”? What did that mean? Was that like saying, We’ll always have Paris?
She’s a really good lawyer, my aunt said admiringly. As an editor, she had very high standards about prose and ideas, which she conflated with her judgments of people. There aren’t too many lawyers willing to defend Pol Pot.
You lived through what Gramsci called a war of maneuver. Violence, revolution, or at least confrontations in the streets. Me, I am in what Gramsci called a war of position. The war for ideas, for alliances, coalitions, new movements; the struggle for a new vision—
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).
