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November 6 - November 13, 2025
my way of seeing the world still seemed more of a virtue than a danger, which is how some dangers first appear.
She was a poor person, I was her poor child, and no one asks poor people if they want war.
(Nothing, the General muttered, is ever so expensive as what is offered for free.)
She had a mind like an abacus, the spine of a drill instructor, and the body of a virgin even after five children.
Americans liked seeing people eye to eye, the General had once told me, especially as they screwed them from behind.
Even God and Noah couldn’t save everyone. Or wouldn’t, anyway.
One did not depend on marines for good table manners. One depended on them to have the right instincts when it came to matters of life and death.
My mother called me her love child, but I do not like to dwell on that. In the end, my father had it right. He called me nothing at all.
he was a sincere man who believed in everything he said, even if it was a lie, which makes him not so different from most.
Even if they found themselves in Heaven, our countrymen would find occasion to remark that it was not as warm as Hell.
I accepted the absurd state of our state with a mix of despair and anger, along with a dash of humor, a cocktail under whose influence I renewed my revolutionary vows.
Although every country thought itself superior in its own way, was there ever a country that coined so many “super” terms from the federal bank of its narcissism, was not only superconfident but also truly superpowerful, that would not be satisfied until it locked every nation of the world into a full nelson and made it cry Uncle Sam?
It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends.
I was uncertain whether these traits were genetic, deeply cultural, or simply a rapid evolutionary development.
Despair may be thick, but friendship’s thicker.
it was only a short way to our parked C-130 Hercules. The plane was a garbage truck with wings attached, and like a garbage truck deposits were made from the rear, where its big flat cargo ramp dropped down to receive us.
But to a bureaucrat paper was never just paper. Paper was life!
he swallowed his pill of Catholicism seriously. He was more embarrassed and discreet about sex than about things I thought more difficult, like killing people, which pretty much defined the history of Catholicism, where sex of the homo, hetero, or pederastic variety supposedly never happened, hidden underneath the Vatican’s cassocks. Popes, cardinals, bishops, priests, and monks carrying on with women, girls, boys, and each other? Hardly ever discussed! Not that there was anything wrong with carrying on—it’s hypocrisy that stinks, not sex. But the Church torturing, murdering, crusading
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A man doesn’t need balls in this country, Captain. The women all have their own.
I liked my scotch undiluted, like I liked my truth. Unfortunately, undiluted truth was as affordable as eighteen-year-old single malt scotch.
As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape.
Original Sin was simply too unoriginal for someone like me, born from a father who spoke of it at every Mass.
He was a relatively innocent man, which was the best one could hope for in this world.
Besides my conscience, my liver was the most abused part of my body.
And that was no lie. It was, instead, the best kind of truth, the one that meant at least two things.
I might have been just half an Asian, but in America it was all or nothing when it came to race. You were either white or you weren’t.
I naively believed that I could divert the Hollywood organism from its goal, the simultaneous lobotomization and pickpocketing of the world’s audiences.
sometimes I dreamed of trying to pull a mask off my face, only to realize that the mask was my face.
glad to be in the land where the pursuit of happiness was guaranteed in writing, which, when one comes to think about it, is not such a great deal. Now a guarantee of happiness—that’s a great deal. But a guarantee to be allowed to pursue the jackpot of happiness? Merely an opportunity to buy a lottery ticket. Someone would surely win millions, but millions would surely pay for it.
I had only lived there, and people who live in a given place may have difficulty seeing its charms as well as its faults, both of which are easily available to the tourist’s freshly peeled eyes.
I was in a familiar place, the place of feeling unfamiliar,
he responded with one of those looks of pity and amusement I was by now so used to getting, the kind that implied not only that my fly was undone, but that there was nothing to see even if it was.
Every paranoid person is right at least once, said the tall sergeant. When he dies.
They believe in a universe of divine justice where the human race is guilty of sin, but they also believe in a secular justice where human beings are presumed innocent. You can’t have both. You know how Americans deal with it? They pretend they are eternally innocent no matter how many times they lose their innocence.
But amnesia was as American as apple pie, and it was much preferred by Americans over both humble pie and the fraught foods of foreign intruders.
Resentment was an antidote to gloominess, as it was for sadness, melancholy, despair, etc. One way to forget a certain kind of pain was to feel another kind of pain,
But what is more revolutionary than helping one’s enemy and his kin? What is more radical than forgiveness?
playing hard to get even though she had no idea I was here to be gotten.
After all, nothing was more American than wielding a gun and committing oneself to die for freedom and independence, unless it was wielding that gun to take away someone else’s freedom and independence.
What am I dying for? he cried back. I’m dying because this world I’m living in isn’t worth dying for! If something is worth dying for, then you’ve got a reason to live.
Wars never die, I said. They just go to sleep.
If youth was not wasted, how could it be youth?
I was in close quarters with some representative specimens of the most dangerous creature in the history of the world, the white man in a suit.
As a nonwhite person, the General, like myself, knew he must be patient with white people, who were easily scared by the nonwhite. Even with liberal white people, one could go only so far, and with average white people one could barely go anywhere.
You tried to play their game, okay? But they run the game. You don’t run anything. That means you can’t change anything. Not from the inside. When you got nothing, you got to change things from the outside.
The loudest voice in the world is the voice of one’s own tortured stomach.
Pain ends but knowledge does not, at least until the mind rots away—and when would that ever happen for me, the man with two minds?
How could I forget that every truth meant at least two things, that slogans were empty suits draped on the corpse of an idea?
the intelligence operative of doubtful intelligence.
Isn’t it remarkable that in a communist country money can still buy you anything you want? It’s not remarkable, I muttered. It’s funny.
