Around the World Winter 05

Kunming, China

I recently spent 5 days in the PRC checking out a potential new work among ethnic minority groups in the southern province of Yunaan.

Yunaan is the Chinese dynamic equivalent of Mississippi—an ethnically diverse, backward and southern-most state that has always been on the frontier of the Chinese psyche.

The rebellious citizens of Kunming--the provincial capitol--coined the famous Chinese phrase, “The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away.” That’s got to be one of the world’s cleanest takes on cultural confidence in the face of violent and self-righteous powers. What phrase could be more nostalgic for Americans? Or perhaps—someday--more authentically Chinese?

A friend in Kunming picked me up and took me to his house on the back of his locally manufactured bike, a jarring trip that bruised some previously unknown bones in my rear end.

After lunch we headed out to meet some of his colleagues. He suggested I follow him on his “other” bike.

When you’re in somebody else’s house you tend to go with the guidance of your host. That’s true even when the word “other” makes you wonder what might be in store just down the road.

So I risked riding a bike around on my own for the first time in the chaotic traffic of the urban PRC.

The rickety bike rolled over the old asphalt road like a rock bouncing off a corrugated metal roof. I felt each crack and pothole in fundamental parts of my body and I quickly came to appreciate why this was his spare bike. I just wish I’d worn a jock strap and a cup.

Traffic in Kunming, as in most major Asian cities, is an intuitive game of high speed chicken. People on bikes are the most apt to demonstrate their bad karma by getting smashed and crushed. I guess it just goes to show that what morally goes around comes around, especially if you can’t afford a motorcycle or a car.

I survived thanks to some urgent personal prayer (Oh my God!) and the pity of the locals for the clumsy and hapless ‘white devil.’

The country has done a flip-flop since my last trip 5 years ago. Kunming puts some western cities to shame. And the members of the underground church--along with the other Chinese who respect the unseen world--grow stronger and more confident by the day.

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

At the tail end of the same trip I also had a chance to visit Vietnam. I was looking for face time with some Filipino missos who’ve made their mark in that rapidly developing country. There is a growing spiritual movement in Vietnam, and a lively church scene starting up among the urban squatter poor in Saigon.

My older brother fought there and I graduated from high school just as Saigon (the old school name for HCMC) fell to the North Vietnamese armies, so I grew up from the time I was little with the war in Vietnam as a constant background to life.

Throughout my stay I had the odd feeling that I'd seen everything in town. I’ve never had that sense of geographical déjà vu before. I guess watching news reports during childhood about a place for almost ten years and then watching movies after that for almost 30 years will play some tricks on your memory.

Saigon is a two-shirt-a-day city. It's 90 % humidity and 90 degrees all day long. I don’t know if you could fry eggs on the sidewalk at noon, but I’m sure you could steam some carrots and broccoli by half-past the hour.

And the architecture is one of the craziest mish-mashes of styles I’ve ever run across. Lots of big metal and glass boxes and butt-ugly socialist realist sculptures do their best to ruin a potentially good urban thing, but on the other hand there are some really lovely French colonial buildings that look like they came right out of a Graham Greene novel. Actually, some of the best of Greene's writing came out of those very same buildings and the people and characters who used to hang out in them, so I guess the order of inspiration should rightly be reversed.

But wow, some of the larger colonial piles can only be attributed to sweaty French imaginations fueled by a hit or two off the old opium pipe. A good number of major public buildings—which date from the early 20th century--look like gigantic wedding cakes covered with the worst kind of decorative frou-frou. There is a definite drag queen quality to these models of flagrant bad taste.

For some of us, these kinds of misguided efforts can be chalked up to disoriented and dominant French colonials who could create whatever they wanted, probably for the first time in their lives. As the history of colonialism makes very clear, great freedoms in a new context are almost always used badly.

I guess this kind of architectural gender ambiguity could also be interpreted by some as the fruit of a nation of cowardly and effete “surrender monkeys.” After a brief look at these buildings, it would be clear to some that the roots of French pooftah-hood run long and deep. What else could you expect from a people who don’t speak English and who, as Steve Martin once observed, “have a different word for everything!”

Along with most other Americans who come to Saigon, I wanted to see some things associated with the war. So I went to The War Remnants Museum as well as the village of Cu Chi, which is a kind of “living war memorial” about 70 clicks outside of town.

The Vietnamese Communist Party, which still controls Vietnam, opened up the country, and especially Saigon, to greater economic and social freedoms in the 90's. So tourism is a pretty recent experience for people here.

At that time the War Remnants Museum was called The Museum of American War Crimes. For some strange reason, that name seemed to turn off a lot of prospective western visitors.

Fortunately, some budding marketing genius among the cadres came up with a better idea. His catchy new name for the building, War Remnants Museum, apparently spared the sensitive feelings of the visiting lackeys of the capitalist running dogs, and Americans soon began to pack the place out. It’s now the single most popular tourist attraction in Saigon.

It’s the story of local cadre makes good that should go down in advertising history along with Tony the Tiger and Just Do It.

The museum itself is a well told—if pretty unsophisticated--story of Vietnam’s battle for self-determination over many decades as they fought off the Chinese, French, and Americans. While it makes no attempt to downplay the immense destruction and damage that the American military rained down on the country, it also recognizes the courage and humanity of many American soldiers and journalists and photographers. One section of the museum even recognizes countries and movements around the world that supported the country during its worst hours—including the vast American anti-war movement.

The war remnants that gave the museum its name—including lots of American and Vietnamese weaponry—are worth the inexpensive admission price by themselves.

The tone isn’t bitter or angry or boastful. It’s somber and instructive, which struck me as just how a war memorial should be. The best single piece in the museum is a very cool and hopeful metal sculpture crafted out of a huge bomb fragment.

After I left the museum I thought about the warm welcome the people in town gave me and the enthusiastic welcome they apparently give pretty much all Americans. When you see the museum and learn about the 3 million Vietnamese killed and the ruthless efficiency of the destruction, you do wonder how they could have learned to forgive so quickly and so well.

When I think back to our own Civil War, and even reflect on our national reaction to 9/11, I honestly don’t know whether Americans could do likewise if our nation ever experienced that level of apocalyptic violence and damage. Maybe so. But whatever our American propensity for letting go of hostility might be, the whole experience in Saigon underscored for me once again the spiritual potency and importance of forgiveness.

A couple of days later I rode out to Cu Chi through some intensely green countryside. After living my whole life in the arid American west, places like Vietnam still seem almost fantastic to me, even after many years of visiting locations at that sort of latitude.

When we got there I was herded into a ramshackle space along with 30 or 40 other people where we were forced to watch a very old and disintegrating film about the resistance of the “primitive” people of Cu Chi to the American military. It was a kind of shaky super-8 David and Goliath story that moved everybody who saw it. The room was tiny and crowded and had no air conditioning, so I was sweating within 10 minutes. That particular trip turned out to be a three shirt day.

After they let us out of the lecture, we went across a road and entered what can only be called “Cu Chi Land.” The local Vietnamese have created a kind of crude theme park meant to introduce westerners to the realities of the Vietnam War in the kind of language and form they believe westerners understand and are willing to pay to see.

In Cu Chi Land you can climb down into the tunnel network that the local Vietnamese lived in for a decade while they tried to survive constant heavy bombing and American patrols. These weren’t tunnels built for larger westerners—I went down and followed the tunnels for about 50 yards and barely squeezed through.

There were over 200 miles of these kinds of tunnels in the countryside just outside of Saigon. The local people lived largely underground like animals for the many years it took them to outlast the people above ground who were trying to kill them.

As you walk along the trails in the park you pass through forests of recovering trees and jungle vegetation. About every 30 yards or so you run across one of the massive craters left behind by the constant B-52 bombers runs.

During the following hour or so the guides introduce you to strange and poorly constructed dummies and models depicting Cu Chi’s people building nasty and lethal booby traps and Viet Cong troops outwitting the much better armed Americans.

The climax of this weird re-enactment of the war was a shooting range at the very end of the trail. For a small fee, you can shoot almost any weapon used during the war, including armor piercing machine guns which are so loud they could burst your eardrums from 30 yards away. Obviously, consumer lawsuits have yet to develop much momentum in this part of the world.

The targets at the receiving end of the firing range were large wooden cutouts of colorful African animals that looked they’d been bought at a steep discount from some children’s zoo that was looking to upgrade its look.

I have to admit that I paid a couple of dollars to fire 20 rounds from an AK-47. I proceeded to annihilate a big purple giraffe target.

I immediately felt bad for the damage I’d inflicted, but my pangs of conscience didn't last long.

I'm just grateful that as an American I now know I'm on the right side of history and destiny, and that in some small and symbolic way my target practice was probably advancing God's Manifest Plan for the inexorable spread of republics and stock markets.

You might even say, I'm part of a kind of Manifest Destiny for the world. Hey, how exciting is that! Now that history is really over, and we're just tidying up for the inevitable, there's nothing to do but pitch in. Cool! No need to worry ourselves with confusing books like the Bible. And anyway, haven't we all heard that manifest destiny thing before--it's almost, kinda like, in our genes!

It reminds me of a great line from the comedy Young Frankenstein, when Dr. Frankenstein's son--played by Gene Wilder--emotionally breaks out into a rhythmic football cheer when he finally realizes he is going to choose to repeat his father's hated and foolish experiments in re-animating dead tissue: "De-sti-ny, destiny for me! De-sti-ny, destiny for me!" Maybe we can have folks start chanting that in church.

And God bless those poor dummies and targets on the wrong side.

Books, Films, Media Reviews--The Unconquerable World, God's Politics, Walter Mosely Winter 05

The Unconquerable World Jonathan Schell

Schell challenges the commonly held belief that warfare is an unfortunate necessity in the relationship between nations. He argues persuasively for a more practical and ethical approach to getting rid of unjust governments and regimes.

He looks carefully at the intellectual foundations of modern war--from Von Clausewitz to The Donald (Rumsfeld).

He also examines the uses of violence in the creation of empires and totalitarian regimes, liberal democracies and the many “peoples’” revolutionary struggles for self-determination in the 20th century.

While the neo-conservatives assume the rightness of aggressive international pre-emptive state violence, Schell challenges that thinking by rolling out a sharp and detailed take on the use of both state and revolutionary violence in the past 200 years.

He makes a very strong case that classical forms of warfare—and particularly pre-emptive forms of warfare--are hard to justify in light of the developments of the past few centuries.

He demonstrates that non-violent people’s movements have been more effective at overthrowing oppressive and ruthless regimes than wars have, at less cost, and with clearly more positive results.

Schell is writing from a Christian background and a grounding in the teachings of Jesus and the NT, though he lays out his argument in a way that anyone can appreciate and take seriously.

TUW will tax you and challenge you. I know that some folks now—even some of the brightest—tend to get their input from a few links and brief websites.

TUW is a pretty good reason to break out of that pattern. If you’re going to read a couple of serious books this year, this should be one of them. It's gotten a remarkable critical reception among people from across the spectrum of views on the use of violence. In my mind, this may be the strongest challenge ever written to the continued reliance on warfare. If you're a thoughtful Christian and you're going to support the use of warfare of any kind, and especially pre-emptive wars of choice, you need to deal with Schell's comprehensive argument.

God’s Politics Jim Wallis

I had a chance to talk to a lot of evangelicals before and after the last presidential election. Though they ranged from conservatives and progressives to Republicans and Democrats, almost all of them felt torn from a spiritual point of view.

If you’re one of those folks, you might enjoy and appreciate God’s Politics. It's a remarkable book.

GP recently spent significant time on the NY Times and Amazon best seller lists. I believe it’s selling well because many people are so desperate for a Christian political take that is authentically biblical and prophetic.

When was the last time a serious book about Christian politics and ethics became a best seller? Or at least, when was the last time that kind of book became a hit without focusing on the piles of shirts, pants and shoes left behind as conservative, white evangelicals rose up to meet Themselves In That Big Exurb In The Sky?

The subtitle of the book, Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, is a good guide to the gist of the book.

Wallis believes that the conservative religious right serves up only half a gospel while claiming to be the righteous, and that the political liberals—like the Good Samaritan in one of Jesus’ most significant parables—serve up a big portion of the other half through the best of their attitudes and actions even though some of them reject Christianity and traditional moral teachings.

He calls for a new movement among American Christians of all persuasions that will call both right and left to biblical accountability, and a more mature Christian voting population that doesn’t vote for a right wing agenda that is obviously un-Christian in many respects simply because that party talks God talk and verbally supports certain family values positions.

Wallis describes a coherent Christian politics that combines a commitment to the teachings of Jesus and the apostles and prophets, personal moral responsibility, and a biblical emphasis on social justice.

Or in other words, a politics and morality that neither current party comes close to representing, even though the conservative right claims that righteous distinction in a way that brings to mind a particular religious/political party that Jesus confronted in the harshest terms in his own day.

He believes a movement of Christian people from both left and right could come together and become a truly prophetic political force for good. I agree. May it be so. I think this is one of the more important Christian books on practical social ethics to come along in a while.

But whether a movement like this develops or not, the heart of the matter is the way Christians respond to all this. Will we develop the insight to recognize not only the weaknesses of the Samaritan, but also the more dangerous weaknesses of the self-righteous Pharisee? I hope so.

Little Scarlet Walter Mosely

If you like bullets and blondes detective novels you’ll enjoy the stories of Walter Mosely, though in this instance it’s a case of bullets and blacks.

I’ve been a fan of detective fiction, and especially noir writing and film, since I was a teenager.

Jan and I re-read all the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle about six months ago. We’ve been introducing Andrew to Holmes through the wonderful BBC film versions of those fascinating stories.

The Holmes stories--written in the 19th century--were some of the beginnings of detective fiction.

As a result of the senseless slaughter of WWI and the carnage of WWII, the detective genre evolved into noir fiction and film. Some creative and thoughtful people wanted to find a way to witness to the fact that a lot of life is righteous posturing which covers up the kinds of violence and lies which Christians think of as sinfulness and even wickedness. Noir is a form of fiction that’s all about stumbling onto and identifying, like Jesus, the whitened sepulchers everybody encounters in real life. So while it can seem dark and cynical, it’s really rooted in the deepest kind of moral consciousness and a kind of worldly wise idealism.

In noir (“black” in French) detective fiction, the anti-hero is normally a morally flawed inner-city detective or some regular guy who ends up in a downward spiral of events beyond his control. He starts on the sunny side of events and little by little descends into the heart of an increasingly darker mystery.

Los Angeles became the American heart of noir fiction and film through the writing of authors like Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon) and Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye) and the many Humphrey Bogart “hard boiled detective” flicks.

Eventually the mood and formula of noir detective fiction were re-interpreted again and again. You may have seen Chinatown (70’s noir film set in 30’s LA), Blade Runner (80’s film noir set in the year 2200 in LA), LA Confidential (90’s LAPD film noir set in the 50’s), The Grifters (90’s film noir about contemporary con-men) and even The Name of the Rose (80’s film noir based in a medieval Italian monastery!).

Mosely is the latest--and one of the greatest--interpreters of noir detective fiction. His stories are about African-American LA in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s.

His African American noir anti-heroes (Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, Paris Minton and Fearless Jones) are some of the most interesting fictional characters I’ve run across in a long while.

Mosely, who is an African-American born and raised in LA, has written a ton of these stories, so it will keep you occupied for a while. I’m only half way through and it’s taken me 4 months.

Little Scarlet is his most recent Easy Rawlins book which is set in LA just after the Watts Riots in the 60’s. I’m in the middle of it right now.

His other Easy Rawlins books include A Red Death (Easy ends up investigating the murder of a Jewish labor organizer in McCarthy era LA), Gone Fishin’ (Easy and his murderous friend “Mouse” return from LA to Louisiana to solve a mystery), Devil in a Blue Dress (Easy solves a mystery and tries to survive in 40’s LA—Denzel Washington played Easy in a 90’s movie version of this one), Black Betty (more Easy in early 60’s LA), and Bad Boy Brawly Brown (Easy uncovers corruption among African-American community leadership in Compton).

His Fearless Jones stories—which I like even better than the wonderful Easy Rawlins books—are Fear Itself (bookstore owner Paris Minton and his friend Fearless Jones do everything they can to stay alive while uncovering dark secrets among 50’s LA African-American nouveau-riche), and Fearless Jones (Paris and Fearless use their clear eyed understanding of how the world actually works—one of Mosely’s basic themes—to survive black gangsters, corrupt white police, and Israeli hit men in 50’s LA).

This is just great writing.