While the lily-livered, pie-in-the-sky bleeding hearts infesting that whore-ridden Babylon formerly known as California do their damndest to drag American values of decency, morality and piousness into the septic tank by openly considering the decriminalization of marijuana, it falls upon the so-called Third World to demonstrate how stoners, dope fiends, potheads and druggies of all shades ought properly to be handled.

578 addicts escape from rehab center in Vietnam

The Associated Press, 05/17/2010

Nearly 600 inmates in a Vietnamese drug rehabilitation camp overpowered security guards and escaped, an official said Monday. At least two-thirds of them were still at large.

Trinh Vuong Thuan, a security official at the rehabilitation center No. 2 in the northern port city of Haiphong, said 578 inmates overpowered security guards to break through the center’s gates on Sunday.

Vietnam’s strict laws on drugs allow the government to order addicts held for up to two years in rehabilitation centers, many of them boot-camp-style camps that include hard labor and communist “ideological education.”

In other news, Trinh Vuong Thuan, a security official at the rehabilitation center No. 2 in the northern port city of Haiphong, was sentenced to rehabilitation by drawing and quartering on Tuesday.

This past weekend, Vietnam marked a big anniversary: 35 years since showing the world’s greatest military superpower the door and uniting the two halves of the nation under the grand banner of communism. That last bit actually didn’t work out so well for everyone, as you may know, but that hasn’t stopped the government propaganda machine from pumping out platitudes extolling the unspeakable wonderfulness of freedom, independence and money-grubbing happiness under socialism, or the new communism, or whatever they’re calling it these days. All weekend there were the requisite dancing in the street, parades, celebratory speechifying and solemn tributes to Ho Chi Minh, who’s worshipped pretty much as a god around these parts, despite the fact that he bears what may or may not be a coincidentally uncanny resemblance to Colonel Sanders (who, in point of fact, also occupies a pretty high spot on the local totem pole). The celebrations fell back-to-back with Vietnam’s Labor Day holiday this year, so posters like the pair below blanketed all of Saigon for the week preceding, giving the whole city the feel of being trapped in a retrospective of 1920s Soviet Union constructivism.

These posters all sort of neglect to mention that every house, every vehicle, every thimbleful of dirt that had previously been owned by a resident of South Vietnam before 1975 was ‘reallocated’ to someone from North Vietnam immediately following the events of 35 years ago. For them, ‘independence’ tastes a lot  like a shit sandwich. You don’t hear them complaining, though – perhaps because it’s illegal to complain.

Freedom! Independence! Happiness, goddamit!

Very rough translation: "Celebrate 35 years of independence and a united country with a bucket of KFC Original Recipe®"

The disabled have a tough gig here in Vietnam. As if being mutilated in a war defending your country from an overwhelminly superior Western invader weren’t enough (Communist Party censors please take notice — I’m an equal-opportunity maligner of political systems!), there’s the fact that the Vietnamese government see no particular need for providing disabled people — veterans or otherwise — with financial assistance – though apparently they’ve got plenty of walking-around money for things like fighter jets and submarine bases. And those who merely had their legs blown into smithereens by hopped-up, trigger-happy U.S. Marines were the lucky ones; Agent Orange fucks up you and your progeny for four generations. No legs? Tough shit. You’re on your own. You’d better have either 1) a rich uncle or 2) mad begging skillz. (“Oh and by the way, thanks for the Revolution and all that.”) They don’t even have real wheelchairs here. Instead, there’s umpteen squillion Vietnamese people pushing themselves around the country in giant tricycles with pump-action steering wheels, like something out of a Buster Keaton film. So not only are they non-pedestrian, they’ve been turned into rolling punchlines.

One thing about the Vietnamese, though: they’re a resourceful bunch. Take this hombre, for example. Can he work? Not so much. Can he sell lottery tickets? Like nobody’s business. But the crown jewel of his business portfolio, the butter on his bread, the pièce de résistance of his peripatentic office environment? Advertising, thank you very much — on the back of his wheeltricycle. Clearly this is a man of the 21st century. Note also that not only is he advertising for Rainbow Divers, who I’m willing to bet pay a premium for this kind of placement, but he also appears to be licensed. The branding team at Nike should be all over this — forget the irony, this guy’s a rolling poster boy for “Just Do It .” Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Vietnam.

Here’s a little news item guaranteed to chill the hearts of all peace-loving folk.

Russia to help Vietnam Build Submarine Base

MOSCOW, March 25 (Xinhua) — The Russian Navy will help Vietnam build a submarine base, Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov said Thursday.

Russia and Vietnam have bright prospects of bilateral military and technical cooperation, he said. “Vietnam needs a submarine base and the Russian Navy will provide help.”

As my mother used to say to me, “You and I seem to have different understandings of the meaning of ‘need.’” From where I’m sitting, Vietnam needs a submarine base like a hyperactive 12-year-old needs a bazooka. I wouldn’t object to the idea of a submarine base per se. It’s the troublesome possibility that a submarine base might lead, like a gateway drug, to even more dangerous fixations. Like, say, submarines.

This is troubling on any number of levels. To begin with, a Vietnamese person is constitutionally incapable of doing a 100% job of almost anything. Rather, he or she does exactly the minimum work necessary to achieve whatever a task requires in a way that gives it the appearance of having been achieved. I should note that this is most definitely not a matter of laziness but of job security. When the job needs re-doing, as it inevitably will, the result is more work for the person who did a half-assed job in the first place. If this were an individual character trait, you might expect it not to work out so well for that person. As it happens, this is a universial ethic, borne of the longstanding communist imperative that every person have a job, no matter how menial, pointless, redundant, counterproductive, bureaucratic, or obsolescent. What better way to assure that everyone is ‘working’ by doing every job at one-quarter the speed, proficiency, acccuracy and thoroughness it requires?

Secondly, the technology does not exist that the Vietnamese have not found a way to misunderstand, misuse, misapply, or otherwise endanger themselves with. Whoever invented the wheel umpteen hundred thousand years ago would faint if he saw what your typical Vietnamese person does with it on a daily basis. And if he and the guy who created the cellphone could together see the way those two technologies are used in tandem, they’d claw their own eyes out.

So with all due respect, this is a society that could fuck up a bowling ball, if they could ever get around to it. And now they want a submarine?

The article goes on to note that:

“They (Vietnam) will also need rescue and auxiliary vessels,” he added.

You can say that again.