Sub-Standard

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.