Say what you will about in the downsides of living in a communist nation whose grasp of modernity operates roughly at the Pleistocene level, officials here know how to prioritize threats to the nation. Elsewhere in 21st-century reality, global leaders gnaw their nails down to the quick over whether the day’s terrorism threat level should be orange, ochre, or hot pink, and can’t sleep at night worrying over whether citizens with preexisting conditions will be able to afford tummy tucks. Here in Vietnam, wise leaders know exactly what the problems are, and they know just what to do about them:

New law could ban sensitive subjects at private schools

Newly drafted regulations released Tuesday aim to prohibit private universities from providing degrees in law, journalism and education, according to Vietnam’s Ministry of Education and Training.

Having tired of the menace such subjects represent to orderly, Stone Age-era society, Vietnam officials have decided that the teaching of such deviant ideas should be squashed and their practitioners placed in leg irons. The obvious solution is that all higher ed should now be controlled by — cue Psycho shower scene music  — The Government.

Despite the rapid growth of higher education quality in the country, many shortcomings have been found, particularly in the process of establishing new schools. This has urged the National Assembly to put education under its supervision from this year.

In other news, production of stone axes and animal-hide loincloths reached record levels here in the first quarter of 2010.

I recently watched a TV documentary on the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which I feel certain the cool heads at the History Channel programmed as a way of diffusing the overblown panic gripping the world over the H1N1 outbreak by depicting just how bad it’s not. See how tens of millions of people succumbed to a seemingly innocuous viral contagion that drowns its victims in their own bloody phlegm? That’s exactly what isn’t going on in your neighborhood. Yet.

I managed not to throw myself off my fifth-floor balcony to preempt the inevitable end. But on my return to work earlier this week, I discovered others have not been so calm about the looming threat of the near-certain eradication of the human species. Last week one of the 4,000 students at my university was diagnosed with swine flu. Shortly afterward, a faculty member, a friend of mine in fact, was also labeled one of the Infected. Both were quickly snatched out of the school, tossed into a van and carted off to the local quarantine hospital, which, if you’ve ever seen a hospital in Vietnam, resembles a cross between The Island of Dr. Moreau and a Bangalore slum, only less hygienic. On the advice of Vietnam government health officials, the school initially insisted that all students and faculty who’d had contact with the two pariahs confine themselves to their homes until seven days had passed or the world ended, whichever came first. But after some consultation with, one supposes, health officials who actually understand the germ theory of disease, university officials reversed themselves and allowed the Almost-Infected to return to school.

On Wednesday and Thursday of last week, therefore, the student population disappeared behind a deluge of cheap, completely useless surgical masks. Lecture rooms looked like casting calls for Scrubs. Hallways throbbed with youth who appeared to be en route to a late-era-Michael Jackson fan club convention. Faculty members awaited the inevitable call for all lecturers to don masks themselves, resigned to a week or more of dressing like a Halloween punchline.

Yet once again, logic, or at least a close substitute, prevailed. For reasons probably having more to do with public relations than modern medical enlightenment, RMIT International University has locked the doors and barricaded the entrance (literally) until the morning of Monday, August 3.* (Updated) It’s hard to complain about an extra-long weekend. But it’s also hard to imagine we won’t be here again in a week or two weeks or three. In the meantime, I see 28 Days Later is showing this evening. One good thing about global pandemics: they’re always entertaining.

RMIT Vietnam extends Saigon South closure to Monday 3 August

24/07/2009

RMIT International University Vietnam has decided to extend the temporary closure of its operations at Saigon South until Monday 3 August.

RMIT Vietnam’s President, Professor Merilyn Liddell, announced the measure today following an initial decision yesterday to close the campus until at least Monday 27 July.

“We have consulted further with local health authorities over the past day, and the good news is that the number of people so far affected by H1N1 has remained very small.

“The total of students confirmed to have this influenza remain at only three, with one staff member also diagnosed. We expect that this number may still rise in coming days, but we believe the quick action we have taken to curtail the spread of the virus will give us every chance of keeping the total number small.”

Professor Liddell said the decision to extend the closure for a further full week, to Monday 3 August, was taken to allow time to consider assessing whether or not the small outbreak has been fully contained.

“We believe it is sensible to continue our precautionary approach for a longer period, and the local health authorities agree with this approach.

“The early action we have taken to minimise the spread of H1N1 appears to have worked to this point, so we believe it’s prudent to continue this approach for a further seven days to provide the maximum opportunity to ensure all sources of potential infection are fully cleared from the premises.”

Professor Liddell said the university placed the highest priority on the health and safety of its students and staff.

The Saigon South campus will maintain a skeleton staff of essential personnel only during the coming week, and senior management will continue to monitor developments and advise students and staff of developments as necessary. General telephone calls will be diverted to the Hanoi campus, which remains open as usual.

“We are encouraging all of our students and staff to keep checking their emails and the RMIT Vietnam website for regular updates through the week, prior to the resumption of all classes from the morning of Monday 3 August,” Professor Liddell said.

“We know there will need to be some rescheduling of examinations and other student activities. Those affected will be advised of what they need to know during the coming week.

“We will be working to ensure that no students are disadvantaged by this temporary closure.”

For Many Abroad, an Ideal Renewed

Itsuo Inouye/Associated Press

Local residents celebrated as they learned of Sen. Barack Obama’s apparent victory in western Japan on Wednesday.

GAZA — From far away, this is how it looks: There is a country out there where tens of millions of white Christians, voting freely, select as their leader a black man of modest origin, the son of a Muslim. There is a place on Earth — call it America — where such a thing happens.

Even where the United States is held in special contempt, like here in this benighted Palestinian coastal strip, the “glorious epic of Barack Obama,” as the leftist French editor Jean Daniel calls it, makes America — the idea as much as the actual place — stand again, perhaps only fleetingly, for limitless possibility.

“It allows us all to dream a little,” said Oswaldo Calvo, 58, a Venezuelan political activist in Caracas, in a comment echoed to correspondents of The New York Times on four continents in the days leading up to the election.

Tristram Hunt, a British historian, put it this way: Mr. Obama “brings the narrative that everyone wants to return to — that America is the land of extraordinary opportunity and possibility, where miracles happen.”

But wonder is almost overwhelmed by relief. Mr. Obama’s election offers most non-Americans a sense that the imperial power capable of doing such good and such harm — a country that, they complain, preached justice but tortured its captives, launched a disastrous war in Iraq, turned its back on the environment and greedily dragged the world into economic chaos — saw the errors of its ways over the past eight years and shifted course.

They say the country that weakened democratic forces abroad through a tireless but often ineffective campaign for democracy — dismissing results it found unsavory, cutting deals with dictators it needed as allies in its other battles — was now shining a transformative beacon with its own democratic exercise.

It would be hard to overstate how fervently vast stretches of the globe wanted the election to turn out as it did to repudiate the Bush administration and its policies. Poll after poll in country after country showed only a few — Israel, Georgia, the Philippines — favoring a victory for Senator John McCain.

“Since Bush came to power it’s all bam, bam, bam on the Arabs,” asserted Fathi Abdel Hamid, 40, as he sat in a Cairo coffee house.

The world’s view of an Obama presidency presents a paradox. His election embodies what many consider unique about the United States — yet America’s sense of its own specialness, of its destiny and mission, has driven it astray, they say. They want Mr. Obama, the beneficiary and exemplar of American exceptionalism, to act like everyone else, only better, to shift American policy and somehow to project both humility and leadership.

And there are others who fear that Mr. Obama will be soft in a hard-edged world where what is required is a clear line in the sand to fanatics, aggressors and bullies. Israelis worry that he will talk to Iran rather than stop it from developing nuclear weapons; Georgians worry that he will not grasp how to handle Russia.

An Obama presidency, they say, risks appeasement. It will “reassure Europeans of their defects,” lamented Giuliano Ferrara, editor of the Italian right-wing daily Il Foglio.

Such contradictory demands and expectations may reflect, in part, the unusual makeup of a man of mixed race and origin whose life and upbringing have touched several continents.

“People feel he is a part of them because he has this multiracial, multiethnic and multinational dimension,” said Philippe Sands, a British international lawyer and author who travels frequently, adding that people find some thread of their own hopes and ideals in Mr. Obama. “He represents, for people in so many different communities and cultures, a personal connection. There is an immigrant component and a minority component.”

Francis Nyamnjoh, a Cameroonian novelist and social scientist, said he saw Mr. Obama less as a black man than “as a successful negotiator of identity margins.”

His ability to inhabit so many categories mirrors the African experience. Mr. Nyamnjoh said that for America to choose as its citizen in chief such a skillful straddler of global identities could not help but transform the nation’s image, making it once again the screen upon which the hopes and ambitions of the world are projected.

Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at the People’s University of China, said Mr. Obama’s background, particularly his upbringing in Indonesia, made him suited to understanding the problems facing the world’s poorer nations.

He and others say they hope the next American president will see their place more firmly within the community of nations, engaging in what Jairam Ramesh, junior commerce minister in the Indian government, called “genuine multilateralism and not in muscular unilateralism.”

Assuming Mr. Obama does play by international rules more fully, as he has promised, can his government live up to all the expectations?

“We have so many hopes and wishes that he will never be able to fulfill them,” said Susanne Grieshaber, 40, an art adviser in Berlin who was one of 200,000 Germans to attend a speech by Mr. Obama there in July. She cited action to protect the environment, reducing the use of force and helping the less fortunate. In essence, she wants Mr. Obama to make his country more like hers. But she is sober. “I’m preparing myself for the fact that peace and happiness are not going to suddenly break out,” she said.

Many in less developed countries — especially in the Arab world — agree that Mr. Obama will not carry out their wishes regarding American policy toward Israel and much else, and so they shrug off the results as ultimately making little difference.

“We will be optimistic for two months but that’s it,” predicted Huda Naim, 38, a member of the Hamas parliament here who said her 15-year-old son had watched Mr. Obama’s rise with rapt attention.

But some remain darkly suspicious of the election itself. They doubted that Mr. Obama could be nominated or elected. Now they doubt that he will govern. The skeptics say they believe that American policy is deeply institutionalized and that if Mr. Obama tries to shift it, “they” — the media, the corporate robber barons, the hidden powers — will box him in or even kill him.

“I am afraid for him,” said Alberto Müller Rojas, a retired Venezuelan Army general and the vice president of President Hugo Chávez’s Unified Socialist Party. “The pressures he will face from certain sectors of society, especially from white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, will be enormous.”

Part of that fear stems from genuine if distant affection.

“He has charisma, he’s good-looking, he’s very smart, he’s young and he knows how to make people like him, to the point that when he went to bow down to the Israelis, people here still made excuses for him,” said Nawara Negm, an Egyptian writer and blogger.

There is another paradox about the world’s view of the election of Mr. Obama: many who are quick to condemn the United States for its racist past and now congratulate it for a milestone fail to acknowledge the same problem in their own societies, and so do not see how this election could offer them any lessons about themselves.

In Russia, for example, where Soviet leaders used to respond to any American criticism of human rights violation with “But you hang Negroes,” analysts note that the election of Mr. Obama removes a stain. But they speak of it without reference to their own treatment of ethnic minorities.

“Definitely, this will improve America’s image in Russia,” said Sergey M. Rogov, director of the Institute for U.S.A. and Canada Studies in Moscow. “There was this perception before of widespread racism in America, deeply rooted racism.”

In Nigeria, a vast, populous and diverse collection of states, Reuben Abati, an influential columnist, has written, “Nigerians love good things in other lands, even if they are not making any effort to reproduce the same at home,” adding, “If Obama had been a Nigerian, his race, color and age would have been an intractable problem.”

So foreigners are watching closely, hoping that despite what they consider the hypocrisies and inconsistencies, the nation they once imagined would stand as a model for the future will, with greater sensitivity and less force, help solve the world’s problems.

There is a risk, however, to all the extraordinary international attention paid to this most international of American politicians: Mr. Obama’s focus will almost certainly be on the reeling domestic economy, housing and health care. Will he be able even to lift his head and gaze abroad to all those with such high expectations?

I know, I know: I seem to have fallen off the map lately; my star has plunged from whatever very modest heights of the blogosphere it had previously achieved. For a week now, visitors to this space have been greeted with only a photo of a winking, leering Bible-thumping, bile-spewing, oil-drunk right-wing demagogue (for which I deeply apologize). But it’s been an especially busy week.

As some of you may know, I’ve recently returned to the ranks of the full-time gainfully employed. As of October 6, I am a Professor of Communications at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Vietnam. Better known here and in Australia as RMIT (not to be confused with plain old MIT), it’s sort of a training ground for the new breed of Vietnamese: an English-only campus of a Melbourne-based university offering degrees in business and accounting, multimedia and graphic design, IT, commerce, and – with the new term beginning Monday – in Professional Communication.

Enter yours truly, who has been tasked with teaching a course called “Visual Language” to fresh-faced hopeful future communicators. It’s a basic course in visual literacy, offering an overview of the way people use images and non-verbal visual narrative to convey meaning in art, film, graphic design, consumer messages, and marketing. Basically, it’s an entire class dedicated to the premise that a picture is worth a thousand words.

How the very smart head of the department got the idea I was qualified to teach this class is somewhat mystifying. Desperation comes to mind. I may also have had some part in it during our interviews. But teaching it I am, and I’ve been submerged up to my eyebrows for the past two weeks in terribly academic-sounding subjects like sight and visual processing, symbolism and semiotics, narrative and expression, spacial organization, aesthetics, propaganda theory, and phenomenology.

It’s also been a crash course in learning how to read and write in British English, in which organisation and utilise are spelled with an S, not a Z (that’s a “zed,” by the way), and colour, flavour, and centre are all words whose relation to modern life appears tenuous, as they all seem to have been lifted directly from The Canterbury Tales or Love’s Labors Lost.

Until last week, my days in Saigon were mainly occupied with drooling onto my new laptop (which has now been stolen, but more on that miserable tragedy later), drinking coffee, and tutoring English three hours each evening at a small private school.

A week and a half ago, however, I was chucked headfirst into the boot-camp-style orientation for new instructors here known as “induction,” a word that can only derive from the way it “induces” ulcers and paroxisms of anxiety about being unprepared to teach your course because of all the time you spend in it. From 9am until 4pm each day, I’m subjected to a barrage of workshops and seminars on HR policy and procedures, IT training, library database searching, work permits, health insurance (Oh, Joy), counseling services, lesson planning, building Powerpoint presentations, measuring student learning, and time management.

It’s a long way from journalism. Though I have found one common area of overlap: the preoccupation with plagiarism in the academic world is at least as obsessive as it is in the world of publishing. (Did you know they have software that can spot plagiarized material? I’m assuming for the moment that those students whose beer money comes from a busy schedule of report writing on commission, as mine did in college, remain safe.)

It’s also a different life from the one I’ve been leading for the past 15 months. I’m now working roughly 12 hours a day. I have an office, a salary, a boss, a passel of health benefits, a legion of wildly international colleagues, and a purpose.

Colour me satisfied.

This tidbit of local news is ever so interesting for several reasons. First and foremost, herein we learn that the Vietnamese prime minister’s name is Dung. That’s his first name. We can bitch and whine about either or both of the candidates running for president in the U.S., but at least we’re not going to have to deal with a chief executive who’s named for fecal matter.

Secondly, an urban rail system in Saigon is good news and all, but given the rate at which most construction happens in Vietnam, I think 12 years is optimistic. I’ve watched (and listened to) the new home construction taking place on both sides of my house for about a month now, and I’m not terribly impressed. The work ethic is there, to be sure, but the technical end is still a little out of date. The scaffolding, for example, is made of wood. I’m not talking about two-by-fours, either, but pieces of wood recently ripped from trees – limbs, branches and such. I do not kid. Also, if you think government contractors are slow in America, you should see them move in a Communist nation. It’s like watching crippled snails procrastinate.

Finally, whether this will actually solve the traffic woes in HCMC is debatable. There are 80 million people in Vietnam and 40 million motorcycles – in a nation the size of California. Assuming the rate of population growth is greater than the annual rate of death by motorbike (a family of four was killed on a motorbike near where I live last week, and twice in the last three days I watched crowds of spectators form as two-wheelers burned in the middle of the roadway), those numbers will be a lot higher in 12 years. Maybe our beloved leader knows something I don’t, but I plan to keep my expectations firmly in check. If Dung has any sense, he will, too. Otherwise he could find himself in deep doodoo.

Vietnam plans $15 billion for city railway systems

The Vietnamese government said today it plans to spend billions building two urban railway networks to help ease the ever-worsening traffic congestion in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung approved a US$14.8 billion plan to build commuter railway networks inside traffic-choked Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City over the next 12 years.

Hanoi will receive $7.3 billion to build seven railway lines, including sky trains and subways, according to a statement released on the government’s website on Sunday. Of the total cost, $5.5 billion will come from foreign investment.

Ho Chi Minh City will receive $7.5 billion, of which $6.3 billion will be foreign invested, to build six urban railways and metro lines.

Prime Minister Dung has asked officials to speed up preparations for the elevated and underground railway systems and focus on attracting overseas aid and loans for the projects, according to the statement.

“The project will help to ease congestion which happens everyday in the cities and has become chronic,” Nguyen Van Cong, chief administrator at the Ministry of Transportation said in a phone interview with Bloomberg Monday. “It will also help limit traffic accidents and improve cities’ environments.”

Fortunately, getting milk direct from the source (the udder) is still an option in my neighborhood.

More tainted milk turns up in Vietnam

Vietnam’s health ministry has discovered the industrial chemical melamine in 18 food products imported from China and three other countries and has ordered them recalled and destroyed, officials said Friday.

Russian news agencies reported that food inspectors found nearly 2 tons of Chinese dry milk believed to be contaminated with melamine. And Philippines health officials found melamine in two of 30 milk products from China, while Australian food regulators recalled China-made Kirin Milk Tea after tests in found the drink contained melamine. It is the fourth product withdrawn from the country’s stores in the wake of China’s tainted-milk scandal.

Chinese authorities believe suppliers trying to boost output diluted their milk, adding melamine because its nitrogen content can fool tests aimed at verifying protein content.