This can’t possibly bode well for those of us on the ground here:

Vietnam buys 12 fighter jets

VIETNAM has signed a contract to buy 12 versatile Russian fighter jets as part of a US$1 billion (S$1.42 billion) deal, Interfax news agency reported on Wednesday.Vietnam is buying the Su-30 fighters at a time when disputes with China over sovereignty in the South China Sea are increasing. Vietnam has said it views the disputes with concern.

‘Last week a contract was signed for the delivery to Vietnam of 12 Su-30MK2s in 2011-2012,’ the news agency quoted a military-diplomatic source as saying.

I for one would like to remind that your typical Vietnamese driver is public menace enough on a 150cc motorbike without guided missiles* and 9G load maneuverability. It’s only a matter of time until these aircraft are being used to haul construction materials around with baskets of live pigs tied to the fuselage, pilots madly text-messaging with one hand while steering/accelerating with the other. Brakes? Who needs ‘em? Slowing down for any reason is a sign of weakness, anyway.

The only thing that could make this more frightening is:

Additional arms deals, including the sale of six submarines, were announced when Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung visited Moscow last December. — REUTERS

* Update: From Defense News, 9 Feb. 2010: “On 4 December 2009, it was reported that Vietnam was close to completing a contract for 12 Su-30 MK2s. The initial contract was for 12 aircraft but was reduced to 8 due to the financial crisis, and the contract did not include onboard weapons.” Clearly, this mitigates the potential threat to those of us at ground level. To say nothing of the Chinese.

Chúc mừng năm mới, friends. Or, as you say in the Western hemisphere, happy New Year!

Yes, yes, I know all of my American friends reading this are thinking, You fool, you addled ignoramus, you rice-besotted chucklehead, New Year’s Eve was more than a month ago, are you so deluded by life in that backwards, hopelessly unhip nation that you’ve lost sense of time altogether? The coming holiday is not New Year’s but Valentine’s Day, shit-for-brains. We know this because every retail establishment in America is assaulting us with that invaluable information every moment of our waking lives until Sunday, when it will all transform smoothly overnight into a full-scale marketplace offensive of behalf of Easter. So thanks very much, Captain Caveman, we’ve got a pretty good handle on which holidays are which over here. Go back to sucking on your boiled egg fetuses and leave us alone until you’ve got something intelligent or at least interesting to say.

Ah, the intimacy of true fellowship. What you fail to understand, my dear American friends, is that while in your indulgent corner of the world the coming Sunday is indeed Valentine’s Day, here in Asia the date of February 14 coincides this year with the Lunar New Year, known locally as Tết (yes, the same as that Tet). Tết in Vietnam is far and away the biggest and most popular holiday of the year, so much so that they’ve stretched it out to a full week or more. By this time tomorrow, Ho Chi Minh City will be a ghost town, all its transient residents returned to the countryside to spend the next week imposing on their families, participating in pointless and obscure rituals, exchanging gifts into which little or no thought went, overeating shamelessly and drinking more than is either safe or legal, and opening old wounds with relatives they’d not squabbled with since last year’s forced reunion. In other words, Merry Christmas and Happy Thanksgiving!

I’ll be spending Tết alone next week, as my girlfriend will be returning to her hometown, Hanoi, where she will ring in the Year of the Tiger with her loved ones in traditional fashion and very likely be forced to answer some difficult questions about why she is still dating an aging foreigner with a receding hairline and no trust fund. Dear heart that she is, she’s made me my very own Tết tree, trimmed with envelopes of ‘lucky money ’ – a compulsory part of every Vietnamese New Year. (And they call this a communist nation. Pah.)

In exactly 28 hours, I will find myself on a stage in front of an audience for the first time in almost two years. This is a little unnerving for me, because the last time I did this I made a fool of myself.

True, the last time, that was rather the point. It was a goodbye party held for me at Theatre 99 in Charleston, where improv comedy is the specialty and foolishness is not just normal behavior but part of the house rules. Under ideal circumstances, foolishness of the improv comedy variety is accompanied by great loads of humor. Only in my case – a tongue-in-cheek interview by theatre owner and full-on comedy professional Greg Tavares – the comedy occurred all on one side of the stage (his) and the foolishness was pretty well confined to the other (mine). Also, it’s one thing making an idiot out of yourself on purpose, and quite another to do it unintentionally. People can tell the difference.

It’s not that I’ve got no experience on a stage in front of a live audience. I’ve performed hundreds of times in scores of theatrical roles – serious, comedic and everything in between. But being entertaining with the benefit of a director, lots of rehearsal, and someone else’s brilliant words in your mouth is altogether different from being entertaining on your own, on the fly. Whetever small gifts I may have as an actor pack their bags and vanish when I’m called upon to improvise. Give me a good script and a month, and I’ll make you pee your pants. But give me a microphone and a spotlight, and you will shortly wish you hadn’t.

In retrospect, I think the best I managed that evening at Theatre 99 was to come off as a slightly drunk, brainless buffoon to Greg’s straight act, which I achieved with surprising ease. Perhaps I had delusions of, at the very least, being laughed with rather than at. There was a lot of laughter, that much is sure. Fortunately, I was leaving Charleston the following week for what turned out to be a permanent relocation to Asia. This time, it won’t be so easy to walk away.

On Sunday evening at 6pm, I’ll step onto a stage at RMIT University and spend the next four hours as host and emcee of the school’s Couple of the Year Contest. Yes, go ahead, ask yourself what that is – what it possibly could be, what form a live love competition between Vietnamese students who are all members of the Business Club could take. And you will find yourself asking the same questions I did when I was invited to be the emcee.

How do you say no to an invitation like this? I’m not asking that rhetorically. Seriously, does anyone out there have any idea how I can squirm out of this thing? I’m starting to think about faking my own death.

It’s worse that the request came from my own students, who have somehow mistaken a comfortableness with classroom buffoonery in their lecturer for professional improvisational talent. I tried politely demurring – I had other plans, I had too much work, I had acute altitude sickness that prohibits me from standing on a stage, I have a phobia for phallic-shaped instruments that prevents me from using a microphone. I asked if they wanted a reference and gave them the number for Greg Tavares at Theatre 99. I intimated that a union contract required me to charge an impossible sum for my appearance. They promised me two free tickets.

There’s no getting out of it now. All week, students have been congratulating me on my yet-to-be-seen performance and telling me they’ll be in the front row. My name is on the poster (“Emceed by famous lecturer Mr. Patrick!”) It’s unlikely that I can count on the crowd being drunk and easily entertained; the only booze on hand will be what I bring in with me, and I’m going to need all of it.

No, the only thing that’s going to save me on this one is a miracle. Greg, are you out there? Can you catch a flight to Saigon in the next, say, 30 minutes? I’ve got the tab.

If you ever start to feel as though life is no longer the challenge it’s billed as being, that you’re drifting through your days like a celebrity poodle, coddled and catered to by an endless parade of attentive sales clerks, obsequious cashiers, too-helpful bathroom attendants and timely pizza delivery service – if you find yourself being accommodated, assisted and indulged into a drowsy, zombified kind of emotionless stupefaction by the ease of living in a hyperdeveloped world superpower, well then: Vietnam is the place for you.

This is a country where the customer is not always always right. Quite the opposite, in fact. The customer in Vietnam is generally considered wrong or at least mistaken, especially if the customer is a foreigner. The words “fast,” “friendly,” and “customer service” rarely appear in the same sentence here, and promptness is seen as a personal vice.

The Vietnamese people seem to pride themselves on erecting obstacles to getting any job done. In a communist nation, it’s a political imperative that every person must have a job, no matter how menial or trivial. Popular thinking follows the logic that if one person can do a job well, then five people must be able to do that single job five times as well. A corollary principle maintains that no job should be done by a machine which could be done by a person (or five). Roads and highways, for example, are kept clean by street-sweepers – not the truck-sized kind but the people-sized kind, an army of elderly men and women who’ve been handed crooked straw brooms and can be seen every morning cleaning streets that (one can’t help noticing) are mostly composed of dirt to begin with.

Another result of this arrangement is that every person becomes far more committed to justifying his or her job than to actually doing it, which usually means spending ten times as long undertaking it as necessary and making it appear much more complicated than it needs to be. Layers of bureaucracy pile up atop each other here like breakfast at a Waffle House. Each person in this bloated machine is dedicated to wringing as much relevance as he can out of his little niche, and also to wringing as much under-the-table lucre as he can out of any poor slob over whom he has the slightest leverage.

Case in point: I recently spent close to a month trying to lay hands on a DHL package that my old flatmate in Osaka, Will, had sent to me here. DHL does not deliver to your actual shipping address in Vietnam, nor does any postal carrier. That would be too easy. Rather, knowing how much foreigners here must enjoy a challenge, the government sees to it that all packages are delivered instead to a remote warehouse way out near the airport, where they are opened, rifled through, their contents appraised and often liberated. If you’re expecting a package, the onus is on you to get to it before its contents have disappeared forever.

As to what are they looking for, who knows. Electronic items raise flags, because if they are not pilfered outright, then they can they be taxed to kingdom come when you pick up the parcel. What’s more, while you are spending weeks wading through the red tape piled up between you and your package, they can replace all the inner components with cheap Chinese facsimiles. So you end up paying an exorbitant additional fee to pick up a package whose shipping cost to Vietnam was already preposterous, and then the electronic geegaw inside breaks within a day of getting it home. No wonder the locals tell you not to bother having anything shipped here.

But in my case I had no choice. My parcel contained old clothes, a pair of iPod speakers, three books (carefully vetted to avoid confiscation by the sticky-fingered censors at Customs) and some mail that had been delivered to me in Japan after I left, including an envelope with 5,000 yen ($45) from Will as payment for my bicycle. To claim this bounty, I had to write and fax four letters in Vietnamese (I had help from my girlfriend, Malo), make two trips to the airport warehouse, and navigate a legion of shuffling bureaucrats whose only job seemed to be telling me, in Vietnamese, that they could help me with just one small part of this process before directing me to another godforsaken, unairconditioned office in the bowels of this vast building. I also had to produce not only my passport but the Customs declaration stub I’d received on my first entry to Vietnam six months previous.

Do you know what I’m talking about, this document? It’s an insignificant little piece of paper they give you on the airplane just before you arrive in a foreign country. It’s covered in rows of square boxes the color of anti-nausea medicine. On it, you write your name – one letter per box, I always run out of boxes – your flight number, how much gold you’re carrying on your person, whether or not you’re entering with live animals or uncooked vegetables, that sort of thing. You fill it out in about 60 seconds flat, hand it over to the guy at the Customs counter when you land, he tears a piece off and hands you back the rest with your passport, and that’s that.

Who on earth thinks to keep such a thing? It doesn’t have value even as a memento, because the cheap paper it’s made of biodegrades almost instantly in the festering reaches of your unwashed pants pocket or in your carry-on or wherever you’ve stuffed it once you’ve cleared Customs and have your mind set on retrieving your luggage and finding one of the few honest cab drivers with a meter that actually works rather than the demonic spinning slot machines most have attached to the dash.

I, for one, do not keep items like this. That piece of paper had no sentimental value for me, and I have never, ever been asked for it anywhere, at any time. Who knew what I’d done with it on landing in Hanoi in June 2008? It’s probably still on the floor of the cab I took from the airport into Hanoi, just another layer of history in a rancid pile that was six inches deep back then. But that little piece of paper was exactly what the DHL goons wanted. After the faxing of the letters and the passport, after the first futile visit to the giant airport warehouse, where I was treated to the sight of scores of Vietnamese men and women gleefully tearing open hundreds of foreign parcels and pawing through their contents like a sick satire of a Norman Rockwell Christmas morning – after all this, I was asked for my Customs declaration form.

Of what possible use could this thing have been to them? Even my girlfriend, who is Vietnamese and no stranger to the byzantine protocols required to get anything done in this country, was flabbergasted. I half suspected these two men had merely invented this step out of thin air as a prelude to shaking me down for a bribe. Nothing of substance is accomplished here without palms getting greased – at every level of organization, from the lowliest street cleaner to the loftiest Party member. The more official their position, the more money they rake in. No task is completed, no form filed, no ticket issued, no stamp stamped, without somebody getting a little something to ease the process along. This I was prepared for, even having already spent close to $400 to have DHL deliver a battered piece of luggage full of old clothes, books, out-of-date mail, and an iPod speaker set.

But no, they didn’t want money. Well, more accurate to say money was not the fix to this problem. They wanted – needed – that Customs declaration, and there was no way around it. Without it, my suitcase was going back to Osaka. Struggling against the rising need to throw a raging apeshit fit, I looked over at Malo for help, only to find her quietly sobbing in frustration. You know you’ve encountered an epic achievement in organizational ineffectiveness when it can make a lifelong Vietnamese resident weep openly.

Frantic, I claimed suddenly to remember all the information I’d written on the form six months before. Was that good enough? Wary, the two men in the cramped, sweltering office said it might be. What was the date I’d flown in? I tossed off a date that sounded likely, then fabricated an airline and flight number from the clear blue. One of the men wrote this information down on a pad. How much gold had I been carrying? Definitely less than an ounce, I replied, in the same breath disavowing live animals and vegetables in general. The man nodded, said something in Vietnamese to Malo, and left the office.

Malo had stopped crying, spent. We sat, not having anything else to do. We talked about this and that, trying to turn the subject to something less overtly Kafka-esque for a few moments. After about 15 minutes, I wondered aloud where the other man had gone.

“He went to find the paper,” she said.

“What paper?”

“Your paper, the one you told him.”

I stared at her, waiting for her to tell me she was joking. She looked back. “The other part, that they tore off,” she said. “He’s finding it.”

“Where?!”

“Up there,” she waved at the floors above us. “Somewhere. They have them in boxes, he said.”

I pictured a vast room the size of a football field, filled floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes containing every torn off stub of every Customs declaration of every passenger who’d ever flown into the Ho Chi Minh City airport. And I pictured this man, ant-sized, peering into box after cardboard box for a useless stub of paper that didn’t even exist. I saw into the very depths of the Vietnamese mind in that instant, and I quailed.

“I made all that stuff up!” I whispered at the top of the whisper register. “I don’t have the slightest idea what my flight number was! I don’t even remember what airline I was on! I just said that so we wouldn’t have to go through all this again with somebody else in another week!”

“They knew you were lying,” she smiled.

I gaped. “So what’s he doing up there?!”

“The date was correct?”

“I don’t know, maybe. I think so.”

“He thinks he can find it.”

“But I didn’t arrive in Ho Chi Minh City. I arrived in Hanoi.”

“Oh,” she said. She thought for a minute. “He might not find it, then.”

I did get my package, eventually. The Customs stub was apparently not as all-critical as I’d been led to believe. A week later the parcel was delivered to another office, where I handed over a “tax” of about $30 and left with a battered suitcase filled with old clothes, some six-month-old mail (missing the 5,000 yen, naturally), and three carefully vetted novels. But no iPod speakers.

It’s just as well. They’d have broken within a week anyway.

For an American living in southern Vietnam, there’s no end to the strange, the incongruous, and the bizarre. Most of it, you learn to deal with, sometimes even embrace. And some of it, no matter how commonplace, you do not.

Road rules, for example. They’re quite literally a foreign concept here – as, often, are roads. Or, forget dog meat, how about a nice bowl of fried cockroaches? Finding a pair of men’s shoes in a 12M can be vexing beyond all reason in a land of miniature people, where four-and-a-half foot women are commonplace, and the typical man’s waist-size clocks in around 28 inches. And what is one to make of a country without a single Starbucks or McDonald’s (let alone an Apple Store)?

But the slipperiest concept by far – more than the food or the culture or seeing a pirated, lushly boxed “Official Acandemy Awards Winners Picture Slumdog Millonaire” for sale by street vendors the morning after the Academy Awards – is living in a place where winter never comes. It sounds like the title of sad children’s book, doesn’t it? The Place Where Winter Never Comes. But it’s all too true. While most of the rest of the Northern Hemisphere is freezing its ass off, I’m dealing with temperatures in the mid-90s. In March 2008 I rode a bicycle to work in Japan through a foot of snow. A year later, I’m riding a bicycle to the office wearing shorts and a T-shirt so I don’t arrive in my work clothes drenched in sweat.

Of these two less-than-perfect scenarios, you might think a South Carolina native might be more comfortable with the second one, the one I’m presently living. That may be true for other other spawn of the South, I don’t know. For my part, I’ll take a foot of snow over sweltering heat just about any day of the year. But especially in March.

It’s not just that spring, such as it is here, lies just around the corner. The temperature in Ho Chi Minh City has been as steady as a crack gunslinger’s shooting hand since, well, this time last year, setting up a nice little home for itself between the 89 and 94 lines. The only difference between winter here and, say, high summer, is that summer is wetter. The same is true of spring, only more so. There are two seasons in this part of Southeast Asia: wet season and dry season, corresponding roughly to the seasons known in other parts of the world as spring and summer, fall and winter. “Hot” is applicable 365 days a year.

Unfortunately, I’m not a hot-weather person. Other people I know here – Canadians and Swedes, for example – claim to be living a life of climatic bliss. No winter at all? Ever? Sign me up, they said, and never looked back. But I’m a perspirer. If there were an honest living to be made in perspiring, I’d have my life’s work cut out for me. I’d have gone pro straight out of high school. The pleasantest winter I ever spent was last year’s, trundling to work every day through snow above my ankles, freezing my way into sleep every night in a house with a single space heater, watching my breath curl into frost above my head as I drifted off into single-digit dreams.

As Ho Chi Minh City staggers from dry season into wet season, the rest of the known world – including you, probably, wherever you are – will be emerging from the refrigerated depths of winter into the vivid, unrestrained exuberance of spring. There, you’ll exult in the rebirth of the world, awash in color and the symphony of life new and reawoken. Here, I will still be hot. But I will be hot and wet. As Adrian Cronauer said, that’s great if you’re with a lady, but it’s no good if you’re in the jungle.

Sometimes I hate Christopher Hitchens and his ever-brilliant, never less than electrically witty, drillbit-sharp take on culture and politics, and sometimes I love him. This article, from Slate magazine, is exactly why sometimes I love him. Thanks, Mr. Hitchens, for saying what has needed to be said for a long, long time.

Sarah Palin’s War on Science

The GOP ticket’s appalling contempt for knowledge and learning.

By Christopher Hitchens

In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn’t seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place “in Paris, France” and winding up with a folksy “I kid you not.”

It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly. Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource, since it can be easily and plentifully “cultured” in a laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation. This makes it useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature “issue” of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina. The fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any financing of research into its habits and mutations is money well-spent. It’s especially ridiculous and unfortunate that the governor chose to make such a fool of herself in Pittsburgh, a great city that remade itself after the decline of coal and steel into a center of high-tech medical research.

In this case, it could be argued, Palin was not just being a fool in her own right but was following a demagogic lead set by the man who appointed her as his running mate. Sen. John McCain has made repeated use of an anti-waste and anti-pork ad (several times repeated and elaborated in his increasingly witless speeches) in which the expenditure of $3 million to study the DNA of grizzly bears in Montana was derided as “unbelievable.” As an excellent article in the Feb. 8, 2008, Scientific American pointed out, there is no way to enforce the Endangered Species Act without getting some sort of estimate of numbers, and the best way of tracking and tracing the elusive grizzly is by setting up barbed-wire hair-snagging stations that painlessly take samples from the bears as they lumber by and then running the DNA samples through a laboratory. The cost is almost trivial compared with the importance of understanding this species, and I dare say the project will yield results in the measurement of other animal populations as well, but all McCain could do was be flippant and say that he wondered whether it was a “paternity” or “criminal” issue that the Fish and Wildlife Service was investigating. (Perhaps those really are the only things that he associates in his mind with DNA.)

With Palin, however, the contempt for science may be something a little more sinister than the bluff, empty-headed plain-man’s philistinism of McCain. We never get a chance to ask her in detail about these things, but she is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools (smuggling this crazy idea through customs in the innocent disguise of “teaching the argument,” as if there was an argument), and so it is at least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies were created just as they are now. This would make DNA or any other kind of research pointless, whether conducted in Paris or not. Projects such as sequencing the DNA of the flu virus, the better to inoculate against it, would not need to be funded. We could all expire happily in the name of God. Gov. Palin also says that she doesn’t think humans are responsible for global warming; again, one would like to ask her whether, like some of her co-religionists, she is a “premillenial dispensationalist”—in other words, someone who believes that there is no point in protecting and preserving the natural world, since the end of days will soon be upon us.

Videos taken in the Assembly of God church in Wasilla, Alaska, which she used to attend, show her nodding as a preacher says that Alaska will be “one of the refuge states in the Last Days.” For the uninitiated, this is a reference to a crackpot belief, widely held among those who brood on the “End Times,” that some parts of the world will end at different times from others, and Alaska will be a big draw as the heavens darken on account of its wide open spaces. An article by Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times gives further gruesome details of the extreme Pentecostalism with which Palin has been associated in the past (perhaps moderating herself, at least in public, as a political career became more attractive). High points, also available on YouTube, show her being “anointed” by an African bishop who claims to cast out witches. The term used in the trade for this hysterical superstitious nonsense is “spiritual warfare,” in which true Christian soldiers are trained to fight demons. Palin has spoken at “spiritual warfare” events as recently as June. And only last week the chiller from Wasilla spoke of “prayer warriors” in a radio interview with James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who said that he and his lovely wife, Shirley, had convened a prayer meeting to beseech that “God’s perfect will be done on Nov. 4.”

This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just “people of faith” but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.