By lamplight turn these scented leaves and read...

Dennis Robert Redmond dredmond at efn.org
Mon Dec 3 16:56:28 PST 2001


On Mon, 3 Dec 2001, Hakki Alacakaptan wrote:


> How proportional is this alleged American generosity to the objective
> destruction of Vietnam's infrastructure and ecology, the massacre of 3
> million Vietnamese,

Ah, but the point is, as Fredric Jameson famously said, capitalism is the best thing to ever happen to the human race, but also the worst thing. The truth of the contradiction is in the extremes, not the bad compromise between the two; one has to denounce the horror of US imperialism, while simultaneously holding fast to the utopia of Americanization, a.k.a. the first stage of multinational consumerism.

My own small contribution to the US Reparation Fund is this litcrit analysis of the masterpiece of Vietnamese poetry, the Tale of Kieu -- basically, I'm arguing the text is a classic on the same level as Shelly's Prometheus or Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, which has been overlooked by the Establishment all these years for the usual neocolonial reasons.

-- Dennis



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