Depressing post

For a few weeks now I've been plotting a post in my head about the American war. It was something about the parallels between Ho Chi Minh and Abraham Lincoln, the near in visibility of the effects of the war unless you are really searchng it out, etc., but now, after spending the last 2+ hours in the War Rememberance Museum, my heart just isn't in it.

Outside of the building there stand captured American planes, guns, tanks and opposite them are their Vietnamese counterparts.

You walk into the museum and are immediately confronted with a section titled "War Truths" (3 million Vietnamese dead, 2 million wounded, 300,000 missing, etc.) and them proceed to an exhibition of photographs from both American and Vietnamese journalists. Reading caption after caption under photographs of American and Vietnamese dead was difficult. From there you are funnelled into a room with a television and a video about the lasting effects of Agent Orange. 70% of Vietnamese are under 35 year od. Agent Orange, while having a short life span in the foilage that it was meant to destroy can stay in human skin cells for up to ten years.

Because of this, many children born between 1970 and 1985 to parents who were sprayed with these chemicals have birth defects that I can only liken to the photographs of Thalydamide babies during the Reagan administration, only these children lived and are now 20-30 years old living in sanitariums, begging for money on the street, and a few are leading normal lives (our current hotel manager seems to have been one of Agent Orange's unfortunate victims).

After the video is an exhibit of American war crimes beginning with a large banner stating "We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal..." and then many many photos of people badly burned with white phosphorous. Around this time it became hard to look at any more documentation of the My Son (My Lai) massacre. We skimmed through the exact replicas of Tiger Cages used by the Southern Vietnamese government during the '50s and were are little too overwhelmed to really study the entire room dedicated to the world wide anti-war movement. After a photograph of Normal Morrison, I was done.

Who needs a drink...?

To cheer you all up here is a painting of Arnold on the wall of a bodybuilding studio here in SaiGon.