We're in Saigon now, things are quite lovely. This city is beautiful- much more so than Bangkok. There seems to be bit more social order, less pollution and trash, less apparant widespread poverty. Here, the wide boulevards are sunny and lined with enormous trees and the alleys are shady and lined with little cafes. Theres a bit of continental sophistication here, i think for obvious colonial reasons. In fact im minded of the books ive read on paris in the thirties- its all here now- the sidewalk cafes with cheap cold bottles of beer, the hotels, the scamming and gouging attendent to a skyrocketing tourist economy, the omnipresent well-dressed prostitutes, the entrenched expatriate population. In fact all thats missing is all the books and flowery talk.
But in so far as literary comparisons go, the city doesn't resemble as much that of Graham Greene's The Quiet American, which i read in Cambodia. I guess it's an outrageous understatement to say that a lot has changed since Greene captured that era, when Viet Nam was at war with France, opium was legal and readily available and this city was still naive about a lot of things. Naivety is one of the main themes in that book: Largely, the naivety of America and it's foreign policy. What prophecy he acheived with this message in 1955. Ten years later would see his message writ large across SE asia in gore and carnage.
Yesterday we went to the War Crimes museum. Something about seeing pictures of smiling American boys holding up decapitated heads makes it feel strange to be here as an american. As the curators remind us, the museum is not there as an accusation but a reminder that these things can't happen again. Unfortunetly our government doesn't understand that message, and all these things are being repeated again and again like boring deeper and deeper into something that we wont be able to escape from.

How do you like that for blissed-out sunny ramblings? OK tommorow ill hit some darker truths when i tell you about the WATERSLIDES!!