JACK BERNARD'S TRAVELS

Posted by jdbernard743

· August 1, 2011

Spoiled and Privileged Children

I am appalled and embarrassed by what is happening in the Congress of the United States. I’ve felt this way for more than 10 years, but this past two weeks has been a crushing indictment of how self interest, personal ambition, ideology, and self delusion have taken precedence over the best interests of the people and nation our elected official are sworn to represent.

Governing America has never been a simple task. Democracy is messy but compromise is what has enabled it to deliver balanced solutions to complex problems for more than 200 years. The current “deciders” of our fate are acting like the spoiled and privileged children most of them probably are. They are throwing tantrums, locking themselves in their rooms and refusing to come out until they get their way. Meanwhile, the rest of us are hostages.

Our country has been in decline for more more than a generation. When the Berlin Wall came down we became the single remaining superpower, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world. We were rich, envied and smug. Even though we were the most powerful nation in history there were cracks in the edifice. Our education system had been failing the country and its students since the 1960s. Dropout rates were astronomical and high school graduates unqualified for either work or higher education. Our university system was and is the envy of the world, but a quality education is now beyond the means of many Americans. More and more of our successful students are from other countries but unlike previous generations these graduates are going home to work rather than following the dream of success and achievement in America.

After 9/11 we had the world’s support and sympathy, a budget surplus, and a clear path to prosperity. Since then we have squandered the first two, started two wars and let Wall Street greed drive us into the financial ditch.

I live and work in Vietnam where hard work, dreams, and sacrifice are the still the elements that lead to a better life. Parents sacrifice and suffer so that their children will have a chance at a better life. When I return to the US I see adult children living with and off their parents and complaining that they can’t find the “right” job while discussing whether Kim Kardashian has butt implants. Let’s get serious. America is becoming a second tier country. We don’t have universal healthcare even though we spend much more than any other country. We have crumbling roads and bridges, inferior mass transit, an overlooked and decrepit rail system. We are fighting two and a half undeclared, expensive wars – one of which was unnecessary and unwise and distracted us from finishing the other. So, what is going on in Congress? Why aren’t the two parties coming together to work out a solution? For some reason these spoiled and privileged children think that they can have it all without working hard or paying for it. I definitely want America to have and be the best of everything, and I think it can if we’re all willing to pay our fair share. With the country teetering on the edge of default and the disparity between rich and poor greater than any time in my lifetime, why is there any question about the responsibility of America’s richest people to pay their fair share to the country that enabled them to become rich. I just don’t get it. Trust me the people holding us hostage are not worried about their pay or retirement checks. They’ll be just fine.

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Categories : Saigon Diary, Uncategorized

Posted by jdbernard743

· June 28, 2011

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What Immigration Policy?

I know the United States has immigration policies. That’s the problem. There are policies that apply to Mexicans. There are policies that apply to Canadians. There are policies that apply to IT workers at Microsoft. There are policies that apply to young foreigners married to older US citizens. There are policies that apply to single women and policies that apply to Iraqi interpreters.

Dominique Strass-Kahn didn’t need a visa but the West African maid he allegedly raped surely did. I have a young friend in Saigon who was turned down for a visa even though she had been accepted to study at a US university, had the money and sponsorship needed, and had the support of her Vietnamese employer. Go figure.

As I listen to the debate I wonder how many of the people arguing so strenuously to tighten immigration and visa requirements have ever been on the other side of the equation? How many of those strident voices have personal experience filling out the forms for another country’s visa? How many of them had to disclose details of their net worth? Did they have to produce a marriage certificate, bank statements, airline tickets, and the home addresses of relatives? Have any of them been denied a visa or immigrant status without an explanation? America is the land of entitlement. Americans would be outraged if they were denied a visa – especially if they were not told the reason – but I have Vietnamese friends who have fulfilled all the documentation requirements, described the purpose of their visit, shown the consular officer proof of assets and dates of travel, named a sponsoring organization, shown the intent to return to Vietnam and have then been denied a US visa without being given a reason for the denial.

Have we forgotten that the US is an immigrant nation? What happened to the sentiment memorialized in the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty?

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Now we are building a fence to keep them out. What’s with that?

Categories : Saigon Diary, Travel, Uncategorized

Posted by jdbernard743

· June 15, 2011

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The Insurance Child

No pictures please…

When Westerners spend time in Vietnam there is one subject that almost always comes up – older white males and young Vietnamese women. The streets are full of them and the combinations are limitless. They always provoke a reaction. What are they about? Some are about hope. Some are about sex. Some are about romance. Some seem desperate. Some are depressing. Some are disgusting. Some are funny. Some are normal. Some are predatory. Some are sweet. Some are sour. Some are scandalous. Some are hard to look at. Some are vets with nostalgia for another time. Some are just what you think they are. Most of them are about money one way or another.

One of the best places in Saigon for people watching is the square at the top end of Dong Khoi Street where the Cathedral of Notre Dame stands as a reminder that the West has been involved with Vietnam and its people for centuries. Every Saturday and Sunday morning Marilynn and I sit across the square from the cathedral on the terrace of the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf Company and watch the human parade. There are brides having their wedding photos taken even though their weddings won’t take place until weeks or months later. There are balloon vendors, shoe shine boys, lottery ticket sellers, models, and tourists all milling about. But,inevitably there will also be a number of old white guys with young Vietnamese women. Vietnamese women are exceptionally beautiful. Human traffickers prize them because of their light skin and fine features. It’s not a mystery why men are drawn to them or why Western men come all the way to Vietnam to meet them.

When I see an overweight older white man with a tarty looking girl in short shorts I am repulsed. Then I remind myself that I have good friends, CEOs of multi-national companies, who go home every night to their younger, lovely, well educated Vietnamese wives. Sometimes I am able to set the sexual tourists aside and look for the real people inside, to see these people in a different light even though they remain a mystery to me.

My friend, James, is a 55 year old businessman from Boston. He’s well educated, straight and normal but socially awkward, and at 55 still unmarried. I imagine that he had trouble attracting good looking successful women who were his peers in the States. Things changed for him in Vietnam. One night 6 years ago he and a friend met a couple of Vietnamese girls in an elevator at the Caravelle Hotel. They invited the girls to sit with them in the rooftop Saigon Bar even though the men didn’t speak a word of Vietnamese and the girls spoke no English. A year later after a telephone relationship with an interpreter on the girl’s end they were married. Now James is doing business consulting in Vietnam and they have a 3 year old child – the “insurance child.” More about that later.

Another 62 year old friend moved to Vietnam after a successful career in telecommunications in Australia. Here he met and married a 28 year old Vietnamese banker. A year later they were the parents of twins – the insurance children. The stories are endless. A friend in Thailand, almost 60 and never married, is now happily married and has a 7 year old insurance child. Another friend, Chairman of one of the Big Five accounting firms, is married to a lovely and talented Vietnamese designer and they have two insurance children.

The insurance child is shorthand for security and commitment. It seals the deal. It is almost a certainty that a young Asian woman married to a Western man will have a child within a year or two of marriage. Vietnamese women are very smart, and when they talk about relationships they talk about being taken care of. It’s all about the money. My 62 year old friend will be in his 80s when his girls graduate from high school. His wife will be in her 40s. When a Western man marries a Vietnamese woman he takes on more than a wife. He gets the girl, but he also gets her family. That generally means he becomes financially responsible for them, all of them – parents, siblings, siblings children, grandparents – and they’re not in the background. They are there, in the house, much of the time. As Zorba the Greek says, “the full catastrophe.”

For these women the dance leading up to marriage can become a risk management challenge. Most Vietnamese women see the Western man as an insurance policy and they are fully invested in securing their future. But, sometimes it doesn’t work out. There are thousands of beautiful girls in Vietnam and they are very available. A Western man can have as many servings as he wants. A particularly beautiful friend of ours has invested 5 years in a relationship with a semi-permanent expat CEO. He was married and she, like her counterparts worldwide, thought he would divorce the wife and marry her. He’s got a great deal, but the plan hasn’t worked out for her and now she’s in her late 30s and other prospects are fading. She never got the insurance child.

Categories : Fashion/Lifestyle, Personal/Family, Saigon Diary, Travel, Uncategorized, Work and Adventure

Posted by jdbernard743

· June 13, 2011

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Roadside Repair

There are 10,000,000 people living in Saigon and there are 5,000,000 motorbikes that get them where they want to go. There are no Mr. Goodwrench outlets or dealer repair shops in small shopping centers along the main thoroughfares, but the Vietnamese are nothing if not resourceful. This picture shows the Saigon solution. Every morning this guy hauls his toolbox and compressor somehow from someplace and sets up on the corner just down the street from our apartment. I don’t know how he hauls his gear. I’ve looked around his “shop” for a trailer or wheels or some device that would help him move the stuff every day, but I don’t see it. I know he doesn’t just heft that compressor onto the back of his motorbike. It probably weighs close to 200lbs. Nevertheless, every morning he sets up shop and every evening he breaks it down and hauls it away.

These corner repair shops are scattered all over the city and this is where flat tires get topped up or patched, clogged fuel lines get cleared, and broken brake cables get replaced. There are small vendors and service providers on almost every sidewalk in Saigon. Most of them, whether they are serving snacks or selling sim cards for your mobile phone transport their “business” to their offices in a small aluminum and glass trolley/cart. And many of them are in position and doing business for only a couple of hours a day. My favorite breakfast cart shows up about 6:00am and is gone by 9:30. I think the couple that owns it must go to other jobs after they’re through serving breakfast to the regulars. The woman next to them sells Coke and some other soft drinks and she’s there until mid-afternoon. These folks know their clientele.

Saigon is a feast for all the senses and a real lesson in entrepreneurial activity.

Categories : Saigon Diary, Uncategorized

Posted by jdbernard743

· May 24, 2011

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Why Can’t We Do It?

Over the weekend I visited a friend in Bangkok. It’s exotic and interesting, but that isn’t what I left there thinking about. My real take-away is about transportation. I have two primary points of reference for traffic – one is Seattle and the other is Saigon. Both are traffic nightmares; Bangkok is not.

Bangkok’s population is officially listed as 9,100,000, about the same size as Saigon and five times the population of the whole of King County, Seattle’s home. The streets of Bangkok are wide and traffic flows normally for a major metropolis. At rush hour things slow down but at other times they flow fairly smoothly. Saigon’s 5,000,000 motorbikes make the traffic chaotic, unpredictable and sometimes outright dangerous. Motorbikes share the streets and sidewalks with bicycles, cars, pedestrians, cyclos, and pushcarts. There is some kind of protocol, but it’s difficult to figure out. In Bangkok there are only a few bikes and motorbikes. What is the difference?

Here it is: Bangkok has a mass transportation system. That’s the difference. The BTS Skytrain and the MRT Underground move huge numbers of people swiftly through the city in comfortable air-conditioned cars at reasonable prices. They also leave the streets free for automobile and bus traffic. Why is it that Thailand, ranked #30 in the world in GDP can move people more efficiently than #1 ranked United States? I don’t know the answer, but I think we deserve one.

In 1953 Seattle built a double-decked elevated roadway through downtown, and in 1963 the Evergreen Point floating bridge was built to connect Seattle to the eastern suburbs. Now, 50 years later both of them are falling apart and need to be replaced and there is no mass transit anywhere (Light rail is a very short joke). Seattle is infamous for its “process.” Everyone must be heard and heard and heard, but nothing gets done. Seattle has been arguing over both the viaduct and the bridge for more than 10 years. Finally, last year a “consensus” was arrived at and we decided to build a tunnel to replace the crumbling old elevated eyesore through downtown. It was a struggle but the tunnel won out and it was agreed that the solution would also create a beautiful San Francisco-like waterfront that would attract locals and tourists alike as well as move traffic efficiently. But, now the “process” is grinding us down again and someone has collected the required number of signatures to bring the matter to another vote on the ballot in 2011. For some reason it seems more important to stop doing things in Seattle than to do them.

Why can’t we have a beautiful waterfront, a functional bridge system and, yes, a mass transit system too? If #30 can do it, why can’t #1?

Categories : Politics, Saigon Diary, Travel, Uncategorized