His speeches opposing the Iraq War. All the points have since been proved correct. He likes to talk about hope a lot; but he is also a badass.
==
BARACKKKK:
I don't oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.
What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.
know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.
I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.
I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars. So for those of us who seek a more just and secure world for our children, let us send a clear message to the president.
========
BARAAAAAK:
"You want a fight, President Bush? Let's finish the fight with Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, through effective, coordinated intelligence, and a shutting down of the financial networks that support terrorism, and a homeland security program that involves more than color-coded warnings.
You want a fight, President Bush? Let's fight to make sure that...we vigorously enforce a nonproliferation treaty, and that former enemies and current allies like Russia safeguard and ultimately eliminate their stores of nuclear material, and that nations like Pakistan and India never use the terrible weapons already in their possession, and that the arms merchants in our own country stop feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe.
You want a fight, President Bush? Let's fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells.
You want a fight, President Bush? Let's fight to wean ourselves off Middle East oil through an energy policy that doesn't simply serve the interests of Exxon and Mobil.
Those are the battles that we need to fight. Those are the battles that we willingly join. The battles against ignorance and intolerance. Corruption and greed. Poverty and despair."
Should I?
There's nothing about that thing that I like.
The concept of sincerity is not a difficult one. Most cultures have it. This includes Chinese culture, my culture. We also have a word for it, though we, like the Arabs, are not particularly famous for it. The word is "cheng yi". We also have related idioms. My favourite is qian li song er mao, li qing qing yi zhong. Literally translated, it means "Giving a goosefeather from a thousand li away. The gift is light but the sentiment is heavy."
It means, in Chinese culture, we are taught not to measure a gift by its material value, but rather by the meaning and well-wishes imbued in the gift.
But on the flip side, it doesn't mean you can't say ummm if a good friend, who's a rich man, who owns a goose factory next door, gives you a single goose feather for your birthday. That, by all definitions, is a fuck you.
You can't talk about a man building churches. Well, you can, if he was building them in any country but a Muslim one.
When I was an intern at a now defunct newspaper (not my current employment) I did a weekly obituary, about local people, who are otherwise unnewsworthy, but managed to die while I needed to fill the page and managed to be the least uninteresting of all the deceased.
Wasn't always easy filling that damned page.
I called up an Indian family, who had put up an interesting looking death notice (I forget what I was intrigued by - it's been four years) and found out that the late patriach had been a zealous churchbuilder across the Straits Of Johor. I remember his family proudly recounting how he would often go to Malaysia and overseeing the building of new churches in a heathen land. He built so many, they told me. What a great man.
As a secularist, I don't actually agree that building lots of churches makes one great. But at least it is an accomplishment. And hey, I had done a story about a street painter who saved up money to build temples back in India. Same same, yeah?
Went back to editor. No go. Granted, part of it was that the story wasn't that strong in the first place - not that the obituary page I was doing was particularly newsy - but a reason was that it was sensitive. People might take offence. Who these people were was left unsaid. I couldn't see why at that time. It's just a guy building churches. Yeah, he also mentioned about converting Muslims, but big deal. I was quite dumb and had no idea of the laws that restricted evangelising to Muslims, which is bullshit if you ask me. At least according to the principles on which I believe a nation should be founded. Laws should restrict evangelising to everyone!
Sadly it's not utopia. A country's got to have freedom of belief, or it's Saudi Arabia. You have the right to annoy me and I have the right to tell you to fuck off. I can understand the restrictions against evangelising Muslims to ensure stability, which says more than I think most people care to admit. I do wish such rules wasn't necessary.
It all goes back to Malaysia.
If you have been following reports, Indian Hindu and Malay Muslim tensions have been running high. Mostly due to the Government being pretty unfair. They held several Hindraf (a Hindu-rights group) leaders under the Internal Security Act. They have been tearing down historical Indian temples. Remember the rage in Iraq over the destruction of mosques (usually by factional Muslims) before blowing up mosques in Iraq was cool? Well, the government in Malaysia have been doing it willynilly, exploiting the fact that many of them were built years ago and had no documents. It also insultingly deflected the quite reasonable claims of discriminatory treatment by downtrodden Indians who have not seen the benefits of progress. Years of fattening Bumiputera. Grabbing a husband's corpse from a grieving wife and forcibly giving the body a Muslim burial. They do that to Chinese Christians too. Mixing civil courts with Syariah rule. Etc, etc.
Recently, they restricted visas for incoming priests and people complained. Then now, boom. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7176323.stm. Malaysia bans Indian recruitment.
Every time I think about how shitty Singapore is, I think of Malaysia's woes and I feel much better that I live in a secular state where the reach of mosque, church or temple does not extend into my constitution.
It gets even nuttier up top.
After two days in HCMC (Ho Chi Minh City) it was time to head north, to cooler climes and, we assumed, more charming locales. Miss June, the third leg in our tripod of adventure, decided to take the railroad, stopping first at Hoi An, the ancient capital of this bomb-blighted land. Yasmine and I decided to bypass central Vietnam by air, looping into the atmosphere and landing in the modern-day capital of Hanoi.
The view from the plane was astonishing. From high above I saw mountains and rivers and lakes, dwindling forest that huddled in the highlands, the endless stretches of farmland that surrounded each cluster of human habitation that overtook the trees. Cities, towns and villages were brown-grey blocks sliced by roads, long and winding like great worms. Flying below the cloud layer is a magical experience over a terrain as varied as this.
Landing at Hanoi's unexceptional airport, we met an Aussie tourist with an Italian name and made acquaintances. Together, we took the free bus Pacific Airlines provides to Hanoi proper. From there, we then made our way down to our hotels in a taxi after Yasmine coerced the dishonest little driver into using his meter. We were fortunate his was a regular one and not one of those rigged to fuck tourists. (More on that later, if there is a later.) We would encounter the Aussie again on our way to Halong Bay. We liked him, not least because he gave us more money for the taxi then we needed for our stop, so in effect we paid nothing at all.
But that's all the good news for now. We were at the Old Quarters, the ancient part of Hanoi, which heaved with energy and lung disease. It was a shithole. Feeling deflated and deafened by the hammering horns of motorcycles and their growling, grinding. soot-spewing engines whose damnable noise both echoed and permeated the low-lying houses, all long and thin with very narrow fronts, like video tapes stood on their length - we wondered what we were in for. Where were the girls in conical hats and ao dais - the body-length flowing white traditional dress - riding bicycles that you always see in pictures of Vietnam? Where were the traffic lights? How are we going to cross the street? (The answer to last part is the same as in my previous entry, but remember it is the devil who rules the street here.)
Our hotel, which was recommended by a friend of Yasmine, turned out to be no refuge.
Everything inside is nuts.
It's been a week or two since I returned from Vietnam. Memories are hazy, like Hanoi, where I ended the trip in a hospital with needles poking out of my arms at the airport, just before I was supposed to go home. I wasn't attacked by drug addicts. What happened was, I was suffering from potassium deficiency, which leads to very nasty things. I don't really want to talk about it too much, there isn't really much to say from my viewpoint anyway, I just felt weak, couldn't breathe and I honestly thought I was going to die.
I'm going to give away the ending here and tell you I didn't die. The mystery is what caused the potassium shortage. Doctors don't know.
I was feeling sick in Vietnam for quite a while. On the last day I was so sick I had to sit down every few minutes. Yet I still foolishly had ice-cream and two cups of coffee. Well, I was feeling miserable and wanted something sweet and sinful. Temptation damned near killed me.
Okay, enough of that. The gist of the trip.
We landed in Ho Chi Minh city. Ho Chi Minh, if you didn't know, was an old guy with a beard whose picture is in every Vietnamese person's home. We share a surname. The city was sooty but the architecture was brilliant, the traffic less so. In fact, the traffic sucked. Quiet is an unknown concept in the big two cities of Vietnam. Every vehicle communicates through honking and it never ends. Motorcycles accelerate past corners and honk you because you didn't see the bastard.
It didn't help that traffic crossings stretched interminably. The secret is to just walk, and pray. "I want to die" was a commonly heard phrase from my travelmates.
Charming town, Ho Chi Minh. Hanoi's Old Quarter was worse.
We saw a bunch of things. I don't really remember. Who cares? The hotel we stayed at was cheap and exceptionally clean. I told the wife of the boss, who cleaned the room, "It's very clean!"
She beamed and said: "Thank you! We like people from Singapore! They're very easy to clean up! Very clean!"
I promise more detail in the next update. If there is one. Cheerios.
