Author Archives: Linh Dinh

As every story is a meandering road, each road is also a story, or, more accurately, an infinity of stories. An abandoned trail that leads from nowhere to nowhere, with no wayfarers, only a rare roadrunner, snake or javelina, would still be an endless source of human-interest tales, or, more likely, tails. Haven’t you heard of the ancient saying, “Even the fool is wise after the Interstate,” especially if he drives off its exits often? Though a stuttering man of few sentences, terrible eyesight and beer fizzled memory, I have managed to drag back a sackful of observations from my snooping around San Jose’s Story Road. Continue reading →

Other people’s lives come fluttering to us in the tiniest fragments, and these we gather, when we bother to, into an incoherent jumble of impressions we pass off as knowledge. Further, our ears, eyes and mind are all seriously defective and worndown, making intelligence a dodgy proposition, at best. Our memory also crashes daily, if not secondly, our verbal skills poor, and when we examine ourselves, there are the added distortions of endless exculpation and vainglory. In short, no one knows ish about ish, though some ish does get much closer to the real ish. One thing for sure, amigo, if you ain’t aiming for ish, you ain’t gonna get ish. Continue reading →

Sightseeing buses are for those who deeply dread the places they’re visiting. You can’t really see a city or town from a motorized anything, so if you claim to have driven through Los Angeles, for example, you haven’t seen it. The speed and protection of a car prevents you from being anywhere except inside your car, with what’s outside rushing by so fast that each face, tree and building is rudely dismissed by the next, next and next. You can’t pause, come closer, examine, converse, sniff or step on something, so what’s the point of visiting Los Angeles like this, except to say that you’ve been there? Continue reading →

In Sartre’s “No Exit,” hell is depicted as a room with two women and a man, which is fair enough, for a threesome is never what you envisioned it would be, in the privacy of your own hell. Hell is also “other people,” “les autres,” for in the company of another, one’s vanity, smugness, extreme prejudices and fantasies, whether philosophical, political, charitable or pornographic, are rudely disrupted. Continue reading →

Of all the words uttered by a person, only a few remain unforgettable to any listener, for these can charm, haunt, humiliate, annoy or terrify even decades later. Continue reading →

The coarsening of a people doesn’t happen overnight. When I came to the States in 1975, the Gong Show was about as rude as it got on television. Some earnest sap would get bumped for crooning, “Feelings, nothing more than feelings,” but no one ever got screamed at, had their wig knocked off or made to sob in public. No tune ever urged murder, and even a group named War only sang, “Why can’t we be friends?” The year’s top hit was The Captain and Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together.” Compared to now, it was a cheesy time, for sure. American cheese. Continue reading →

When one of our senior statesmen, and former presidential candidate, no less, calls a foreign leader a monkey, we should wince, but, no, our citizens merely jump online to declare that this is an insult to monkeys. Such is the state of American witticism and, uh, statesmanship. Continue reading →

Tales of madness are subjective. I mean, what is insanity exactly? If all of your ghastly indiscretions, mental and actual, were strung together, they could wrap this earth many times over, ditto mine, so all of us can easily be deemed deranged, including you, solemn pastor, rah rah coach or prissy board lady. Continue reading →

In the 1980s and 90s, even a klutz like me could find work as a manual laborer. I painted houses, washed windows and cleaned apartments and offices. Continue reading →

The world just ended, and I’m still here, so maybe I’m already in hell, where I have reserved a booth jammed with half-forgotten faces, or maybe I’m shunted to heaven, thanks to a bureaucratic mix-up. Continue reading →

Catalans want to break from Spain, again, and secession is also the buzz in Flanders, Scotland, Texas and Vermont. With the global economy collapsing, people everywhere are becoming fed up with being ruled by distant bureaucrats and bankers hell-bent on destroying local livelihoods. Wages are down, jobs lost and entire countries gone bankrupt thanks to government-enabled banking frauds, a process lubricated by increasing centralization and the intertwining of national finances. Continue reading →

“We want to be troubled no more by Arabs; room to breathe; a skyline cleansed of them; no more bleating of sheep knifed by an Arab; every beast to die a natural death; no interference till we have drained the carcass empty and picked its bones clean. Cleanliness, nothing but cleanliness is what we want,” so says the oldest jackal in Kafka’s “Jackals and Arabs,” as translated by Willa and Edwin Muir. This tale about Jews and Arabs appeared in a Zionist monthly, Der Jude [The Jew], in 1917, just a month before the Balfour Declaration. Continue reading →

If you’re a gun dealer, all shootings are good for business. Drive by, clan, gang, post layoff, adultery in flagrant, Russian roulette, Batman’s suburban theater premier, urban flash mob, gas station sniper, accidental, incidental, mercy, ruthless, righteous retaliation against unbearable diss, premeditated since infancy, Satan driven, God sanctioned, whatever, it’s all good, as long as your hardware was in use and in demand. Continue reading →

Are you rolling forward and upward? Will your offspring use you as a red-carpeted stepping stone towards an asskicking future? Are you still beaucoup loaded and inured from any testy unpleasantness wafting up from below? Do you believe that bums are bums because they don’t know how to be competitive in this global economy? (Meanwhile, you employ an army of illegals to take away all of their jobs, or grant special visas to those who can’t simply hop across the border. To entice emigration, you may even shower foreigners with bombs.) If yes to all of the above, then good for you, I suppose, though all of your BP, GE, Boeing and Kellogg, Brown and Root stocks may nosedive soon enough. Continue reading →

7/1/12—Citing Iran’s nuclear ambition, America and her hushed puppies impose oil embargo on Islamic republic. Going on four years now, the global economic depression has kept oil price in check, so this embargo is meant to stop it from dropping further, if not bump it up, benefitting Western oil companies. An economic sanction steers customers from an enemy to you. Though always slobbered in morality, it’s basically a trade tactic. The military cost of harassing Iran and enforcing embargo also enriches Western weapon manufacturers. Continue reading →

The flaws of bad government, oppression, injustice and corruption, etc., can be masked by an unearned windfall. Take Saudi Arabia and its oil, for example, or the United States and its oil, which was first sucked from its own soil and sea, then everybody else’s, thanks to its status as an empire. Continue reading →

On top of its brusque and decidedly unromantic sexual fondling, TSA agents have also been caught stealing electronics, jewelry and cash. A TSA manager ran a prostitution ring from a motel room, and a supervisor is a defrocked priest, kicked from the pulpit for molesting two young girls. Lots of kids pass through the Philly airport, so this shamed minister has found his true calling. Continue reading →

No fan of public sexual molestation or gratuitous cancer-inducing radiation, I haven’t flown in four years, but tonight, I’ll have to board a plane to fly to London. If there was a transatlantic tube, rickshaw relay or galley slave jubilee special to Piccadilly, I’d be on it, but since there’s no way to dodge our eager TSA gropers, I might as well man up (or down) for some random intimacy. Continue reading →

Whatever crimes, violations or discretions anyone admits to, he or she likely has done, is doing and will do worse. This is also true of governments. Washington can now snoop on your international emails and phone calls, without warrants, but do you seriously think they’d spare your domestic communications? Of course, not. Continue reading →

Until 1982, Philadelphia had three daily newspapers, and the surviving two, the Inquirer and Daily News, are owned by the same company. Both are hurting. Fewer and fewer readers force extreme cost-cutting measures that reduce the quality of each rag, which means even fewer readers. Competition from the Internet, as well as the degraded reading habits it fosters, choppier and sloppier, are mostly to blame, but corporate greed and shortsightedness also played an important role. Continue reading →

Outside the Gallery, Philadelphia’s low-class shopping mall, Jimbo sits in a wheelchair and begs behind a large sign, “I AM A CANCER VICTIM. I CANNOT WORK. CAN YOU HELP ME”. Under a leather cowboy hat, his eyes are still alert, though a pinch of his lower lip has turned purple. A reader and thinker, Jimbo will talk your ears off about FDR’s foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor, the FBI’s infiltration of all protest movements and, especially, how the IMF has enslaved the world, Continue reading →

Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote, “Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.” Continue reading →

In these days of a dying, raving and hallucinating empire, its best known poet, and a master at being antiwar, is accepting a Presidential Freedom Award from a cynical if affable, still, to many people, master of war. What is Bob Dylan thinking? Continue reading →

It is Poetry Month again, but most Americans wouldn’t know it, preoccupied as they are with forechecks, Mitt, Kim, Lady, Pippa and Doritos Locos Tacos. Continue reading →