Flying to New York on 09.11.11 Finds a Paranoid and Collectively Depressed Nation on Arrival

Those little town blues

Flying from Asia to New York is punctuated by an announcement on the PA from the pilot leaving Taiwan that says they are required by US law to tell passengers that they are not allowed to congregate in groups of more than two, anywhere on the aircraft during flight. It is only a small notion of the American paranoia to follow. You don't hear that going to China. On the flight from San Fran to NYC the first sign that America is in deep shit is that there is no free food on the flight as there had been from Saigon to Taipei and Taipei to San Francisco. Nope. You can buy a breakfast cookie for $3 on American Airlines or a limp shrink-wrapped croissant with ham and cheese for $6. It sucks. Welcome to the good ole US of A. Time to pay for everything - including the free-everywhere-else carts that you use to get your luggage out of the airport. In America, that costs $5. In Europe, Asia and Africa, all of which I visited in the past two years, those are free - and supported by advertising on said carts. "Sorry, we're fresh out of money in America because all the war and shit over the past 10 years", reads the idea and fresh out of things like 'freedom' and 'liberty' too according to the press I read.

The New Yorker Magazine does a whole issue on the 10th anniversary of 9-11 and it's not exactly a love story - having a cigarette with a guy who works stocking coolers at one of the restaurants in San Francisco's airports he says, "Do you think they really killed Bin Laden?" He doesn't believe it. The New York Times Sunday Book Review features a story by Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum called, "That Used To Be Us" on America's slumping economy and lack of current innovation. 10 years of war are killing something, obviously. Obama is chided for curating George Bush's legacy by OpEdNews.com and it's pretty damn tough to find any optimism at all on the way into America. Excellent time to go back methinks.

You might find the Europeans grousing about Greece and the Asians grousing about, well nothing, but it's more than plain to see that at least the American intelligentsia are none too happy about much at all. As far as I'm concerned, I have nowhere to go but up. It will be interesting to see how that can come to be in a nation that seems to be wallowing in being down.

The Chinese Cookie Jar is Dead

Thrown away by a careless housekeeper who thought it was garbage. The Chinese Cookie Jar was actually a piece of Japanese porcelain that was given to me by my adopted mother - and to her, by her mother, and to her by her mother. It was roughly 170 years old. The first date on the family registry was 1845.

I had taken it to four continents - America, Asia, Europe and Africa. It was broken to at least 50 bits on my trip to Africa last year. I had put the bits in a plastic bag and vowed to super-glue them all back together once I got back to Vietnam. That will never happen.

Whilst away on a business trip this weekend, a careless housekeeper threw the bag away - and with it, a lot of adopted family history - and a little bit of mine.

I had called it the Chinese Cookie Jar since I was a kid and mom used to keep cookies in it on top of the refrigerator. I broke the lid, trying to get to the cookies, and it had been thrown away. The rest went away today. I'm sure there's a message in that.