Immitation, flattery, etc.
I like to keep up on national news about the town where I live, and see what is being written about our City Councilman, Van Tran, who is running for the California State Assembly. I interviewed Tran for an article I wrote for the Spectator in late August. Yesterday I noticed a New York Times article (picked up now in the Long Beach Press Telegram) that resembles the one I wrote, sort of. The gist of both is about the attitude of Vietnamese-Americans in our local Little Saigon about current Presidential candidate John Kerry. The two could hardly be more different.
I wrote that the Vietnamese-Americans in this country have been more than a little dissatisfied with the Senator, mostly stemming from his opposition to the Vietnam Human Rights Act. His long ago Senate testimony was known among the hard-core anti-communists here, but of late, everybody knows. "Mister Jane Fonda" is his nickname in these parts. That he's now running for President has gotten the locals interested in helping to make sure that doesn't happen.
The Times takes a different approach. They quote Van Tran, "There is a sense of Vietnam fatigue 30 years after the fact. But here we are 30 years later, and we have two candidates for the highest office talking about what they did in Vietnam or what the other guy didn't do."
Jane Fonda makes an appearance. "I know he came back against the war, he didn't like the war," Mr. Chau said. "I heard and read the newspaper that he gave back his medals, that he was like Jane Fonda. I think he didn't know very much about the Communists." Chau went on to say that the US should stay in Iraq and finish the job.
A third person, a Mr. Do of a local Viet language newspaper said, "The Vietnamese are not really interested in this discussion. They want to look forward and not look back into the past." Another person, a writer and founder of a support group for Vietnamese women said, "John Kerry is a hero to me." The last person, an ethnic Chinese, said, "When you go to war, people die." She also expected a reinstatement of the draft because of the "grinding insurgency" (the writer's words) in Iraq.
I give the writer, John Broder, props for quoting more people in his article than I did in mine, but I believe he is soft-peddling a bit. Were I to have quoted more people "on the street" instead of two local politicians choosing their words for publication, the article would have come off as a fire-breathing and unprintable diatribe against Kerry, which I believe is closer to the truth not only in Little Saigon, but also in the Viet-Am community at large.
Broder makes no mention of Kerry's activities stymieing the Vietnam Human Rights Act that originally had these people fired up. His anti-war take is that it's all about a thirty year-old conflict that everybody is tired of. The Vietnamese are not really interested in the discussion, war is bad, the draft is coming, the Communists fooled Kerry, and to at least one person John Kerry is a personal hero. That doesn't sound like where I live.
The Vietnamese community is not one hundred percent behind the President, and is equally not uniformly against Senator Kerry. But tired as they may be of this old war, they certainly don't want one of the key figures that helped lose it, and caused so many Vietnamese to either flee on rickety boats or be slaughtered, to be in charge in their new home.
