Democracy of Violence

LINH DINH

[still from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, 1972]

Sustained, leisurely conversations aren’t just essential to mental health, but to maintaining civility. Faced with another, one must learn how to listen, and to entertain, with proper respect, someone else’s opinions. Plus, one can’t so easily lie or make false accusations. It’s a lot harder to bullshit, in short.

Lacking such encounters, society unravels. Online, a masked man can unprovokedly call a woman “a cunt” or “dink cunt,” and feels no shame, but what do you expect from barbarians? As “sulu,” “catdompanj” or “The Gimp,” etc., one can say anything, if only for much needed release. Bottled anger must be messily spilled constantly.

Already, the US is in worse shape than what’s depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Watching it in a theater while still a teenager, I couldn’t appreciate its significance. What’s the point of so much gratuitous barbarity?

Within the first 15 minutes of this two hour movie, a homeless man is viciously attacked by four young men, a woman is stripped naked and nearly raped, then an older man is tied up, beaten and forced to watch his wife gleefully raped. At minute 42, a woman is murdered.

In any American city, unspeakable acts of barbarity occur almost daily, with most perpetrators not caught, or promptly bailed out then punished so lightly, they’re likely to commit more outrages soon enough.

By contrast, the main villain of A Clockwork Orange, Alex DeLarge, spends most of the film being rehabilitated, with his entire nation becoming invested in his progress. Far from typical, Alex is seen as a monster. Plus, the state genuinely wants him to be cured. Itself barbaric, the government still wants to maintain a monopoly on violence, unlike today’s America. Spreading mayhem and barbarity quite liberally, the US has become a democracy of violence, and nothing else.

It’s a land of violent opportunities! You can kill and die so many ways, even in places you’ve never heard of. Somalia, Niger… In Cheyenne, Wyoming, a woman told me her daughter was stationed in North Korea. If locked inside, by choice or decree, you can be violent online!

Every interior in A Clockwork Orange has the most vulgar decor, with even “high class” households displaying kitschy pornography. At the home of a writer, there is one vaguely legitimate painting, but everything else is kitsch, for vulgarity has engulfed the culture.

The only intrusion of high art is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Listening to it, Alex looks deranged while lapsing into poetry, “Oh bliss, bliss and heaven! Oh it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. It was like a bird of rarest spun heaven metal, or like silvery wine flowing in a space ship. Gravity all nonsense now.”

For this rapist and murderer, such bliss is a transcendence that rockets him from this earth. The poem in the Ninth is Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” of course. As translated by Michael Kay, it begins:

Joy, beautiful spark of the gods,
Daughter of Elysium,
With fiery rapture, goddess,
We approach thy shrine!

In this poem of gratitude, joy is no incitement to mayhem, but a gift from heaven. It ends:

Way above the stars, brothers,
There must live a loving father.
Do you kneel down low, you millions?
Do you see your maker, world?
Search for Him above the stars,
Above the stars he must be living.

Without humility, there’s no gratitude, only insatiability, resentment, anger and fleeting smugness. There are so many more Alexes among us than in A Clockwork Orange.

Tellingly, Alex’s deepest source of pleasure becomes a tool to torture him. He’s cured only when exorcised of lust, lust for violence and Beethoven’s Ninth. Effectively lobotomized, he’s capable of neither good nor evil.

My occasional forays into films are most unnatural. I watch fewer movies than anyone I know. Nearly always, I prefer to be among actual bodies and voices. Even when writing, I do this.

Sitting outside Subinh Hotel, I can hear traffic noises constantly. Across the street is a thin lady who almost never smiles. I buy bottled water from her. The waitress here is a plump woman with a gorgeously serene face.

This morning, I again dropped into Liên Hương for its unsweetened avocado smoothies and to chatter with its owner, an old ARVN who lost a leg during the war.

Tomorrow, Liên will go to Bangkok to visit his daughter and grandchildren. Starving, he had to move to Laos 31 years ago. A Vietnamese from Thailand then fell in love with Liên’s daughter, then only 17. He kept persisting until they both relented years later.

In 1974, Liên had a chance to emigrate to the US, but turned it down. During those inhuman years just after the Fall of Saigon, Liên started to regret this, but now, he’s more than at peace. In Laos and Vietnam, he’s talked to immigrants who had returned from the West.

There’s a man in his 50’s who had a welding business with about ten employees. Giving it all up, he emigrated to Australia to be with his son. Working in this son’s dry cleaning business, he couldn’t iron fast enough, so was yelled at until he cried. Telling me this, Liên couldn’t help but laugh, but Vietnamese do laugh at nearly every situation. Recounting their own misfortunes, they’re liable to laugh.

It’s 2:23PM. Done with this article, I can walk ten yards to the house that sells baozi in the evening. There, I can talk to a Chinese who has just left San Jose, CA for good. Much of the Bay Area has turned into a nightmare, we agree.

If Coredo wasn’t in Pietrasanta, I’d be tempted to visit his Dok Mai Lao to eat and talk. Mentioning his hometown earlier, I forgot to say Fernando Botero had a house there. Botero’s paintings are almost kitschy enough to be in A Clockwork Orange.

See how hard I had to work to draw any connection between Pakse and that horrific movie or the West? There’s no one remotely like Alex, sulu or Catdompanj here. You need not believe me, but it’s an entirely different world. Older and more enduring, it will outlast that distant madness.

My visa expiring, I must leave for Cambodia within days, but I just might return. Before coming to Pakse, I didn’t know it would be so sane and congenial.

[Don Sang, Laos on 4/5/23]

[Pakse, Laos on 10/2/23]

[6AM daily mass in Pakse on 9/18/23]

Source: Postcards from the End