The Post-Partisan Emporium

  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 f...

  Satanic, Sinking West Still So Sexy LINH DINH Consider these photos: In the first, we see a smiling white woman in a white dress, flanked by two dark females, recognizably Asiatic. Topless, one is flat chested, while the other has the merest suggestions of breasts, yet they’re identified as “Phneung young women.” The fully dressed one is Mimi Palgen-Maisonneuve, a French woman who lived in Cambodia in the 1950’s and 60’s. This photos circa 1952 provides a striking contrast between civility and relative barbarity. In the second, there are two Lao women with shoulder poles, carrying produce for sale. One wears a conical hat. In the background, though, there’s a Coca Cola truck, and there are many other clues to tell us it’s an image from the 21st century. One woman has a denim shoulder bag. The other wears elephant pants, of the type popular with tourists, as well as phony Balenciaga flip flops. Taken just yesterday, it’s a snapshot of rural, “backward” people adapting to contempor...