If a blogh is not a place to reveal ones deepest shame I don’t know what is. So I am going to confess that for a number of years in high school I was that most shameful thing of all, a Deadhead. I listened to Grateful Dead albums obsessively, I read books about them and about Haight Ashbury, I traveled to their shows (by rail, bus, car and hitchhiking) and took lots of acid. Discovering their records one by one was an odyssey into the past, into the utopian sixties, a decade I idealized. I did listen to other music: Led Zeppelin 4, all of Jimi Hendrix, The Allman Brothers, Joni Mitchell, Leo Kottke, Hot Tuna to name a few. But all took a back seat to the Dead. By 1975 I was that most dreaded thing of all, a seventies hippie (but I never wore Tie Dye or batik!). How I became one, and how I got out of it, is the subject of this post.

Like most oldest children I had to find my way through the musical wasteland on my own, there was no older sibling steering my taste. My parents listened to classical music and musical theatre. I owned The Monkees and before that Little Alvin and the Chipmunks and Peter Paul and Mommy. Playing the trumpet in the dance band gave me a taste for standards like Tenderly and Stella by Starlight, as well as Burt Bacharach tunes. Even at that age I was given to the obsessive playing of single songs, exhausting them and everyone around me until a new compulsion seized hold of me. Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell (I told you I would spare no shame), followed. In 1970 or so I started listening to AM radio and naturally progressed into a love of bubble gum pop. I’m not sure when I migrated over to FM. But this was the situation when I entered 7^th grade. That was the era of great soul music, and under the influence of new friends I started to by soul 45s with the money that would, a year later, go to cigarettes. Someone gave me Carly Simon’s album with You’re So Vain on it, and the blue and the red Beatles Greatest Hits records. I had a friend, Burt B. who owned 3 records, Aqualung, Led Zeppelin 2, and Firesign Theatre. We listened to these late at night, while his divorced mother was out on dates, on his little sister’s plastic portable record player. There was also a proto-schizophrenic girlfriend, Joanne L. (she later hanged herself in an insane asylum), who introduced me to something she called ‘hard rock’, in mockery of my bubble gum taste. These bands recorded on the Warner Brother’s label (distinctive logo) and all I remember was Uriah Heep, Mott the Hoople and T Rex. The names intrigued me, but the sound not all, at least, the sound couldn’t complete with Joanne’s big beautiful tits and bewitching tongue.

Mark P. gave me my first Grateful Dead record in 1973. His house was the epicenter of our pubescent decadence. He had parties with soul music and booze. His mother laughed when we mixed every color of liquor in her cabinet and poured it over ice. I watched the network premier of Planet of the Apes there, which was cut short by a blackout. It seems I spent every Friday and Saturday night at his Larchmont Manor house. He had a cousin, Josh, who lived on the Upper West Side and turned us onto pot. Josh also recommended that Mark buy me Working Man’s Dead for my birthday. Puzzled, I looked at the Warner Bros label and concluded it must be ‘hard rock’. Proudly I showed it to Joanne, who laughed at me, because The Dead weren’t hard rock, apparently. I put the record on and was upset to discover a mix of country, folk and rock. Like a lot of music I came to love obsessively I put it away after one listen.

But the Dead have deadly hooks. The invisible insinuation of Jerry Garcia’s voice and beguiling guitar had done its work and a year or so later I started to listen again, this time falling in love. I don’t know what appeal the Dead has, it is a mystery. Surely few other rock bands become cults. Pink Floyd? The Beatles? Maybe. But the Dead were less media driven. They remained apostles of the hippie bohemia they helped create. They seemed to actually like each other. Their fans couldn’t hear their music on the radio. (They had only two FM hits that I know of, Truckin’ and Casey Jones, but there may have been others on American Beauty…maybe Sugar Magnolia? But I am too depressed by all of this to even Google it!). The next record I got was The Greatest Hits, and this revealed something astonishing: there were indeed ‘hard rock’ Grateful Dead Songs, and it was something called Acid Rock. There was a whole corpus of Sixties music that exploded in my nascent psychedelic brain. I was now all Tao de Ch’ing, Grateful Dead, hippie nation, and I found a group of friends who shared the tribal aspirations farting along the surface of a decade that began in despair and ended in total despair. Because the seventies, as opposed to the sixties, were cynical, introverted and apolitical. In retrospect there is an engagement and intensity and theatrical innocence that wasn’t evident at the time. Movies like When We Were Kings reveals that what seemed like a disgusting big money media event was actually a quaint expression of a good time, compared to our time of total wall to wall delusion.

I also had a different group of friends, or rather, an overlapping one, and they came out of Bowie, the Tubes, and Lou Reed. I didn’t like this music (except for Walk on the Wild Side, which I knew from my AM radio days). But the gateway drug to punk for me was The Velvet Underground. What finally cured me of the Dead in fact (after a transitional period of some years) were bands like The Modern Lovers, Television and the Velvets. These bands had an expansive, energetic, improvisational drive to them that was familiar to me, it continued the rock of the sixties into the seventies without becoming fatuous. The seventies horror was Yes and ELP and the Dead’s 25 minute jams with their faux jazz and reggae feel, sixties Muzak. The fact is I was young and insane and the music of the Dead from around the time I started to listen to them to the time I stopped was becoming the music of old men, or 30 year old bong hitters anyway. A Dead show as an amazing event, but going to CB’s or Max’s or Club 57 at Irving Plaza was the real deal. There was no retrospect involved. It may not have been the 60’s, but by the late 70’s it seems we had our own decade. The drugs of choice became speed and alcohol. I didn’t cut my hair or change my clothes, and I still listened to the Dead, alone, late at night, but the songs I was listening to were all from the sixties, bootleg recordings collected obsessively by my fellow-traveler Deadhead and best friend, Mike.

The punk revolution in music explicitly was pitched against the Dead. They were the symbol of musical flatulence. Iggy Pop, David Bowie, The Talking Heads, Roxie Music, John Cale, The Sex Pistols each in their way were a refutation of the mellow sincerity of the Dead, of CSNY, of Jackson Browne and James Taylor and Carol King, or the corporate synthesizers of English super groups. I am happy to say that by 1978 I never listened to another Dead record and changed my wardrobe to black. The hair stayed long (until I got it cut heading off to Southeast Asia, in 1983), but now it was henna’d burgundy, to go with the two earrings in my left ear and smeared sluttish eyeliner and mascara and chipped nail polish I wore.

The bands I loved best in retrospect were much more like the Grateful Dead than I then imagined. The Velvet Underground were the anti-Dead (their first albums came out in the same year) in almost every way. But opposites are quite alike. The Velvet Underground were both avant-garde and counter-cultural, like the Dead. The Dead were connected to Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy (whom Garcia loved more than anyone else besides Pig Pen) and the whole beatnik demimonde, and Phil Lesh had been a jazz trumpeter. They were seriously into avant-garde music and incorporated the spirit of free jazz improvisation into their music, including feedback and noise. The Velvet Underground came out of the New York Andy Warhol scene and John Cale had been Lamont Young’s student. They also incorporated free form improvisation with noise and feedback and long songs (the average length of Sister Ray was 25 minutes!), only their music was rooted in drone and rhythm, not the blues. Neither band was ever commercially successful in the big sense of the word though the Dead, by dint of staying together, were able to make money. The Velvets, true to form, were an anti-tribe and went the way of most Rock’n’Roll collaborations, mutual contempt. But the amazing thing is, at this point, both bands are best documented by live recordings. And it was these live recording (especially Bob Quine’s Velvet Underground recordings, many from San Francisco, when the Dead ruled that roost), that slowly brought me back to the Dead, albeit not as a Deadhead. But that will have to be a different post.

NGUYEN COCHINCHINA

SOUTHERN VIETNAM IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

By Li Tana
Southeast Asia Program Publications
Southeast Asia Program
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 1998 

http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-AN/102893.htm
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20072012
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihonmachi

Nguyen Cochinchina, Li Tana’s fascinating and vitally important book about the expansion of the Vietnamese into central and south Vietnam, addresses a period and place little written about in English. The story of how the Vietnamese came to occupy an area that comprises 3/5ths of the current country is colourful, full of court intrigue, family rivalry, puppet emperors, evil uncles, exiled Ming loyalists and a variety of freebooters, criminals and what we would today call entrepreneurs.

16^th Century Vietnam was ruled by the Le dynasty, whose founder, Le Loi, a peasant landowner, had led a peasant army to defeat the Ming in 1428, after ten years of war. 30 years later, the emperor Le Thanh Tong, raised in a court dominated by ministers and the intrigue of courtiers and empresses, established a Confucian state and inaugurated what is considered to be a golden age in Vietnam. Among other things he inflicted a major defeat on the Cham to the south, which opened up the possibility of expansion into land that had traditionally been viewed as a place of exile. The Cham were quite different from the Vietnamese in language, religion and custom, though they shared a long history of war and conquest. By the early 16^th century a succession of increasingly depraved Le emperors resulted in  civil war, with two baronial families, the Nguyen and the Trinh, on one side and the Mac on the other. In 1527 Mac Dang Dung killed the Le emperor and made himself emperor of Vietnam. The Trinh and the Nguyen cast themselves as Le loyalists, but from here on the Le were figureheads and civil war continued.

It was in this context that the Vietnamese move to the south began, with the voluntary exile of Nguyen Hoang. Li Tana writes:

“When Trinh Kiem took over power from the Le dynasty in 1546, the formerly allied Trinh and Nguyen families were set to become enemies. Nguyen Hoang, foreseeing the trouble to come, is said to have asked Nguyen Binh Khiem, a famous seer and scholar, what to do. Nguyen Binh Khiem pondered for a long time and replied: “….The Hoanh Son mountain area would be suitable to inhabit for thousands of generations.” Nguyen Hoang then asked his sister, the wife of Trinh Kiem, to persuade her husband to send him away as military commander of the distant frontier region of Thuan Hoa. Nguyen Hoang’s gambit was successful. The Year was 1558.

“Trinh Kiem only wanted to get rid of an enemy. He failed, and gave Nguyen Hoang a kingdom instead.”

The two regions separated slowly. Nguyen Hoang continued to pay tribute to the Le court, but his son did not, and from the early 1600s until the Nguyen unification of the country nearly 200 years later, the two regions were at war.

The south maintained its independence against the far more powerful and organized north for a number of reasons, explored by Li in depth. Part of the reason is that until the early 17^th Century the Trinh in the north still had to contend with the Mac, who controlled the region around the Sino-Viet border, and thus were fighting two wars at once. But there were economic and cultural reasons as well.

The Trinh were somewhat paralyzed by Vietnamese Confucian orthodoxy, which among other things was hostile to trade, and continued to view China and foreigners with suspicion. The Nguyen, on the other hand, in order to survive at all, in an alien land, abandoned Confucian orthodoxy. Theirs was a trading kingdom. Under the Nguyen, Hoi An become a thriving port of trade, especially with Japan and, at first indirectly, with China, via Taiwan. The Nguyen imported rice from Thailand, had a looser village structure, a different tax system and relied on Chinese exiles to settle lands far to the south. The Vietnamese adopted and adapted Cham cultural and religious beliefs, and Mahayana Buddhism became the religion of court.

Famine and war also drove the Vietnamese south, which created a ready pool of migrants. All of this led to a unique Kingdom which, in the 18^th Century, became the cradle of the Tayson Rebellion, which saw the destruction of the northern Dynasty, the Exile of the Nguyen to Cambodia and eventually the unification of the country by the Nguyen with its Royal capital in Hue, where it remained until 1975.

This history is important because it adds complexity and nuance to a story which often doesn’t get past politically convenient sound bites. Li Tana especially analyzes the economic structure of Nguyen Cochinchina and anyone with an interest in the history of trade in the region should read this book. But more so it grants to the south a degree of difference from the north that is rooted in historic reality. In remarkably succinct chapters she explores the ethnic diversity of the southern lands, the fate of the Cham,  foreign relations between the Nguyen court and trading partners in Batavia, Thailand, China and Japan, the Khmer, the Lao and the upland people. There is a wonderful narration of the Tayson uprising.

In this period a different, more Southeast Asian, less Sinicized identity emerges in the south, one which in some ways is a return perhaps to older Vietnamese folkways that exist in myth and custom, and in the interstices of official Vietnamese culture, as defined by Confucian scholars and court historians. Li Tana does what all great historians do, restores a lost world both in its lustre and its particulars. Understanding this period of Vietnamese history helps to illuminate subsequent events, events which came to shape our world hundreds of years later and thousands of miles away.

Robert Kennedy in his Own Words
The Unpublished Recollections of Robert Kennedy
edited by Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman
Bantam Books, New York, 1988

“In my judgment, you would have accomplished much more if you had had a dictatorship during the period of time that President Kennedy was President, because you would have gotten medical assistance for the elderly, you would have gotten all kinds of domestic legislation, , you would have been able to protect our open spaces, you would have been able to do something about congestion in the cities, and you would have been able to do something about the slums—all of these things you would have been able to accomplish if you had a dictatorship.

“Therefore you could argue, during that period of time it would have been much better not to have this system of government—you know, not have a democracy. I think, at any time, you can say that it would be much better if we could have sent people—large numbers, perhaps—down to Mississippi and been able to protect that group down there. But I think that it comes back to haunt you at a later time. I think that these matters should be decided over a long range of history, not on a temporary basis or under the stress of a particular crisis.

“In my judgment, Mississippi is going to work itself out, and Alabama is. Now, maybe it’s going to take a decade and maybe a lot of people are going to be killed in the meantime. And that’s unfortunate. But in the long run I think it’s for the health of the country and the stability of the system….”

On Voting….

“I thought a good deal more needed to be done [on voting rights]. I felt that of course this was the area in which we had the greatest authority; and if we were going to do anything on civil rights, we should do it in the field where we had the authority. And number two: I felt strongly that this was where the most good could be accomplished. I suppose that’s coming out of a political background, but I felt that the vote really makes a major difference. From the vote, from participation in elections, flow all other rights, far, far more easily. A great deal could be accomplished internally within a state if the Negroes participated in elections and voted.

“I look at—just coming out of the election of 1960—the amount of power that the Negro had, the amount of power that he had in the state of New York, where 20 percent of the population is Negro. And so many decisions are made to insure that they are satisfied, and they are always consulted about matters. I could see it all over the country. And here you had almost fifty percent of the population in the state of Mississippi who were Negro, forty percent of the state of Alabama, and a large percent in Georgia: if they registered and participated in elections—even if half of them or even if a third of them, if you get it up over fifteen percent of the whole voting population [being] Negro….

“….In some of these communities it could make a huge difference. And that was the key to opening the door to all of what they wanted to accomplish in education, in housing, in jobs, in public accommodations. All rested on having the vote and being able to change the situation internally.”

On Civil Rights in the North

“…I think the ills that people suffer are so hard to escape in a northern community. It’s basically poverty. I suppose you just have to exist to know that there’s a ghetto system, and that the education’s not as good, and that people can’t get jobs as easily if they’re Negro as if they’re white people. All you have to do is walk down the street between Seventieth and Thirtieth and see how man Negroes you see in the city of New York. It’s the same in every community.

“I just thought that things needed to be done for Negroes in education and employment and housing. And particularly for young people. Like the work we did with the juvenile delinquency committee. I think that would have been very helpful. Seeing what has to be done for preschool education for Negroes, for instance, in major cities. The fact is that fifty percent of all your basic intelligence—you IQ—is determined before you reach the age of five. Well, if a Negro child is born into a home that is broken—and the mother doesn’t read or write—it’s pretty tough for the child ever to be developed or prepared to go to first grade, be prepared to go to school…

“The problems of the north are not easily susceptible to passage of legislation for solution. You could pass a law to permit a Negro to eat at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant or stay at the Hilton Hotel. But you can’t pass a law that gives him enough money to permit him to eat at that restaurant or stay at that hotel. I think that’s basically the problem of the Negro in the North, and that’s why I think it’s more difficult to be dealt with….I don’t think that people realized the depth of the problem and the fact that the solution was not easy and required the attention of the community and the state as well as the federal government.”

“I see the old men, all twisted and torn
The forgotten heroes of a forgotten war
And the young people ask me, what are they
Marching for?
And I ask myself the same question”
Shane McGowan, “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda”

The Vietnam Project has broad horizons and contains multitudes. One part stretches into the remote paleolithic in the lands surrounding the Red River Delta, the beginnings of agriculture, the state and trade. But another part radiates into the present, in America, where everyone who remembers the American War with Vietnam continues to live with its legacy. I’m not a TV news watcher, except on Sunday mornings in the winter, when I am sometimes motivated to fold laundry. Fareed Zakaria yesterday morning on CNN was discussing Richard Holbrook with Leslie Gelb and a couple of other yackers. Holbrook’s last words according to them were, ‘Get out of Afghanistan.’ This prompted Zakaria to ask if Holbrook’s experience in Vietnam had shaped his perceptions of Afganistan. Yes! Yes! was the reply. Every generation that lives through war carries the war in their head with them forever after. Robert Graves as an old man whose mind was in twilight replied to a question about his life, “I killed a lot of people”. That would be in the trenches of WWI 60 or 70 years earlier.
Last week, Franklin Crawford, an Ithaca writer and chronicler of what he calls Tiny Town sent me an email about his experience of the American War with Vietnam. I reproduce it here exactly as he sent it. It inaugurates that part of the Vietnam Project that includes The War at Home (thank you Craig MacDonald), and that includes writings as opposed to book reviews and discussions of arcane books.

i got a heap of Vietnam-related family stories — all regarding my brother who was killed in a raid on the artillery base where he was stationed in the Tay Ninh Province in South Vietnam (big place of course — the base was close to the Cambodian border, to be more specific, not knowing coordinates) … his dog tags were missing for 35 years. well. not missing, really. they were in a file in Washington, D.C.

background: my father dropped my brother off at a LIRR train station one december morning in 1970 and he never saw the boy again. dad was a decorated soldier and served in the Battle of the Bulge and a brutal mopping up campaign that followed all to protect the Rohr Valley from the retreating germans who were sabotaging every bridge they crossed out of Belgium back home. the record of his first six months after landing remain one of the worst war stories i have yet read, and i like reading about the american “civil” war.

my brother’s death (caused by AK-47 crossfire and shrapnel from satchel explosives, loss of blood, etc. crushed my father, already a ruined man pretty much at

47. he was institutionalized in his 50s and never led a normal life on the outside again. well. that’s not fair: hospitals and institutions have their norms and life in there runs according to laws beyond most people’s ken.

brother’s death crushed mom, too. both my folks were very damaged and on a downward trajectory when the tragedy hit, spread and got all cozy with the alcoholism and serious mental illness, etc., which run their chaotic routs in my family. at times it is tempting to think there was a poxes [sic] upon us, but i don’t believe in poxes except for that which comes from poultry and a man named small. plus, i am too lucky. i’ve ruined any evil genie’s experiment by producing positive outcomes despite the fact i’ve been warehoused in nine rehabs. true. that’s a cat’s worth of lucky evidence right there. anyway. dad died in 2005. an army genealogist who’d been looking for him for 10 years or more saw the obituary. the tags were returned. dad was dead. with him went his belief my brother was not dead. because there were no tags. even though dad had forced a terrified mortician to show him my brother’s naked dead body. naked!

the wounds were quite horrible. i have all the paperwork. that’s enough to convince me. then again i was never a soldier, so there’s a lot i don’t know.

my father died after a rather simple surgery, in the brooklyn hospital, pretty far from home, alone. he left his own mystery that will never be solved: there is no death certificate for my father. that’s because no one knows why he died. he was recovering well in the ICU for five days and was released to his room. he was dead before sun-up. i had promised to be there when he was returned to his room but i was in spain. he was ashes when i got back.

it is my opinion that Vietnam was an american proxy war that never ended. not for me, anyway. today, the russians and chinese have found a better way to take us to the cleaners. these latest efforts are kind of a draw.

vonnegut considered Vietnam a war we lost. too bad for him. my once beloved author died a disappointed man, i think, because the world did not end in his time.

hope this does something for “the Vietnam project.”

yours,

franklin crawford

ps links: it was a very slow news week in our region. the following rec’d a lot of attention. it freaked me b/c i helped write some of the stories and starred in them (worked at the Cornell Chronicle at the time).

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Feb06/dogtag.dea.html

http://www.pressoffice.cornell.edu/releases/release.cfm?r=16585&y=2006&m=2

there was tv and radio and print media that even made its way to troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. ha~! sad world Mr. Frankel. but to have good luck in it — ah. there’s the gravy for your biscuit.

NIXONLAND

By Rick Perlstein

Scribner, New York

2008

NIXON (to an aide): “It’s a piece of cake until you get to the top. You find you can’t stop playing the game the way you’ve always played it because it is part of you and you need it as much as an arm or a leg…. You continue to walk on the edge of the precipice because over the years you have become fascinated by how close to the edge you can walk without losing your balance”

Rick Perlstein’s NIXONLAND dishes up the traditional Nixon, Tricky Dicky, one of the worst (at least until recently) presidents in American history. This is not Tom Wicker’s revisionist Nixon, this is Nixon in all of his noir glory, the master manipulator, the man who never told the truth if he could avoid it. It is a comfortable Nixon, the Nixon of my memory. And it is one difficult to reconcile with the revisionist Nixon, which is closer to Nixon in his own eyes. The revisionist says, “Sure, Nixon was a son of a bitch, a liar, a manipulator. So were Truman, Kennedy and Johnson, and Eisenhower for that matter. He just got caught.” I don’t think the revisionist Nixon is quite right, but it is provokative, and a necessary corrective to what has become a caricature of a complex, dark, enigmatic political figure whose successes, failures and motives are difficult to pick apart or even define. One thing is certain, he, along with Lyndon Johnson, shaped the post-war American political landscape perhaps more than anyone else. Race, the environment, poverty, welfare, health insurance, the use of the American military, and, especially, the limits of executive power, were dramatically defined either in reaction to these two men or by them. We are living with the consequences now.

This is Rick Perlstein’s thesis: That the Nixon years, and their relevance to our own time, can be analyzed as a conflict between, and exploitation of, the mutual fear, incomprehension and hatred of two groups in our country, the elite Franklins, and the ordinary Joes called Orthogonians. 

While I find the thesis to be limited, Perlstein’s use of it is both entertaining and informative. He writes a cultural history of American internecine violence from 1964-1972 that is to the novelist and Nixon hater a delicious lunch. To the serious historian it no doubt appears to be a gross simplification. I am a novelist, not a historian. I was amused and disgusted and occasionally, discovered something I did not know. In these desperate times it is good to be reminded that Nixon, Reagan and Wallace actually were the bastards of my memory, not merely shrewd politicians with the guts and instincts to sense where the gutter of American politics was and go for it. Though they were of course that too.

The root story, the origin myth is this: when Nixon turned down his admission to Harvard (because his father would not pay the train fare, which happened to my uncle too) he matriculated at Whittier College. There he attempted to join an elite student society, The Franklins. He was turned down by them and rather than sulk in private, rather than become a campus shooter, or lonely alcoholic bum, he got even. He formed his own club, The Orthogonians (orthogon meaning right angle, Straight and Square), made up of the students rejected by the Franklins. This pattern, of both sharing and exploiting the feelings of rejection and hostility towards the elites of ordinary people, would be Nixon’s meat and potatoes for the rest of his career.

“Part of Nixon dreamed of world peace. Part of him gave the public something it wanted as much or more: an outlet for their hatreds….[W]hat Nixon saw as fighting evil and what much of the country saw as fighting evil overlapped. They identified with Richard Nixon—not despite the anxieties and dreads that drove him, but because of them.”

And what did they hate 1969 and 1970? Here is his description of the final convention of the SDS:

“….One faction, the Progressive Labor Party, a severe, crew-cutted Maoist cell that banned the use of drugs, had stealthily taken over the SDS bureaucracy. Another faction…joined in tactical alliance with a group that called themselves The Weathermen to try to win the organization back. They labeled Progressive Labor false Maoists and ersatz revolutionaries and had attempted to prove their revolutionary superiority by recruiting angry white working-class high school students, who were supposed to serve as foot soldiers under the vanguard leadership of The Black Panther Party. The Weathermen were, meanwhile, working to harden themselves as urban guerilla warriors and had brought black and Latino street toughs into the meeting as ringers. When an entyirely separate faction, the Women’s Liberation caucus, offered a motion against male chauvinism, the street toughs roared back in  mockery, chanting, ‘Pussy power! Pussy power!’ The floor disintegrated into a cacophony of contending chants: ‘Fight male chauvinism! Fight male chauvinism!’ “Read Mao! Read Mao! Read Mao!’”

Although the book concentrates on the greatest hits of the period, there were incidents I knew about but had never read about in depth. His description of the Newark Riots is shocking, and forces the reader to remember that police violence in this country was routine and condoned, much worse than it is now, even given the well publicized abuses in major cities . For several pages he documents and describes each murder committed by the National Guardsmen, and state and local police. It is harrowing. These are the conditions that preceded the riot:

“The biggest city in New Jersey was a frighteningly corrupt town….Newark had the highest percentage of substandard housing of any American city: 7,097 units had no flush toilets; 28,795, no heaters. Twenty-eight babies died in a diarrhea epidemic in 1965, eighteen of them at city hospital, which was also infested by bats. The city’s major industry was illegal gambling. Cops ran heroin rings. Food stores raised prices the day welfare checks arrived.”

The uprising began when rumors got out that a black cab driver had been killed while in police custody. The response was to protest, and then, when police surrounded protesters, to hurl names, followed by bricks and garbage. Soon looting and arson broke out. City officials didn’t respond, and the police, who felt handcuffed, took matters into their own hands:

“At eight thirty a father driving with his family to White Castle slowed for a barricade. Guardsmen opened fire. His ten-year-old son, Edie Moss, was mortally wounded in the head.”

“At 6pm bullets ripped through the windows of Eloise Spellman, a forty-one-year-old widow, on the tenth floor of the Hayes Homes project. Her son and daughter watched her die. The shooters were guardsmen and state troopers, who reported she died of sniper fire.”

“Rebecca Brown, thirty, liked to sit at her second-floor window. She kept a color photo of the Star-Spangled Banner clipped from the New York Sunday News on the wall. An adjacent wall was pocked with twenty-six automatic-weapons bullets from street level, one of which killed Mrs. Brown.”

And so on. His finally entry is:

“One more corpse wasn’t included in the Newark death toll: a cop with a conscience who testified against his comrades during the grand jury investigation of the riot died of ‘occlusive coronary arteriosclerosis’ while ‘visiting friends at 25 Gold Street,’ a newspaper said. That address was the police clubhouse.”

Altogether 26 people were killed and 1500 injured. 43 years later and Newark is still recovering from these events.

Perlstein doesn’t flinch from describing left wing violence in the same period, but he contextualizes it by reiterating the obvious, that left wing violence, and African American uprisings, were in response to something.

Perlstein throughout restates his thesis. In the chapter on the student takeover of Willard Straight Hall at Cornell University, after describing a surreal series of confrontations between the administration and radical, African American students, and the reaction of white jocks, he writes:

“What one side saw as liberation the other saw as apocalypse: and what the other saw as apocalypse, the first saw as liberation: Nixonland.”

Nixon used this dichotomy to divide and conquer within his own party too. The Checkers Speech was meant to keep him on his party’s ticket, when Dewey and other Franklin Republicans were trying to get Ike to punt him. Nixon was only there as a sop to the paleo-conservatives and the virulent anti-communist right. Country club Republicans loathed this switchblade yielding ball-kicker from California. The Checkers Speech firmly cast Nixon as a victim, of the press, of the rich and the sophisticated. Moreover, what he was accused of doing was not only legal, but the opposition, the ultimate Franklin Adlai Stevenson, had done it too. Telegrams in support of Nixon ran something like 100,000 to one and Eisenhower had no choice but to retain him. It was one of the many ‘soiling humiliations’ Nixon would transcend and yet, in a most Hegelian way, retain the shadow of for the rest of his career.

In our perpetual amnesia we seem to forget that the rhetoric used during say, the recent health care debate was identical to that used in the early sixties, by many of the same people, who opposed civil rights legislation of any kind on constitutional grounds. Here’s Perlstein on George Wallace in 1966, commenting on increased federal efforts to gain southern compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which denied federal money to any institution that discriminates: 

“There were twenty-two senators from states of the Old Confederacy. Eighteen of them signed a letter to the president calling [revised federal schooling guidelines] an ‘unfair and unrealistic abuse of bureaucratic power.’ George Wallace….read a joint statement standing beside the Alabama congressional delegation that the guidelines were an ‘illegal’ and ‘totalitarian’ ‘blueprint devised by socialists.’ His school superintendent observed that Section 256 of the state constitution—‘Separate schools shall be provided for white and colored children, and no child of either race shall be permitted to attend a school of the other race’—forbade the state from compliance. Wallace went on statewide TV to announce that HEW had ‘the unqualified, one hundred percent support of the Communist Party, USA, as well as all its fronts, affiliates and publications.’”        

The election of 1968 was a squeaker. Despite a severe lack of funds, a party divided against itself and widespread disgust Humphrey almost made it. Was it because half the nation or more wanted out of Vietnam and didn’t really believe Nixon had a secret plan? Perhaps. That would appear from the record to be the issue that gave Humphrey the bump he needed, as he moved away from Johnson in October of 1968. Race on the other hand was not just dividing the country but was slowly, as the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, 1965 and 1966 encroached on white privilege in the north, pitting the ‘silent majority’ of white working class Americans against a liberal minority, identified now with radical youth, black revolutionaries and intellectuals. Nixon paid close attention to the election of 1964, when Goldwater got the nomination through grassroots organizing and took the south from Democrats. Wallace and Reagan were quick studies in the art of exploiting the hatred and alienation of white, blue collar people, the traditional Democratic base, but Nixon was the master. He used buzzwords and innuendo where Wallace and Reagan engaged in overt racism and red-baiting. It was exploitation of this as yet narrow niche, and the promise to end the war in Vietnam, that got Nixon into the White House. What unfolded over the next 5 1/2 years of his presidency was the continued heightening of this division and the policies the strategy served. It was also the violent beginnings of what we now know as the culture wars.

Nixon’s policies are hard to assess. What to Wicker is an accomplished and somewhat invisible domestic record of continued liberal government, enforcement (eventually) of Supreme Court desegregation orders, the EPA, etc. is to Perlstein actually more subterfuge. Nixon, when faced with legislation he did not like, often undermined it. The NEA is a case in point. Nixon hated the NEA, hated northeastern artists and intellectuals, hated the city elite that the NEA served. But rather than doing the conservative thing of abolishing it, he actually increased funding, something liberals could hardly refuse. But he put the funds in the form of state grants and thus screwed big city arts organizations. His means then were hard ball politics. Where he was subtle and crafty in the world of policy, he was criminal, blatant and paranoid in his pursuit of reelection, which came to consume all that he did. What developed out of all this was an assertion of executive power that eventually brought him down. But in this he was continuing an evolution that began much earlier in the century, albeit to serve ends other than reelection.

Lyndon Johnson abused executive power, but he did so with a guilty conscience. He hid what he was doing, he lied, because as a man who had served most of his career in the legislature, as a congressional aide, congressman and senator, and the ultimate retail politician, he knew the executive had to have legislative support. Where he could not get it, as with Vietnam, he lied. And he covered up the lies. He also knew that wiretapping was illegal. He lied about it.  

Kennedy’s arrest of steel executives at midnight, use of wiretaps, and tacit approval of the assassination of the Ngo brothers, Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the entire conduct of the Vietnam War, are but a taste of what would come under Nixon. Nixon, without consultation, waged war on two sovereign nations (Laos and Cambodia), and took the US off the gold standard and imposed Wage and Price controls without any congressional consultation. His diplomatic negotiations with China and the Soviet Union were conducted in secret. He blackmailed corporations into contributing to his campaign. He had the IRS, FBI and CIA investigate and harass his political opponents. This kind of exercise of executive power is unthinkable now, even given Cheney and Bush’s abuses. Moreover, the Bush/Cheney abuse of executive power was, on the part of Cheney, an explicit effort to return to Nixon’s doctrine of The Imperial President, a president who was above the law. It was Reagan appointees who then took this ad hoc assertion and justification for unlimited executive power and crafted the constitutional theory of the strong executive. That argument was used to justify W’s abuses. In this sense then the Bush abuses were laid out by Nixon and Reagan as a permanent option for right wing governance in America.  

Tom Wicker’s biography of Nixon, One of Us is much more sympathetic and famously shifts attention from foreign to domestic policy as the place of Nixon’s accomplishments. Perlstein has none of this. But Perlstein’s main point is not to crucify Nixon but rather to connect him directly to the politics of today. If there is less violence than in the early seventies, we are certainly living in what he calls Nixonland, and it is a terrible and unintended legacy. Nixon and Johnson before him destroyed the faith Americans had in their government because they were shown to be corrupt liars. Yet both men honestly believed that their political machinations, and their venal pursuit of money, were in the service of something, that government exists to solve problems. It was Reagan who didn’t just pay lip service to anti-government conservative rhetoric. He took American disillusionment with corrupt government and used it to destroy the idea of government itself. We have lived with this absurd nightmare ever since. And somehow the violence, fury, paranoia and activism of the Right are no longer countered by the Left. The Left has been in the position of defending government instead of challenging it. It’s only appeal is to reason, and as we know from Julius Caesar, given a choice between the reason of Brutus and the will of Caesar, the people will run Brutus out of town on a rail, leaving their ears to Antony.

I believe that Nixon had genuine abilities, both as an executive and as a man, but the record of abuses so undermines the accomplishments that it is hopeless to try to separate them out. He saw much. If he ramped up inflation for cynical political reasons, fearing recession more, he also looked at the balance of trade and concluded that America would no longer be the sole economic power in the world. Perlstein brings this point out and it is a good one, because Nixon’s solution was to lie about to the American public, and it was part of his motivation in taking us off of the gold standard. He saw that in order to retain military power we would have to have relations with China. He saw this in the early sixties and played a close hand. Not even Kissinger knew what he planned. If he knew Vietnam was unwinnable it did not stop him from prolonging the war for his own purposes, and he was sadistic in his use of bombing. Even compared to W’s use of torture, and the deaths in the civil war in Iraq, Nixon’s policies in Vietnam were criminal. Under Nixon and Johnson there were millions of Vietnamese killed, hundreds of thousands held as political prisoners in the south, and CIA and South Vietnamese police torture was widespread, common, and far worse than anything done at Gitmo or Abu Ghraib. But in the sixties these actions fueled American disgust and opposition to the war, caused our loss of faith in the government. It brought down two powerful and popular presidents. By Reagan’s time only a minority cared, and under Bush/Cheney there were no consequences whatsoever.

Nixon was partly a creature of his times, of history, and he was certainly justified in feeling bitter that he got caught at playing a nasty game others had played against him. In The Nixon Presidency: an Oral History of the Era (Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald Strober eds., Brassey’s, Washington DC, 2003) McGovern is quoted as saying no one could believe that Nixon would keep the tapes. He could have just burned them. Nixon’s hubris was such that he really believed the tapes were his, and his obsession with history, with his own image, was such that he couldn’t give them up, they were his guarantee of being able to write the triumphant story of his administration. Nixon wanted the final word on his presidency. Perlstein often refers to his ‘soiling humiliations’, invoking the trope of shitting ones pants, of being pelted with fecal matter. This is the low Nixon. The Nixon riding in a motorcade in Venezuela, defiant of the mob throwing rocks and garbage at him. I don’t think it should blind even the Nixon hater to the complex truth of this man. Perlstein’s book then lays out the idea that Nixon was no worse than we are. He knew us better than we knew ourselves, and we are living, every day, with his dark legacy.

Volume 2 of Victor Lieberman’s Strange Parallels, Southeast Asia in Global Context, Circa 800-1830 is out. Volume 1 is one of the most extraordinary books of historical scholarship I have ever read. It builds upon and expands vastly theoretical and conceptual approaches pioneered by Anthony Reid. It’s been too long since I have read volume 1 to review it here. Lieberman’s ‘strange parallels’ are resonances between ‘east’ and ‘west’, the evolution of the state, trade, political and cultural centralization during the period when these two regions of the world are supposed to be undergoing separate and unequal development. When I was doing a lot of reading, years ago, (renewed recently), I started to feel that the European reformation, and nascent capitalism, and changes in the European state paralleled similar changes in Southeast Asia, and that developments in world trade might be the stimulus common to both. The rise of a neo-Confucianist state in Viet Nam following the defeat of the Ming (15^th century, see John K. Whitmore’s The Development of Le Government in 15^th Century Vietnam, his Cornell dissertation, and Vietnam, Ho Quy Ly, and the Ming (1371-1421)), the rise of the Islamic trading states in Malaysia, and similar changes in Thailand and Burma suggest that there were global events before global conquest. Modernity is not just indigenous to the west but the result of an interaction which at times took the form of competition. William McNeill in his books pursued this idea some, especially his world history and The Pursuit of Power, the follow up to the eccentric and brilliant Plagues and Peoples.

Lieberman is much more in the world systems school of meta or global history than McNeill, who is no Marxist and doesn’t go in for theory so much as a mapping out global environmental constraints and stimuli to history. But Lieberman brings the empiricist’s eye to the proceedings, and his background is in Burmese history. He is able to focus simultaneously on the details of local histories and the vast conceptual abstractions of world system theory.  I can’t wait to read volume 2 and would urge the first volume on anyone who wants to get both a granular and global perspective on Eurasia from 800-1830.

Hubert Humphrey
A Biography

By Carl Solberg

1984, Norton & Norton, New York
Borealis Books edition, 2003

 The Vietnam Project began with a simple desire to know what happened during the Vietnam War. By the time I got around to writing this blogh, to formalizing it as a ‘project’, my interest had run riot to include the entire history of the region, and I felt morally obligated to counter-balance the events of 1965-1975 not only with the immediate context of French and Japanese colonialism, but with Vietnam’s history. So I have been posting reviews of books that relate the history of the region from pre-historic times. This requires a multifaceted approach, for the Vietnam of 900AD is not the Vietnam of 1425, 1787, 1805 or 1945.

That said, I am still fascinated by the American War, and The Vietnam Project includes as one of its panels a political and cultural history of the United States from 1960-1975 or so. For if Vietnam has fascinated me so has the presidencies it so strongly marked, those of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. If a war that killed millions of people and crippled (perhaps terminally) a superpower can be said to have single victims (and of course, morally, it only has single victims), then one of the saddest stories is that of Hubert Horatio Humphrey.

Hubert Humphrey was a hero in my family, of sorts. I was too young to understand that his position on the war had ruined his reputation. I just knew he wasn’t Richard Nixon, and that my uncle was his friend and associate. On November 22^nd, 1963, Humphrey and Mondale were at my uncle’s house plotting DFL [Democratic-Farm-Labor Party] politics. And another uncle, a stalwart CPA member in good standing, tells me that Humphrey once said, ‘there will always be room for Communists in the DFL.’ In 1968 I went to school on election day with a hand-lettered cardboard sign for Humphrey. On election night I stayed up past midnight in my parents’ bed watching the returns. Humphrey’s loss was shattering. I had followed the race since the spring, been for RFK despite my mother’s McCarthy for President straw hat and my father’s inexplicable dislike of the Kennedys. I hated George Wallace. By the fall, even to an 8 year old, it seemed like the world was ending, and Richard Nixon was the final disaster.

Hubert Humphrey is best known for his soaring and triumphant speech in favor of Civil Rights at the 1948 Democratic Convention. He was the 37 year-old mayor of Minneapolis and a rising star in the Democratic Party. His politicking and rhetoric resulted in the adoption of a minority, pro-civil rights plank in the party platform, which set the course for Democrats for decades to come. That year he became the Democratic senator from Minnesota.

He is also notorious for his purge of Communists from the Farm-Labor Party, which he then merged with the Democratic Party, and for introducing a bill in 1954 outlawing the Communist Party. His bill was merged with another bill and passed as The Communist Control Act of 1954. Even J. Edgar Hoover opposed it.

Humphrey’s struggle with the Communist Party dates back to the 1940s when he was mayor of Minneapolis and a fiery progressive. At that time the Republican Party dominated Minnesota politics. Its main rival for power was not the Democrats but the Farm-Labor Party, a radical progressive party with a strong and militant Communist membership. In the thirties, Communist dominated labor unions waged pitched battles with police on the streets of Minneapolis, with the tacit support of the colourful, brilliant Farm-Labor governor of the state, Floyd Olson. Olson was elected in 1930. To Farm Labor Delegates he said, “I am not a liberal, I am…a radical….I want a definite change in the system.” His party’s platform began with the statement: “We declare that capitalism has failed.” Soldberg writes of Olson, “[he] could deliver stump speeches in Yiddish as well as Swedish and Norwegian…” Olson passed an income tax, mortgage moratorium and food relief. He formed an alliance with Roosevelt.

One of the virtues of Solberg’s biography is that it reminds the reader how close to the radical left Democratic politics was in this country in the 30’s and 40’s, before Truman and the Cold War ‘consensus’ decisively divorced the two. Like Lyndon Johnson, Humphrey’s father was a Progressive, deeply involved in politics, and a Socialist, at least in orientation, if not affiliation. The Minneapolis truckers’ strike of 1934 was led by the Dunne Brothers, former Wobblies who had become Communists and sided with the Trotskeyites when they split from Stalin. They were opposed by The Citizen’s Alliance, financed by Republican millionaires, the Pillsburys among others. Some of the agri-business interests would later finance Humphrey. There was at the time a Silver Shirts group of fascists, associated with Republicans. These were the contenders for political power in the upper Midwest in the 1930s. Elected officials, union bosses, gangsters, business men, workers and farmers were waging political war and the whole ideological rainbow of that time was unabashedly on display.

Humphrey never lost his connection to the left, despite his Anti-Communist passions. In the fifties he was a member of a group of Euro-Socialists, with whom he had much in common. If he opposed Communists he was on easy terms with them. His meetings with Kurschev and other Soviet officials make fascinating reading. In domestic policy he favoured a form of liberalism that is all but dead in this country. Though few bills appeared with his name on them he was instrumental in the passage of every piece of major social legislation during his time in the senate, including especially the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Medicaire, and Food Stamps. He was in favor of arms control agreements and initially opposed Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War. That opposition cost him dearly. Johnson froze him out of all policy decision for a year as a result and it was only through self-abasement that he crawled back into Johnson’s lap. Johnson pinned Humphrey down and Humphrey allowed it, seemed to crave it. His relationship with Johnson is so disturbing it makes me question what kind of president he would actually have been.

Humphrey grew up not in poverty as LBJ had, but on the edge of it. His father was a pharmacist (as was my grandfather) and Humphrey acquired his extraordinary gift of gab and listening working the counter of a drugstore from childhood through his twenties. He had to struggle to go to school, and like Nixon might have made a fine professor. But his talent for speech making was evident to everyone who met him. Unlike Nixon he craved the approval and company of others. He lacked Johnson’s paranoia and Machiavellian instincts. Like Brutus he trusted the integrity of others far too much. He was disorganized and didn’t stand a chance against the Kennedys. Humphrey’s appeal was always that he understood the ordinary working man, the farmer, the union worker in a factory. There is a famous story that in West Virginia an old coal miner said to JFK, “They say you were born a rich a man and never did a hard day of work in your life.” JFK had to admit that this was true. “Well,” the man said, “you didn’t miss a thing.”

Against Nixon he might have won had he had the ability to oppose Johnson earlier. When Humphrey first started running for president he did so by entering primaries. It was his only chance to rack up enough delegates to prove himself to the party hacks who would pick a candidate. Humphrey knew the back room as well the stump. It is an unfortunate irony that by 1968 he was reduced to running the insider’s campaign. McCarthy and RFK battled it out in primaries while Humphrey sought the endorsements of Mayor Daley and the likes of Mr. Crandall from Erie County. Humphrey was a dinosaur, but never as bad as the left made him out to be. Today Tom Hayden says the left’s biggest error in the 60’s was sitting out the ’68 election. But Humphrey’s brand of politics in 1968 was badly out-dated. Today Humphrey’s politics would be impossible. A man who knows the difference between a Stalinist, a Trotskeyite and a Socialist has to pretend he’s an idiot if he wants to be elected. Our professor president has not taken the time to explain the differences to the morons who call him a ‘Communist Fascist’. It wouldn’t be worth it. He would be crucified.

Humphrey died at the age of 67, of bladder and stomach cancer. Seeing him thin and wasted by illness was striking and sad. What America lost we seem to have lost for good. The Cold War and Cold War politics eventually defeated the progressive left political tradition in this country. Humphrey and Johnson had roots in the 19^th century. Their game of being international hawks and domestic liberals failed. It would be Wallace and Nixon and Reagan who would map out the political future of America, and the fruit is the GOP of today, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich and Tom Delay, as well as the losers: Humphrey, McGovern, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Kerry. It seems at least possible that RFK had a different map. Certainly the McGovern/McCarthy map was a losing one. Humphrey’s life brings up all the ‘might have beens’. What if Humphrey had won in 1968? Could RFK have won?

Humphrey’s proteges included George McGovern, Fritz Mondale and Eugene McCarthy. McCarthy and McGovern both stabbed him in the back, as many of his friends had done. Humphrey never held it against any of them, including Johnson.

Johnson died at the age of 64. JFK was 46. Nixon out-lived them all.

THE 7^TH-8^TH CENTURIES

BY MICHAEL VICKERY

The Centre For east Asian Cultural Studies for Unesco,

the Toyo Bunko, 1998

Michael Vickery is foremost an historian of ancient Cambodia. But he has also written about modern Cambodia. He is a Marxist, and his writing has a strong polemical current running throughout it. Even when he is agreeing with another historian it sounds like he is disagreeing. He is not afraid to take on the titans of his field. Thus, he has few good words for Oliver Wolters and is generally disdainful of Wolters’ mandala theory of Southeast Asian politics or his Big Man theory. Wolters, after writing on early Indonesian commerce, that is work as an economic historian, became increasingly interested first in sociology and later in literary criticism. Vickery shares these passions and concerns but as an avowed historical materialist he is distrustful of anything that smacks of idealist history. (“The reader will find nothing here about ‘mandalas’, ‘galactic polities’, ‘discourses’, or ‘resonating’). Moreover, while retaining a general theoretical orientation that is Marxist, he seeks for evidence in the actual epigraphic record of Cambodia, particularly those inscriptions written in Khmer, as opposed to Sanskrit. Thus he is critical of any effort to tie Cambodian historical development to India. He not only rejects strong versions of Indianization, but weaker ones too. It is his thesis that Cambodians adopted Indian titles, deities and culture as a way to establish new patterns of power and domination. His book covers the period of transition from traditional, dispersed, discreet Khmer polities to a unified state, with an inherited kingship passed down from father to son (as opposed to uncle to nephew).

Vickery has alienated a lot of people with his forays into contemporary Cambodian politics and society. This is where his Marxism has gotten him into trouble. His book Cambodia, 1975-1982 has been denounced as a denial of the Cambodian genocide. Partly this has to do with tone. Vickery is tone deaf. He seems almost gleeful in his debunking of the 2 million deaths and opts instead, based on a very close reading of diverse data, for a figure of 700,000. In his defense, he is clearly horrified by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. What he is out to debunk is not the assertion that they were a viscous and mutant form of leftist regime, but rather the distortions about what actually happened there. For Vickery, history should be based on an interpretation of verifiable fact. Hence, he counts the number of doctors in the country before Pol Pot came to power, estimates how many left the country, and then disputes the claim that Pol Pot murdered all of the doctors. What he does is contextualize the events of Pol Pot’s reign with ancient and contemporary Cambodian history. It is an unsettling picture, quite at odds with the image of Cambodia as a sleepy, peaceful, pastoral country destroyed by steely-eyed Communist sociopaths. Unfortunately, he was wrong about the death count. By he is not and was not a genocide denier, in the same sense that Gareth Porter and Noam Chomsky were. There is a fine book that was written to refute Vickery but which, in the end, recalculating the same data, came to similar conclusions. This is R.A. Burglar’s The Eyes of the Pineapple, a much more ‘pleasant’ book to read, in that the author is less combative and more humane in his treatment of the material. Both works are, apparently, dated. Those interested in the Cambodian Genocide should read widely if they wish to understand what really happened, and they will not come away with a rehabilitated Pol Pot, just a feeling of disgust for the United States, China, Lon Nol, Sihanouk and the other actors who made Pol Pot possible, going back to the 1950s. Ben Kiernan, Burglar and Vickery are all good, but there is more recent stuff out there.

Don’t let his tone or his work on Democratic Kampuchea put you off. Once you have waded through the tedious theoretical arguments about the Asiatic Mode of Production, Asiatic Despotism (and I wonder why Wittfogel and Marx and Engels, at this late date, need such a thorough washing). What he is doing is clearing the air for his detailed, close reading of the Khmer inscriptions, which he says have been misinterpreted or even ignored in favor of the Sanskrit. His engagement throughout is primarily with Coedes, who published the first translations of the corpus, and Claude Jacques, a French historian.

To give the flavour of the work as well as its intentions and some conclusions, here are some quotes:

“In the following chapters I shall study pore-Angkor Cambodia within the temporal limits of its contemporary records, the inscriptions—in particular, those in Khmer—from the early 7^th to late 8^th century. My preconceptions are consciously historical-materialist, and I seek to derive inferences useful for a study of modes of production, in particular the ‘Asiatic’, early state formation, and comparative social structure of ancient societies.

“I intend to explain how textbook pre-Angkor Cambodia came about, the preconceptions behind it, the sources on which it was based, what is wrong with it, and what a more satisfactory history should be.”

“This study is not a history of pre-Angkor Cambodia in the sense which most students of Southeast Asia have understood history. There is no narrative, and it is certainly not histoire evenementielle, history of events, or king-and-battle history, for there are hardly any events recorded in the contemporary record.  We do not know what any particular individual did at any particular time. There is not even a dated installation a ruler, nor a dated construction of an edifice. In the 7^th-8^th century inscriptions no battles are recorded nor decisions about justice, nor foreign relations. What is recorded are assignments of land, animals, and categories of people at specific times and places, or interactions between persons of rank and foundations, and these records taken together and studied in sequence reveal not events, but processes. They lend themselves to macro-history; in fact, that is all they are suitable for.”

“During the last millennium B.C supravillage communities, with populations of 500-2,000, had developed in areas of modern Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam’ and social stratification had occurred to the extent that there were at least chiefs and ordinary people. Among the inland communities there was overland trade in valuable and rare commodities, and the ships of coastal communities sailed at least as far as India.

“The first supravillage socio-political organization attested in the Cambodian area is known as ‘Funan’, the center of which appears to have been near the southern coast in what is now Cambodia or in adjacent areas of Vietnam. Most of this coastal region, except the Mekong and Bassac valleys in its eastern sector, and extending around the coast to what is now southeastern Thailand, is cut off from the Cambodian central plains by mountains, without any river channels to the coast. Level land suitable for agriculture is also sparse, and in its geography this coastal area bears much resemblance to Champa—a long, narrow coastal plain with scattered small areas of fertility.

“Funan controlled the coast and riverine outlets from the plains of southern and central Cambodia; and it was a maritime society along a trade route lining China, Southeast Asia, and India. Funan was probably not a unified polity, let alone an empire, but a group of allied ports, like Srivijaya, of which the most important was on the Cambodian or adjacent Vietnamese coast. It was a stratified society whose population practiced advanced techniques of water control and rice agriculture….

“A…hypothetical model…is that Funan and Chenla were never separate states. They may have represented different centers, even congeries of centers, within Cambodia, linked in loose political relationships, and at times rivals. The Chinese view of them as separate states, one vassal of the other, and ultimately conquering its suzerain, is inaccurate, a result of imposing Chinese political theory on an alien polity.

“With that assumption, of course, an explanation must be sought for the impetus to the Funan > Chenla shift….

“As the maritime trade of the coastal areas (Funan) had developed and declined in the 5^th-6^th centuries, they lost whatever political hegemony had prevailed to inland centers….The most powerful lineages [of ruling families or clans]and the kings whom they served and may have been family members, merely shifted the focus of their economic and political activity from the seacoast to agricultural areas inland. Class and state development which had begun in international and maritime trade continued in the exploitation of land and labor and the extraction of surplus from the agrarian heartland.”

“Whatever the Cambodian interests in the Mekong delta may have been, they were thwarted in the mid-8^th century, when the political centre of Champa shifted to the south, to Panduranga near modern Nha Trang….

“The shift in Champa to the south, which apparently meant Cham neglect of their old northern capital, facilitated Cambodian expansion into that area through Cambodia’s Northeast, …a region rich in products important fin the international trade of the time…..

“Jayavarman II…migrated with his followers into the Northwest, where there was apparently no strong political center…while the Northeast was secured by allies….Then the capital of the new, much larger polity was established at Angkor, midway between [the two regions] and in a key location at the apex of the Tonle Sap, permitting control of the Tonle Sap, the Mekong, and the Northwestern riverine system linking Cambodia’s Northwest with the Gulf of Siam.

“Further expansion toward the Northeast was probably blocked when northern Champa became once again the Cham, political center in the 870s, just at the time when inscriptions begin to appear at Angkor in the reign of Indravarman. Thereafter, the dispersal of inscriptions indicates almost total disinterest in southern Cambodia and its coast, and concentration on exploitation of land and labor.”

Perhaps in the next post I will try to indicate what was happening in Vietnam, Champa and Srivijaya at this time. Vietnam was of course still under Chinese rule, and this is the height of the Srivijaya trading ‘empire’, the rise of which marginalized both Funan and Champa, as ships could sail directly between Sumatra and southern China without landing in Malaysia or coastal Southeast Asia. The Cham shift to the south was the result of being routed by the Vietnamese and Chinese, but the details of this will have to wait another day.

By Keith Taylor

Berkeley : University of California Press, c1982.

xxi, 397 p. : maps ; 24 cm.

http://www.amazon.com/Birth-Vietnam-Keith-Weller-Taylor/dp/0520074173

The Civilization of Angkor

By Charles Higham

London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001.

xv, 192 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.

http://www.amazon.com/Civilization-Angkor-Charles-Higham/dp/0520242181/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262619216&sr=1-1

In my last South East Asia post I subjected the reader to a lengthy complaint with illustrations from illustrious texts. I wish now to reverse that complaint, at least in the sense that I am going to suggest two books for those interested in the history of the region that do precisely what I dreamed a book on the ancient and lost kingdom of Champa would do. They are narrative histories that synthesize information provided by ancient inscriptions and histories with archaeology, linguistics, sociology, geography and anthropology. Both books rely upon a groundwork of studies provided by others, along the lines of Wheatley’s historical geography of the Malay peninsula and Wolters’ work on Srivijaya. In the case of Charles Higham, he is indebted to his own archaeological work and the epigraphic studies of Michael Vickery, among others. Taylor’s work is indebted not just to his own studious reading of French, Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese sources (as well as European) but to Jennifer Holmgren’s Chinese Colonisation of Northern Vietnam: Adminstrative geography and political development in the Tongking Delta, first to sixth centuries A.D. (Australia National University Oriental Monograph Series; number 27, 1980). In her words:

‘This work covers the administrative, social and political history of the first five hundred and fifty years of Chinese occupation in the Red River delta of northern Vietnam….

‘Until now, European, Chinese, and Vietnamese scholars have made very little effort to investigate this period of Sino-Vietnamese history….very little is known about the relations between Chinese and Vietnamese during this period….Early this century, several French scholars attempted to pinpoint the locations of Chinese administrative centres in the Red River Delta during the earliest and latest phases of the Chinese occupation. Nothing, however, has been done since then to follow up their work.’

A familiar lament!

Taylor’s scholarship is scrupulous, and there is no other book like it that I know of. The writing is purely functional, but this is no impediment, especially to those of us who are frustrated by the 10-20 pages accorded this thousand year period by general histories and surveys. A review of the book by Truong Buu Lam frankly describes the period as being ‘dry’, but then, so did CS Lewis label the poetry of early 16th century England ‘drab’. I’m sorry, but there is nothing drab about Skelton, nor is there anything dry about the long evolution of Vietnam from a collection of culturally related clans and villages, farming and trading along the Red River, to a unified polity with a distinct self consciousness. How aware a people are of their own difference, their own uniqueness as a people (which can be easily confused with nationalism), is a fraught subject. One of the fascinating things about Vietnam is that it is a clear example of a nation created by colonization. That is Taylor’s narrative, though the end point of the book is really the beginning of what we call Vietnam. At that point, in the late 900’s A.D., the Vietnamese had not yet written their own histories. They had not yet created a Confucian state, or developed beyond its embryonic beginnings the native script, or Chu Nom.

The story of state formation on the South East Asian mainland is also told by Higham in his book. This process, which is to be seen everywhere, takes many distinct forms. My reading has been shaped by a desire to know the total history of Vietnam. Early on in my research I became fascinated by the Cham, a people conquered by the Vietnamese. Their history has barely been written in a western language, though it may lie locked in their as yet untranslated and studied inscriptions. But the Cham lay between two states, Angkor and Vietnam, and the land that is today Vietnam extends down to territory covered by Higham in his book. Indeed, the earliest independent, urban polity in South East Asia lies south of modern day Saigon, in the ancient ruins of Oc Eo. Oc Eo was a trading state, totally unlike Angkor or Vietnam. It was perhaps the capital of the polity known to the Chinese as Funan, though the idea of a capital is wrong. The Funanese were probably Khmer speaking people.

The story of the rise of Vietnam as an independent entity has a context, and it is a complex one that includes not just China and the areas of southern China not yet Chinese (especially Yunnan, but also as far north and east as modern-day Canton), but the Khmer in Cambodia, the Cham in central Vietnam and farther abroad, the evolving trading kingdom of Srivijaya. Srivijaya, Funan and Vietnam were directly involved in the India/China trade from Han times on. And this list excludes the many related peoples living in the hills and mountains between China, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia.

Funan, like Srivijaya, was a trading ‘kingdom’, located in scattered polities along the coasts of Vietnam and Cambodia. Vietnam itself was engaged in foreign trade and a source of exotic forest materials and luxury goods. This is what attracted the attention of the Chinese. It was certainly not the climate or the people, which disgusted most elite Chinese and frightened them. To be stationed in Vietnam was to suffer isolation, disease, and death.

By the end of Chinese colonization Vietnam was becoming an ‘inland polity’, a state based not on foreign trade but on wet rice agriculture. Higham’s book, like Taylor’s, charts a similar trajectory for Cambodia, as the Khmer move slowly up the Mekong River, building and digging monuments, canals and reservoirs. ‘Chenla’ succeeded Funan. Power becomes centralized. By the 13th century they had built a monumental civilization that rivals that of Egypt and accounts for the enduring interest in the region.

Today Cambodia is known chiefly for a its recent auto-genocide. It is a small, powerless nation which has for hundreds of years been the pawn of powerful neighbors (Vietnam and Thailand) or colonial aggressors (the French and the Americans). Oddly, France’s colonization of Indochina may have preserved Cambodia as an independent country. Vietnam on the other hand is a regional power, an economic player, a nation that has defeated China, France, Japan and America in successive wars and preserved its language, history and culture for thousands of years. Yet there are more books written about the early history of Cambodia than Vietnam and that is certainly because of the monuments they left behind. In the end, Vietnam’s monument was its political acumen.

Not long ago I finished William Southworth’s two volume dissertation on Champa. Since there is very little written in English about Champa I was excited to find it, and I was not disappointed, really, or at least, I had no right to be. I have also just finished reading Georges Maspero’s (1872-1942) The Champa Kingdom.

The Champa Kingdom : the history of an extinct Vietnamese culture

Georges Maspero ; translated by Walter E.J. Tips.

Bangkok : White Lotus Press, c2002.

x, 226 p. : ill., map ; 30 cm.

http://www.whitelotuspress.com/bookdetail.php?id=E22285

The book is the only available general history of Champa, at least in English, and it is badly outdated. But outdated as it is, there are long passages based on Vietnamese and Chinese history that make exciting reading, where the glimmer of the blood and steel flashing on fields of battle, of junks laden down with gold and rhinoceros horn, of court intrigue come alive. Almost all of Southworth’s dissertation is dedicated to establishing that histories like Maspero’s are virtually useless. He goes through every argument advanced by every historian of Champa, narrates their disputes with each other, advances and then debunks or revises their theories. He has done a great, post-modern demolition job. The problem is when he goes on to write his own history of events. The fact is there isn’t much to narrate, because you are restricted to Vietnamese and Chinese histories, and these are what Maspero bases his history on. After that, it’s archaeology, art history and paleography. These are where the disputes lie. The inscriptions, and the temples, are among the oldest on peninsular South East Asia. Southworth’s main thesis is that Champa wasn’t a kingdom at all, and that most of the dating, based on styles of script and decorative motif’s, combined with a suspect theory of Indianization, was erroneous. He does reconstruct sequences of temple complexes, and by jettisoning the timelines of dynasties and the succession of capitals of kingdoms he can reevaluate when monuments were built. All of this is valuable. But he does not do what Wolters expressly set out to do: reconstruct a mentality related to a material culture, in this case, what it was like to live in Champa, whatever, wherever, and whenever that was. What I am looking for and not finding is an Annales style history. Southworth cannot be blamed for this, and as I re-read sections I can see he really does address matters of history and development, or change. But because of the paucity of contemporary scholarship, he must necessarily be tentative and inconclusive about everything except his assertion that prior scholarship is faulty, and give the reasons why. Of course, before you can write a synthetic, narrative history of a place and a people you do need to establish and analyze the material facts at hand. Before Wolters wrote about culture he spent enormous time on the proper translation of words, the meaning of toponyms and the nature of products being traded. The deconstruction business in history is tedious, necessary work, at least when it restricts itself to the writings of other historians (as opposed to the more usual deconstructive work of destabilizing meanings and calling into question the possibility of history itself: the inane hall of mirrors students of former acid heads so gleefully build). 

This situation has been going on for a long time. There is a multi-volume set of papers published in 1961 by the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, entitled Historical Writings on the Peoples of Asia. DGE Hall edited volume 2, Historians of South East Asia. The last article in the book is The Application of a South East Asia-Centric Conception of History to Mainland South East Asia, by A. W. MacDonald. I’m going to quote at length from this paper, with the idea that you can compare some of MacDonald’s statements with Michael Vickery’s research proposal linked to below, as well as the links to the Ohio Universities Library SEA Blog, and some other texts. Mind, this was 2 years before Wolters’ published Early Indonesian Commerce (which was a doctoral dissertation written at SOAS) and around the time of Wheatley’s The Golden Khersonese, nearly 50 years ago. Vickery’s proposal was written in 2005.

“Professor D.G.E. Hall in his recent work, A History of South East Asia, remarks that European scholars concerned with these regions feel today that their previous approach to their subject ‘has been too much influenced by certain preoccupations inherent in their own training and outlook’ (pp. vi-vii). He quotes with approval M. de Casparis’ criticism of a ‘Europe-centric’ approach to these studies and notes that ‘Indian writers who, largely through the work of the French and the Dutch have come to discover Greater India may be accused of an India-centric approach.’ Professor Hall himself has sought ‘first and foremost to present South East Asia historically as an area worthy of consideration in its own right, and not merely when brought into contact with China, India or the West.’ I do not intend to discuss here the extent to which Professor Hall has succeeded in his task. [there is a footnote: I must, however, note that professor Hall has been accused in turn of an ‘Anglo-centric’ approach to his material by F.N. Trager….] His book, despite its popular character, marks a date in our studies inasmuch as it is the first full-scale History of South East Asia in the English language….

“Those interested in the civilization of China, like those interested in present-day tribal cosmologies, know that self-centered conceptions of history are as common in the Far East as in the West and are certainly as ancient as these latter. Cultural superiority in all latitudes is defined primarily by disparaging comparisons with the habits of each civilization’s barbarians. But the first point to be made is that the kind of overall vision of South East Asian history implicit in Professor Halls book is itself a product of Western thinking, although not entirely based on results achieved by Western scholars….It is interesting to note that professor Hall, in his own words ‘came to realize the need for some such book’ as his ‘through contacts with students and teachers in South east Asia.’ In fact there exists no book by a South East Asian national, either in a local or a foreign language, which covers the field. This fact is obviously not the consequence of a lack of general education among South East Asians….

“In the West we have certainly tended to write South East Asian history as we see our own. Perhaps I should say as we used to see our own. For we are still, in the South East Asian field, concerned primarily with the correct determination of genealogies in the ruling families, with the life of the court and palace, the tenure of office and the policies of important ministers of state, the aesthetic or museum value of religious architecture and other works of art, the big battles, etc. The structure of society, of the very many different societies in the past and present of South East Asia, has not yet been analyzed….Archaeological interest having been centred mainly up to now on town-sites, we know deplorably little about life in the past of South East Asia, outside of its towns and small villages. And until we know more of present-day conditions in the country-areas all serious social or economic analysis, of mainland South East Asia as a whole, seems frankly impossible. It goes without saying that in the West only those who have written, whether on manuscript, fibre, wood, or stone, or have erected durable monuments, occupy an important place in the history books….Because, in the past, they have not made use of solid building materials nor employed writing to extol their exploits or explain their political and religious systems, we tend to ignore their history. But the fact that it is very difficult for us to get to know their history does not mean that they have none. For instance, the historical role of the Karens, Kachins, Chins, Nagas, Kukis, and other groups of more or less illiterate inhabitants of North Burma was, during the 1939-1945 war, of considerable importance. It is not mere supposition to state that the role of mountain-dwellers in the past history of these regions has been underestimated….

“….But if we can never fully free ourselves from the influences exercised on us by our own background and training, and if, despite all that anthropologists may say, we must persist in the West in subscribing to a linear, evolutionist concept of history, it is none the less possible, by studying our source materials in their particular cultural contexts to improve our understanding of their value….

“I certainly do not for a moment think that we should abandon the study of South East Asian history, envisaged en bloc, ‘in its own right’. We cannot have too many well-documented synthetic class-books, and I would like to see many more, written by South East Asians. For they would tell us more about what a South East Asian-centric conception of history really means. But if we are going to make real scientific progress in this field, if we are to deepen our knowledge of particular problems in their cultural contexts…we must abandon any hope of covering the whole field. The range of knowledge required to use at first hand all the sources which concern South East Asian history is in any case beyond the ambition of the most gifted and laborious among us…For there are other ‘preoccupations in our training and outlook’ than those which result from our purely geographical position. If South East Asia was first divided between three main colonial powers, Britain, Holland, and France, it has suffered a further dismemberment at the hands of Historians, Anthropologists, Linguists, Philologists, Epigraphists, etc., which has not always resulted in a corresponding and manifest increase in our general knowledge of the whole area….”

MacDonald makes clear that, as of 1961, there was a need both for detailed, empirical studies of specific times and places that are conversant with contemporary theory (psychological, anthropological, sociological, economic, etc, a stew of social science speculation), and for general synthetic works of narrative history. He, or she, has some hope that good scholars will be able to balance the twin extremes of tunnel vision and meaningless generality and, through a modicum of self-awareness, avoid or reduce cultural bias.

This is a quote from a fascinating series of blog posts I found on the Ohio Universities Library SEA Blog:

“It is not hard to imagine why Western scholars find it temptingly easy to ignore or gloss over Southeast Asia in their surveys of world history. For one thing, the history of Southeast Asia is still little known in the West. Other standard explanations include good old-fashioned Euro-Americo-centrism, which persists, in no small measure, up to the present-day (Lockard noted this in his Occasional Paper, The Rise and Changing Status of the Southeast Asian History Field in the United States: an Analytical Study, 1989). This being the case, what can we say about world histories published in Southeast Asia? That is, if Southeast Asia has been largely neglected in Western-language world histories, how is it presented in world histories written by Southeast Asians? How do Southeast Asian scholars view their history in the broader  global context? With these questions in mind, I retired to my office, dusted off a copy of  volume one of Luang Wichit Wathakan’s Prawattisat Sakon (Phranakhon: Samnakphim Phloenchit, 1932), and sat down to read. It was illuminating, and troubling.”

Follow these 4 links to the complete posts:

http://www.library.ohiou.edu/sea/blog/?p=494, http://www.library.ohiou.edu/sea/blog/?p=553,

http://www.library.ohiou.edu/sea/blog/?p=607,

http://www.library.ohiou.edu/sea/blog/?p=630

Now, here’s an excerpt from a proposed research project, written by Michael Vickery (to read his entire research proposal go here: http://www.iias.nl/vickery-michael) :

“Both for Angkor and Champa my project starts from the presupposition that their histories as written are defective, and that even when the important sources, the local inscriptions, have been competently translated (in the case of Cambodia) their information has been interpreted and synthesized with other sources of information based on assumptions which are no longer acceptable.

“Revisions of the standard history depend very much on new ancillary work in archaeology, prehistory, historical ethnology, linguistics, and historical interpretations of ancient South and Southeast Asia, which, living in Thailand and Cambodia for several years, I have not been able to access, and for which my time at IIAS, with the libraries of Leiden and Amsterdam, will be particularly valuable. For Champa, the situation is worse than for Angkor, because serious historical work on Champa ended, with one significant exception, before 1930, and the Cham-language inscriptions have never been subjected to expert translations like the work of George Coedès for Khmer. That particular problem will not be solved in my work either, for I am not a Chamist, and so far as I have been able to determine, there is no competent translator of Old Cham working today. Nevertheless, the translations which were done between 1904 and 1915 by Louis Finot and very recently on the inscriptions of the Po Nagar temple in Nha Trang, are probably 80-90% reliable and may be confronted with the interpretations of other sources which are gaining currency.

“In addition to trying for better understanding of the inscriptions, further work on Champa must take into account certain new conceptions about the history of the Champa-Cambodia region (and indeed of all of Southeast Asia). First is awareness that from late prehistoric times until into the second millennium AD, the great navigators in the region were neither Indians nor Chinese, but Southeast Asians, in particular those belonging to the Austronesian language family, whose distribution from Taiwan to the Philippines and Indonesia and from the Pacific Ocean (Polynesia) to Madagascar proves their seagoing skills. Among these Austronesians were the Cham, and it is now accepted by interested scholars that contrary to the standard conception of the time of Maspero and Coedès, the Cham were not one of the hypothesized ‘waves’ of overland population movement out of China and through the mainland peninsula to Nusantara, but latecomers from Nusantara, probably Kalimantan, arriving by sea on the eastern and southeastern coasts of Indochina in the last centuries B.C.

“The main purpose of my paper, “Champa Revised”, cited above, was a critical analysis of Georges Maspero’s Le royaume de Champa (1928), which was accepted literally by George Coedès in his Etats hindouisés, and thereafter was a dominant component of all discussions of Champa. I show in that paper, which will be revised and extended at IIAS, that Maspero’s history of Champa was faulty both in conception and detail, and his syntheses of Champa inscriptions with Chinese and Vietnamese sources led to inaccurate conclusions about major events throughout, in particular, the 10th to 15th centuries after Champa was faced with an independent Viet Nam and an aggressive Cambodia. The history of those 500 years must be completely rewritten, for Champa internally, and for its relations with both Viet Nam and Cambodia.

“The new consensus on the Austronesians and their maritime skills suggests that it was probably Southeast Asian Austronesians, and not people from India, who were responsible for the first imports from the latter to Southeast Asia, such as beads, pottery, and small luxuries, which long antedated any signs of Hinduism/Indianization. As Pierre Manguin has written, “The archaeological research of the last 30 years has proved that this ‘Indianization’ [of Southeast Asia] during the first centuries A.D. happened after about a millennium of steady exchanges with India, in which certain populations of Southeast Asia, who were beginning to organize themselves within political systems of increasing complexity, played a decisive role, particularly in the setting up of seafaring merchant networks exporting gold and tin” [to India]. Accepting this makes it easier to explain the rapidity with which new developments in India, such as styles of script, sculpture, and cult conceptions were transmitted almost immediately to Southeast Asia. It was because Southeast Asians had long been in maritime contact with India, and they immediately took home whatever novelties appeared. Once this much is admitted, the next logical supposition is that it would have been Southeast Asians, and not Indians, who brought the first elements of Hinduization/Indianization to Southeast Asia, integrating them selectively, and with adaptations, into their own structures of complex societies. I believe this idea is quite new among historians, and I intend to argue strongly for it with support from the new work in ancillary fields noted above.” Michael Vickery, Research Proposal, International Institute for Asian Studies

The situation, at least for Champa, doesn’t appear to have changed much in 45 years. Things move slowly. But note too that he says the theory that Austronesians were in control of shipping through the straights and were responsible for bringing Indian religion, script and statecraft to the region is new. Wolters towards the end of Early Indonesian Commerce suggests as much, and I have certainly read versions of this thesis in books published in the 80’s, so I’m not sure what’s so new about it. Perhaps it is a question of degree. But at this point, ‘Indianization’ is hardly a controversial subject, it is rather a matter of complexity. Undoubtedly Hindu and Buddhist culture came to the region. If it wasn’t through direct colonization, and it wasn’t a case of parallel, autochtonous duplication, then clearly there was an ongoing process of cultural exchange. I am more interested in reading the details of that exchange rather than polemics as to whether it occurred or not and what it means about you as a scholar and person if you believe it occurred in one way as opposed to another. I suppose in 500 years scholars will wonder how it came about that the dominant religion among American poets of the 20^th century was Buddhism, or why Americans came to cook Chinese food in their homes when people of Chinese descent represent such a small proportion of the population. But the potato, the chili pepper and the tomato are all new world crops that spread around the globe much faster than the people from these places. Has anyone suggested that the Incas colonized Ireland? I remember once eating in a little Chinese takeout joint in Port Huron, MI with my then little children. We were starving and furiously tucked into our Lo Mein with chopsticks. The woman who gave us our food stared at us with astonishment. When we were done she asked, “You are from New York?”

Everyone who makes their mark in SEA history does so by denouncing previous efforts. Many of the established historians working in the field today, Vickery not excepted, cut their teeth on the Cold War, its politics, its distortions. They are given to polemic, if not diatribe, and they have the habit of moral superiority and indignation. While engage and en garde this is exciting, but it can distract.

This is from Robert Brown’s 1996 The Dvaravati Wheels of the Law and the Indianization of South East Asia (Volume 18 of Studies in Asian Art and Archaeology, Jan Fontein ed., E.J Brill, 1996) http://www.amazon.com/Dvaravati-Wheels-Indianization-Studies-Archaeology/dp/9004104356 :

“Dvaravati is a culture that lasted some 400 years, from the seventh through the tenth century C.E. It encompassed most of present day Thailand and is associated with extensive artistic and architectural remains. Yet, it is almost totally without a history. Not one monument or art object is dated. There are no indigenous texts associated with Dvaravati. While there are a few Dvaravati, these are almost exclusively religious, consisting mostly of quotations from standard Indian texts. The only other written information regarding the culture comes from some brief references in Chinese histories….”

“The way in which Indian culture moved into South East Asia and the process by which it was adopted and changed by the local population has been the focus of extensive research for a century. This scholarship lies at the very heart of our understanding of South East Asian civilization, particularly up to 1000 C.E. The general shift over this period of scholarship has been from regarding South East Asia as an extension of Indian culture to viewing it as strongly autonomous, with its own indigenous and well-developed, pre-Indianized culture. I will argue that it is both and thus neither. Indian culture was not transplanted to grow uninfluenced by the South East Asian soil in which it was planted. Nor is it quite right to envision India as supplying the forms in which South East Asian concepts could be clothed, new wine in old bottles. The distinction between form and content was never that distinct. There was almost always a mixing of both Indian form and content with indigenous form and content….”

“….My assumption that early South East Asian culture is best understood in interdisciplinary and intercultural terms leads me to cross disciplinary borders—history, urban and state development, textual and inscriptional analysis, religious studies—using these not as subsidiary areas to that of art history, but as central arguments….

“Two themes that arise consistently in my analysis are a blurring of categories and an attempt to define a non-Western psychology. Both themes are reactions to typical Western reductive or universalizing analysis based on dichotomous polarities. Interdisciplinary and intercultural understanding is rather in the direction of honoring otherness rather than in universalizing and totalizing narratives. Otherness here means either pre-Indian influenced or localized (local meanings formed using Indic notions) South East Asian meanings.

I’ve just started to poke around this book. It was written 9 years before Vickery’s research proposal, and his project seems to be dictated by the concerns expressed by MacDonald back in 1961. The literature is replete with such musings. It is what interests me I suppose. This territory, so well-charted by all the world’s empires, is still terra incognito. But if I may be permitted a personal plea (and I mean NO disrespect): Messrs. Southworth and Vickery, and all you others, please, write a work of general, detailed history about the lives and languages of the areas you study. Not just wars and lists of ‘Indianized’ Kings, of course; but not just revised sequences of pottery shards and petrified pollen either. What goop was in the bowl? Were there markets? Why did the Rhade crown the King? Who rode the war elephants? Why did the Chinese Emperor release the parrot? Why the hell are some of those pottery shards Graeco-Roman? Were Graeco-Romans hanging out with the Possu and the Arabs in Zabag? Did they stop off at Oc Eo, visit Funan, dine with the Dons of Champa? If they weren’t this then what were they? Were they That? It is a general problem: the problem of antithesis. It is not enough to end with what things were not.