Word: saigon
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Like countless other communities in Asia, Ho Chi Minh City-also known as Saigon-last week celebrated Tet, the three-day lunar New Year. Flowers bedecked the streets, although perhaps not so many as in years gone by. The city's florists did not believe that South Viet Nam's new Provisional Revolutionary Government would allow such a luxury. As one of them put it, "We were not prepared to grow flowers on time...
...first time since 1968, when Tet was the occasion of a devastating Communist military offensive, firecrackers were allowed in Saigon and could be heard exploding sharply throughout the sprawling city. There were also the usual multicolored dragons snaking rhythmically through the streets, along with swarms of whining, air-polluting Honda motorbikes...
...spoke about the alienation of work under capitalism, and its perpetuation through excessive consumption and addictions and anti-social escapes. I explained how we export the worst of the exploitation to foreign workers, citing what happens in Puerto Rico and Taiwan (and, in the past, Shanghai, Havana, and Saigon). I described Latin American peasants who get a few cents a day growing coffee, yet have to buy their wheat from us; we keep governments in power there which force them to plant only coffee, so we can get it cheaply and control the wheat market. I spoke of guerrillas...
...first member of Congress to visit Vietnam since the U.S. withdrawal there last spring, McGovern said Saigon was "completely normal." He said he could find no evidence of a bloodbath...
...some of the things that didn't happen in 1975 were as important--and sometimes more important--than those that did. There was no bloodbath in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon. The world's economy did not collapse. The Arabs didn't buy Disneyland. New York City did not default--although no one is sure. Neither Kissinger nor Moynihan returned to Harvard and we didn't get the Kennedy Library...