The world fluxes through like eddies in a big current of pleasure and torment, most of which we do to ourselves, and some of which we do to each other. It’s a bit torrent, and the results ebb and flow like a global lava lamp. The US American South hears Africa mixing with Appalachia, and the Blues are born, then become Rock, which the Beatles of Britain pick up to pick themselves up, and then to blow away the Germans one more time, and then to make us fall in love with them and the music they got from us all over again. They then take it back to the USA for us to hear what they heard but totally remade. We take the British Invasion as something new, not as the weird mirror of us it actually was. The Jamaicans hear the same African roots, but to them it mixes with Island music, and becomes Ska, and then we influence it some more and kick it back to them and it becomes Reggae, and then it comes back to Britain in the USA in Dub form, and we take it into the clubs and and a new crazy beat, electronica, and the beat goes on… 

Or, look at the way religion flows over the globe. Buddhism rules in Cambodia, and then Hinduism comes back, and it goes back and forth, and what we think of as static today is really a moment in the global wax and wane of who believes what and where, and you can even see it in time lapse on a map. It’s amazing to watch the ebbs and flows of the who is and what is in control.

And when one culture really lets another have it, there’s always blowback. And it’s a strange, inverted version of the assaulting culture that comes back in mutated form.

Japan bombs us. But then whoa, do they get bombed back! And how. And the radiation that gets unleashed comes back as the radiation of Fukushima. It’s not just irony. It’s a syndrome of yin-yang doppelganger payback.  Hiroshima, Fukushima, pick a shima.

LBJ decides we have just got to stop communism in Vietnam, and the USA goes to war over there. And arguably miserably fails to stem an inevitable tide, with the country ending up just where it would have been without the ten years of war, the only difference being 5 million more people dead than if the US simply decided Vietnam wasn’t a “domino.” Or Pol Pot decides Cambodia has absolutely got to be a domino. And the emigrating buffalos of Eastern Cambodia, the “Serengiti of Indochina” end up totally decimated. All over Vietnam, there’s Agent Orange everywhere. Some of the mangroves still haven’t grown back, and many never will. All this would never had been if somebody wasn’t reacting to somebody else’s backlash.

If you visit Vietnam, one of the big things that hits you is that the Capitalism we fought to save is right here ready to bite us back in the form of Vietnamese Communism. It’s like Hyper-Capitalism, where everybody is a street hustler, everybody’s striving, and they make no bones about ripping you off, working for every last Dong. Without malice mind you, but nonetheless, the people here by and large make no compunction about charging whatever they can get at all times, and never missing an opportunity to hit you up. And it’s different than in India. It’s somehow…American style. So what I am experiencing in Vietnam, this ultra-focus on money, this is partially the way it is as a result of us hitting them so hard with our system. It’s like irradiated capitalism. We bombed them with it, now I visit, and the radiation comes back to me full circle. It feels like home.