If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time - Marcel Proust (photo by Edward Steichen)
Today, May 19th, is the birthday of Ho Chi Minh, born in 1890. I was not really planning a commemoration of his birthday, but this morning while reading Garrison Keillor's always rewarding The Writer's Almanac, I collided with this stunning paragraph:
"The famous Ho Chi Minh Trail was the route along which the North Vietnamese government ran supplies for the Viet Cong guerillas in the South, and it has become a series of golf courses, the Ho Chi Minh Golf Trail, geared toward tourists."
A series of golf courses? As a child of the 1960s (born in '56), this has just left me dumbfounded. Is this what it was all about? The B-52 bombings, the napalm, the revolutions and killing fields? Is this what it was all about? Will the ghosts of fifty thousand plus US soldiers and untold millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians be teeing off together on the 18th hole? Did McNamara shout “Fore!” before releasing the bombs? Are the Pentagon Papers and Mao's little red book on sale at the golf shop in the clubhouse?
Ho Chi Minh Golf Tral
There is actually a website for the Ho Chi Minh Golf Trail, with the catchy slogan: "The man, the trail, the golf adventure of a lifetime". I include the link, not so much for you to visit the site as to assure you that I am not making this up. The page proudly displays a quote from a review run in Golf magazine in February 2009: "Vietnam, once synonymous with bloodshed, is remaking itself as a golf destination, complete with luxury hotels, A-list course designers and a marketable name with a whiff of danger: The Ho Chi Minh Golf Trail."
I close with a video clip of Adrian Mitchell reading his powerful poem "To Whom It May Concern" at the International Poetry Incarnation in Royal Albert Hall, London (1965, when golf was not yet a tourist attraction in Southeast Asia). I first saw it at The People's Lost Republic of EEjit site, where it was posted by TFE as part of the poetry bus series. TFE apparently first saw it on Rachel Fox's blog. Thanks to both:
