There is nothing new under the sun. Everything that passes for news is merely an echo of the past, a restatement of universal themes.
I’m thinking this way because I keep reading about Vietnam in the newspaper. The stories, fresh as today’s newsprint, are not “news” at all. They are the latest episodes in a very old serial.
On March 11th, the New York Times ran a story about the Vietnamese government assuming the debts of the former South Vietnamese government. According to the story, Hanoi will pay the United States $140 million that was owed by the Saigon government for railroads, power plants and water systems. Although those dollars were spent to assist Saigon in fighting Hanoi, Hanoi is picking up Saigon’s tab, at least in part.
The carrot, in this old game of sticks and carrots, is trade. Vietnam wants a seat at the table of global trade, but the US wants to clear up some old bills before it is willing to pull out a chair.
The story in the New York Times reminded me of a story I’d seen a month earlier in the Wall Street Journal. Through a happy coincidence of recycling and procrastination, I was able to find that story still in my office.
Like the New York Times, the story in the Wall Street Journal was “news” about Vietnam that reached back 30 years. The story is about a generation of young adults who were born
with limbs missing or badly deformed. Many of these young adults cannot speak or understand simple directions and many of these adults had siblings that died at a very young age.
They’re called “Agent Orange babies,” after the dioxin?laden defoliant sprayed across much of South Vietnam by American forces during the war. The Agent Orange babies represent a surge of birth defects in children born in Vietnam ? as many as 500,000 in the past 25 years, according to the Wall Street Journal.
American Vietnam veterans have long pointed to Agent Orange as the causal factor in their own higher?than?average rates of cancer and birth defects among their children ? but
American soldiers were transients in Vietnam. The people of South Vietnam ? the people we called our allies ? lived for years in a landscape soaked in Agent Orange.
Soon after the war, Vietnam attempted to address the problem, but it was not news then, not in the US, which was still smarting from the war.
Now the US is normalizing relations and Vietnam, hungry for trade, is reaching out to the west. American veterans and scientists are curious to learn more about the effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam, but now it is Vietnam that is blocking their inquiry. That’s the other side of the coin that comes with trade agreements and reaching out to the west.
Dr. Arnold Schecter of the State University of New York at Syracuse believes Vietnamese living in areas sprayed by Agent Orange may have the highest concentrations of dioxin ever found in human tissue. But the Vietnamese won’t allow formal studies. The new Vietnam, interested in trade, doesn’t want to alienate American Corporations like Dow Chemical of Midland, Michigan ? that manufactured the Agent Orange that soaked Vietnam.
I remember Vietnam as a series of senseless, brutal and short?sighted acts on both sides. Thirty years later, nothing seems to have changed. As I said, there’s nothing new under the sun.
Agent Orange Babies
There is nothing new under the sun. Everything that passes for news is merely an echo of the past, a restatement of universal themes.
I’m thinking this way because I keep reading about Vietnam in the newspaper. The stories, fresh as today’s newsprint, are not “news” at all. They are the latest episodes in a very old serial.
On March 11th, the New York Times ran a story about the Vietnamese government assuming the debts of the former South Vietnamese government. According to the story, Hanoi will pay the United States $140 million that was owed by the Saigon government for railroads, power plants and water systems. Although those dollars were spent to assist Saigon in fighting Hanoi, Hanoi is picking up Saigon’s tab, at least in part.
The carrot, in this old game of sticks and carrots, is trade. Vietnam wants a seat at the table of global trade, but the US wants to clear up some old bills before it is willing to pull out a chair.
The story in the New York Times reminded me of a story I’d seen a month earlier in the Wall Street Journal. Through a happy coincidence of recycling and procrastination, I was able to find that story still in my office.
Like the New York Times, the story in the Wall Street Journal was “news” about Vietnam that reached back 30 years. The story is about a generation of young adults who were born
with limbs missing or badly deformed. Many of these young adults cannot speak or understand simple directions and many of these adults had siblings that died at a very young age.
They’re called “Agent Orange babies,” after the dioxin?laden defoliant sprayed across much of South Vietnam by American forces during the war. The Agent Orange babies represent a surge of birth defects in children born in Vietnam ? as many as 500,000 in the past 25 years, according to the Wall Street Journal.
American Vietnam veterans have long pointed to Agent Orange as the causal factor in their own higher?than?average rates of cancer and birth defects among their children ? but
American soldiers were transients in Vietnam. The people of South Vietnam ? the people we called our allies ? lived for years in a landscape soaked in Agent Orange.
Soon after the war, Vietnam attempted to address the problem, but it was not news then, not in the US, which was still smarting from the war.
Now the US is normalizing relations and Vietnam, hungry for trade, is reaching out to the west. American veterans and scientists are curious to learn more about the effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam, but now it is Vietnam that is blocking their inquiry. That’s the other side of the coin that comes with trade agreements and reaching out to the west.
Dr. Arnold Schecter of the State University of New York at Syracuse believes Vietnamese living in areas sprayed by Agent Orange may have the highest concentrations of dioxin ever found in human tissue. But the Vietnamese won’t allow formal studies. The new Vietnam, interested in trade, doesn’t want to alienate American Corporations like Dow Chemical of Midland, Michigan ? that manufactured the Agent Orange that soaked Vietnam.
I remember Vietnam as a series of senseless, brutal and short?sighted acts on both sides. Thirty years later, nothing seems to have changed. As I said, there’s nothing new under the sun.