“Hell has come home,” says Linh Dinh in the course of describing the blighted, nation and its drug-addled occupants in the context of U.S. military might abroad—such might that laid waste the nation of his birth and even formed him, as he travels the pauper’s road through one dying American town after another.
Linh is the most interesting journalist [one of the few remaining in the trade] I have read and his tack for writing Postcards from the End of America, by bussing from town to town and walking through the bowels of these various decaying places, is superb, a crooked reminder of Jack London’s nonfiction work from more than a century before.
Linh’s poetic talents—though he concedes that he will likely not be honored for his poetry again as his investigation of the world has taken a course not in line with Communist American Orthodoxy—inform his investigations and observations as life of the lower social forms swirl about him on his low rent journey into the heart of a dying nation.
Linh unflinchingly designates U.S. military combat veterans as auxiliary mass murderers, even as he sympathizes with their lot in life. He also speaks of “globalism unraveling” and a return to local and regional life. These two stances will alienate him from the Right and the Left and limit his readership severely—and I cheer him for taking that poverty road.
Ishmael gifted me this fine book and I read it on the flight home from Salt Lake City, it being a journal not put easily aside. I feel a kinship with Linh and hope to meet him some day. I encourage readers to read his long overdue book and leave you with one of my favorite quotes:
“Universities have colluded with banks and governments to fleece students and shackle them to a lifetime of debt servitude, but as long as you’re still enrolled and your payments deferred, life will seem good and promising, for the university’s primary job is no longer to teach, but to maintain this rosy illusion. In these United States of universal debt bondage, universities have become a marketing branch of the criminal banks. It’s all good, children, so just sign here to get your very own academic (ish) casket!”
Finally, I absolutely love his irreverent verse at the end of the book, in which the line below is artfully imbedded:
“As I sleep, an ass wipe sneaks…”
link › linhdinhphotos.blogspot.com
Writing Unchained
Prolific Writing by Design
