The world Vietnamese and French press are awash in outrage and sorrow over Daniel Pearl's execution. Me too. I would like to add this observation to this particular audience.
One of the rationales proposed by Pearl's executioners has been that he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. It's a slur that can be floated about any white man working outside the continental United States.
There are people who have known me all my adult life who think I work for them. What else is a Westerner doing here in Vietnam? Why else would a Duffy from New Haven get Ford Foundation support to publish Vietnamese literature? Why is the French government paying this guy to hang around in bookstores?
What can you do? Poor people and police everywhere are ignorant of the actual machinery of power here in the metropole. They are busy surviving. They don't know enough about the real CIA to know how close I am to that milieu and how far my life decisions have taken me from it.
What always startles me, like hearing a racial slur, is to hear this kind of insult floated and accepted by educated people in our milieu. I don't think Daniel Pearl was a CIA agent. It would have been superfluous; he was so interpellated by our world order that to have him running informers and doing drops would have only gummed up a good thing.
I think it is bad form to complain about the petty annoyances of being a white man, flak from the people who assume that you got whatever you have by the color of your skin and you have never thought or heard about their particular grievances. But this one is life-threatening, terrifying to my timid, world-traveling soul. Calling an American intellectual working overseas a CIA agent is vicious racism and should not be tolerated by people of good will.
Thanks for your attention.
