Twelve Rounds with Kent Clizbe

As published at SubStack, 8/16/22:

[Corner Bar in Sea Point, Cape Town on 10/30/21]

That’s the schedule anyway, but if someone gets knocked out in seconds, so be it. I promise to fight fair, so no head butts, low blows or rabbit punches, and I trust Kent will be similarly under control.

After the aging legend Nonito Donaire lost recently to Naoya “Monster” Inoue, he bowed in four directions to the Japanese crowd, then admitted soon after about the first knock down, “I didn’t even know what happened. I was trying to counter. All of a sudden, I was on the floor and he was counting me. I was like ‘What is happening? Are you kidding me?’ Then I looked in the corner and Rach (his wife) said, ‘Put your hands up or he’ll count you out.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh shit, I got dropped!’” In their previous bout, Donaire had fractured Inoue’s eye socket, so it wasn’t like he was outclassed.

OK, let’s meet my opponent, who’s no weekend bouncer or dollar store baked beans. As seen at his website, here’s Kent Clizbe’s bio:

Kent served as a staff CIA case officer in the 1990s, and as a contractor after 9/11. He has worked in various capacities in intelligence positions in Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. His specialty is Counter-terrorism and Islamic Extremism. Kent has also worked Counter-intelligence, Counter-proliferation, Counter-narcotics, and other targets. In addition to extensive liaison work with foreign intel services, he has worked in the US Intel Community in inter-agency, inter-governmental intelligence operations since 9/11 […] In the US Air Force, Kent was a Vietnamese linguist, completing language training at DLI in Monterey, CA. He served for three years at Clark AB in the Philippines.

[…]

With a career that has spanned the globe, in multiple roles and operations, Kent has many stories to tell.

Clizbe is still with the CIA, in short. At his website, there are photos of him posing with a predator drone and relaxing at a military base behind barbed wire, his “office.”

Merriam Webster defines “case officer” as “an intelligence officer who recruits agents and manages their activities.” The CIA itself clarifies, “Operations Officers clandestinely spot, assess, develop, recruit, and handle non-U.S. citizens with access to foreign intelligence vital to U.S. foreign policy and national security decision-makers.” Their starting salary is $64,012 to $97,430.

From haircut to clothing to props, each man crafts his self-portrait, so Clizbe’s is as a militarized spy combating Muslim terrorists.

I, on the other hand, like to depict myself having drinks or food with whomever wherever. Since I have never made even $30,000 in a year, I limit myself almost exclusively to low-end joints, a preference, mostly by necessity, mind you, which somehow annoys Clizbe, but we’ll get to that later.

Clizbe’s first beef with me was with my 6/28/22 article, “Linguistic Viruses Render You Impotent, Maim, Kill.” In this piece, I cited not just Vietnam but Scotland as victims of linguistic colonialism, but spanning space and time, there are thousands of other examples. Vietnam, too, has subjected others to its linguistic hegemony, I must add.

Below is Clizbe’s comment in its entirety. He begins by quoting two passages from my article:

"Each language is a unique vision of the world. You have no idea what I’m talking about. You’re not supposed to. I’m not speaking your language."

"A virus, English infects alien societies to corrode their integrity, dignity and virility."

While your observations and musings are, at times, interesting, and your posts are worth reading, your worldview is corrosively un-self-aware.

So, you got a bad deal in the USA. You also got a leg-up on the vast majority of non-Americans around the world, especially those in the 3rd world locations you like to haunt.

The English skills you demonstrate are to your advantage. Yet you seem to be blind to that--seething with hatred and contempt for the language and culture, even as you manifest your skills in the language and culture!

My response:

Hi Kent Clizbe,

You're reducing everything to the personal. It's not about me, or the US vs. Vietnam, but the larger issues of linguistic hegemony, foolishly injected language as virus and how the integrity of each language needs to be protected and nurtured.

Why do you think I brought up the example of Gaelic? Or the quotation from Robert Burns? In Scots, it's a departure from Gaelic and so close to English, even we can understand it in the 21st century, and Burns is the national poet of Scotland!

In your second response, you have six exclamation marks for seven sentences, so it's not me or anyone else here who's "seething." Chill, my man, and step back a bit to see the larger picture.

Cheers!

Linh

If I was “seething with hatred and contempt” for English, as Clizbe claims, why did I learn it well enough to publish twelve books in English? They include a novel, two collections of stories, six of poems, the nonfiction Postcards from the End of America, plus two anthologies of new Vietnamese writing. I’ve also translated American poetry into Vietnamese, including T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Plus, I’m among the translators included in Tempo—Excursions in 21st Century Italian Poetry, just released.

Nearly all of my translations into English have been for no money, and since these have attract little attention, they should qualify as labor of love, no? And not just for the material but language itself, that is, for the love of English.

I’ve written appreciatively of Jack London, George Orwell and the little-known Breece D’J Pancake.

As for my supposed “hatred and contempt” for American culture, I will insist my Postcards from the End of America is, if nothing else, a deeply sympathetic portrait of endangered Americans, those few bother to notice. Studs Terkel and Joe Bageant were inspirations. I’ve also spent hundreds of hours interviewing at length neglected Americans. If I hadn’t been canceled, most of these “Obscured American” interviews would already be in a book.

[with Joe Bageant and poet Teresa Leo at Dirty Frank’s in Philadelphia, 3/28/11]

I thanked Fred Reed, John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands for helping me to recover from a severe illness.

Rather glibly, Clizbe says, “So, you got a bad deal in the USA.” I got a bad deal because I chose to follow my own intellectual, artistic and moral paths, as flawed or shaky as they may be. I never conformed to any party, department or firm, especially one as notoriously sinister as the CIA.

After my “Bar Hawks and Vultures” of 8/14/22, Clizbe asked:

Linh,

Please don't take this as criticism. It's a sincere question that comes up each time you publish something about American underclass culture.

Your subject matter is interesting. Wondering why you chose/choose to focus, in America, on the emy lowlife dive bars and the down-on-their-luck unfortunates, criminals and soon-to-be-criminals who inhabit them?

Specifically, why that focus in America, while in Vietnam you seem to focus on more wholesome and family-friendly locations and people?

There are plenty of scumbags in Vietnam. Plenty of lowlifes and dive bars. Tattooed gangsters and their hoes, drug-runners, thieves, drunks and druggies, wife-beaters, women beating their husband's mistresses, and much, much more. Why not interact, hang out, and write about them? Your skills at inter-cultural translation could provide interesting portraits of the same class in Vietnam that you so ardently pursue(d) in America.

Thanks.

My response:

Hi Kent,

I wrote about the American underclass because I was a part of it. These were my people, and most of them were not "scumbags." Far from it.

As for the underside of Vietnamese life, I've written about it also. Check out my novel, Love Like Hate, to begin with.

Linh

And:

Hi Kent,

Just hours ago, I got an email from my Scranton buddy, Chuck Orlowski. A school bus driver, Chuck had a horrible job for decades. If someone blew her brains out in a motel room, Chuck had to pick up all the splattered flesh and bones, and I mean everything. If some teen stepped in front of a train, Chuck had to gather all of his remains for even a hundred yards away.

I've written so much about Chuck, I'm practically his biographer. When I briefly toyed with returning to the US, Chuck said I could stay with him. I'm not there for several reasons, and one is I can't afford to live in the US as a canceled author. Sure, I can get another shit job, but I would be so exhausted, I wouldn't be able to write.

As a young man, I was a housepainter and house cleaner mostly. Even if I'm up for those kinds of work again, I wouldn't be hired. By 2018, I noticed nearly all the housepainting crews in Philly were manned by Latinos.

Linh

Each time I met Chuck, we sat in the cheapest bars and conversed, not just with each other but whomever. Made up mostly of working class Poles, Italians and Irish whose grandparents labored in coal mines, Scrantonians are as solid as they come.

I didn’t hang out with Chuck because he was a freak but because he was fascinatingly normal, whatever that means. I probably have more pathologies than he does. Ain’t that right, Chuck?

Those answers and several more didn’t satisfy Clizbe, so let me try again.

In the US, I went to dives not to find criminals or junkies, but because, simply, I enjoyed people’s company and beer. Dives were social spaces most available to plumbers, roofers, housepainters, housepainters, waiters and mechanics, etc. If in the 21st century, too many of them are also alcoholics or drug addicts, this says more about American society than these folks’ natural inclinations.

It has been observed that in colonizing the New World, the Spanish baptized each new community by building a church, while for the English, it was erecting a tavern. Since church services were sometimes held inside these tippling temples, since it was warmer in winter, you can’t say the English ever shortchanged their religion. For them, taverns also served as inns, of course, plus town halls, courthouse, libraries and markets. Each business went smoother with a few pints and, lest we forget, they drank beer instead of water, since it was much safer, and tasted better too.

Pubs litter English literature. In The Canterbury Tales, the pilgrims set off and ended their journey at The Tabard, so the briefest spiritual interlude is sandwiched by ordinary life in all its raunchiness. During Chaucer’s time, The Tabard hosted mobs of criminals and “Winchester Geese,” as prostitutes were known, thus makes my Friendly Lounge in South Philly, once owned by a Mafia hitman, seems like a prissy church.

[Friendly Lounge in Philadelphia on 9/3/15]

Orwell on his ideal bar:

In the Moon Under Water it is always quiet enough to talk. The house possesses neither a radio nor a piano, and even on Christmas Eve and such occasions the singing that happens is of a decorous kind.

The barmaids know most of their customers by name, and take a personal interest in everyone. They are all middle-aged women—two of them have their hair dyed in quite surprising shades—and they call everyone “dear,” irrespective of age or sex. (“Dear,” not “Ducky”: pubs where the barmaid calls you “ducky” always have a disagreeable raffish atmosphere.)

[…]

You cannot get dinner at the Moon Under Water, but there is always the snack counter where you can get liver-sausage sandwiches, mussels (a speciality of the house), cheese, pickles and those large biscuits with caraway seeds in them which only seem to exist in public-houses.

Clizbe, though, sees no social values in taverns. He can’t stomach “hanging around with scumbags.” And, “What does one try to find in a divebar? You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas,” so I was just “pissing away [my] life and money,” never mind all the sobering stories I heard in those joints from such tough yet lovely people. All have informed and many have inspired me.

Now, let’s examine taverns in Vietnamese literature, but wait, there isn’t any! The idea of sitting somewhere just to drink is still very alien to Vietnamese. Sure, many love to get buzzed, but they must have something to nibble with the booze, so the verb for imbibing alcohol is “nhậu,” which means downing beer or wine with friends while eating together.

[Đồng Nai, Vietnam on 4/7/22]

The bar, then, is associated with rich Westerners and their Vietnamese prostitutes. Since most Westerners never stray from these accommodations, they may not even know there are no bars, none, in ordinary Vietnamese neighborhoods. There are nhậu places, sure, but these are brightly lit joints where families also gather.

As for the dark side of Vietnamese life, I’ve written about it plenty, so read my Love Like Hate, for example, or “A Servant’s Tale.”

Since I didn’t look for criminals in the USA, I’m in no hurry to sniff out Vietnamese gangsters. When it comes to illicit activities, Kent Clizbe is the expert here, for he has made a lucrative career with the most evil outfit of an openly criminal government.

Following my sparring with Clizbe, a reader asks, “Makes me wonder what he's doing commenting on Unz or on your site.”

I answer, “Since Unz has proven to be useless as a dissident website, its two main functions are to misdirect fools and harvest their identities. Since Kent is openly CIA, I don't think he's a part of that, however. His function is to lead fools into thinking the CIA is actually quite ‘transparent,’ with ‘independent thinkers.’”

And, “His disdain for low end taverns also betrays his contempt for poorer Americans. For all of his supposed patriotism, he sneers at a huge swath of America.”

I, on other hand, value nothing more than sustained bouts of drinking, eating, talking and laughing with people I find most lovely, of whatever nationality or color. No man, woman or child is uninteresting.

What do you know, it’s almost time for a beer. My my, it’s nearly time for some beer, I think. Isn’t it time for a beer? I strongly believe it is. Argument settled, let’s get some beer!

[at the back of West Side Tavern in Osceola, Iowa on 9/23/14]