Testing the Right

From the Los Angeles Times comes a story about an exhibit of communist art set to open “in the middle of the country’s largest Vietnamese population.” How’s this for a subtitle?

The show opening in Santa Ana purposely includes communist symbols, a bold step that curators hope will provoke discussion and tolerance of different political viewpoints.

Boldness lies, I suppose, in advancing the farcical notion that communism has any history of provoking discussion and tolerance. The Vietnamese refugees living in Orange County’s Little Saigon know this first hand. Communism for them is not the utopia imagined by the pacifist, latte-sipping campus oligarchy.

Sponsored by the Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Assn., the exhibit includes paintings, photographs, multimedia displays and performances on topics including politics, war, sexuality and youth culture. Called “F.O.B. II: Art Speaks,” the name is a play on the pejorative moniker “fresh off the boat,” a term given to immigrants who came to the United States by boat, including hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees who escaped after the war ended.

Yes, pejoratives often invite a discussion of tolerance. A previous effort to reach out to the Vietnamese community through art involved painting a foot bath to resemble the flag of South Vietnam. Who knew that would not be a welcome symbol? But artists of the left are an intrepid lot. Tram Le, one of the curators, said, “I felt the community was on this slippery slope, that we were not progressing toward having open dialogue and being more tolerant of different political viewpoints.”

So if a foot bath won’t make those right-wing rowdies more tolerant, we’ll give them a whole exhibit to overload their senses.

“I think that we were trying to confront that fear head on,” said Mariam Lam, a UC Riverside assistant professor of literature and cultural studies, and board member of the art group. “We are trying to say that the community should be a safe space for people, even protesters.”

In all of this, we see no mention of the viewpoint of the South Vietnamese being represented in this exhibit. What a funny way to build bridges and open a dialogue. A bold way, perhaps! You don’t actually have a dialogue or show tolerance yourself. You simply present your own views and insist on tolerance from the other side.

They call it bold, but this approach evinces the same banality that always characterizes communism – the kind of banality that excites the academic class.

The exhibit will test the Vietnamese American community, said Linda Vo, chair of UC Irvine’s Asian American Studies department.

And there you have it.