I met a tiger up in the hills. He looked at me:
I looked at him. We went our separate ways.
But on the open road, where I thought I was safe
It was human beings who captured me.
Captured by Chinese Nationalists
Ho Chi Minh wrote prison diaries in verse
To show and hide his thoughts
Clarity is the enemy
In the eyes of the law
But metaphor hints at meanings
That serve myth and vision
Capturing legends
And the foundations of a nation
In the image of Uncle Ho
I visited the Ho Chi Minh Museum in Hanoi today. The museum is the message (to rephrase Marshall McLuhan's famous line). Propaganda is like body odour: we don't notice our own but the smell of others can be quite confronting. The spirit of HCM is immortalised in the museum; the body is chemically preserved in the next building over. I didn't bother with the hours-long queue to see the physical remains. The less popular spiritual remains were, to my mind, much more interesting and, as it turned out, inspiring.
