Underdog Nation (i)

from Quang X. Pham and Forbes Books

Judge a book by its cover. What it’s for.

CHILD REFUGEE

The president of the United States of America cast all law aside to welcome those whose republic fell at Saigon on April 30, 1975. Our navy already had steamed from Guam to the rescue.

Over that final quarter of my native century our congress passed act after act making the decency of Gerald Ford and our captains legal. Not every landed immigrant has taken advantage of the opportunity to become a citizen.

The reconciliation of the USA with the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam in the last decade of that century allowed us to deport those refuseniks. We began after the September 11 attacks and have accelerated through the first quarter of this century.

US MARINE

Nobody is going to deport the author. If his people didn’t sign him up with us as a child then service in the United States Marine Corps would have provided another royal road from ward to adult and guest to citizen.

BIOTECH CEO

A chief executive officer is a civilian. In the armed services an executive officer is a role played by the immediate junior to the commanding officer.

Both executive and commanding officer are roles, not ranks. In a publicly traded corporation the executive officer would be the chief operating officer.

That is a rank, as is chief executive officer. That officer’s role is to speak to the public who trade in the shares of the corporation.

People who do not trade in shares learned of the role of CEO over the career of Bill Gates of Microsoft Corporation across the fourth quarter of my native century beginning, what do you know, in 1975. Bill built and defended a common platform for personal computers, as John Rockefeller had done for oil.

Kings of their hills, John and Bill told their publics what to do. There is no common platform in bio-technology.

A BIOTECH CEO is more like a CHILD REFUGEE, intrepid, and a US MARINE, confident. Not some guy you must obey but a captain, a president you follow out of chaos.

QUANG X. PHAM

I like the X. What the followers of Elijah Muhammad, an entrepreneur in religion for self-help, take when they cast off the slave name.

You could call all Vietnamese names slave names when they aren’t royal ones. The Nguyen, Tran, and Le dynasties supply the 3 most common Vietnamese family names.

PHAM, the fourth, is a lineage of defeated Champa, now central Viet Nam, at whose frontier the national leaders come from, for instance both Ho Chi Minh of the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam formerly known as Democratic and Ngo Dinh Diem of the defunct Republic of Viet Nam. QUANG, the personal name, is one of those given to a boy to recognize inherent moral quality, in this case clear and bright.

Buzzard? Hawk?

We were wondering that very question this morning as a pair of silhouettes just like that one on the cover circled in the sky over the gulley at the corner. Usually, on our block, when you see feathers spread like fingers it is the scavenger but their glide this morning seemed more like predators’.

Then they started to scream. Yup, hawks.

This raptor on the book cover has got to be the totem of the USA. The bald eagle, of course, who hunts when they can’t steal prey from other hunters, when they can’t scavenge.

Man in a suit with a briefcase

A CEO doesn’t carry anything, as a naval captain does not. That is a salesman on his way to soar with the eagle.

Pawn

The pharmaceutical representative stands on 1 of 16 commoners in the game of 2 kings. Not climbing on and over the pawn in the corporate manner but rather in transformation as Peter Benjamin Parker dons the suit of the Amazing Spider-Man and

Dr. Robert Bruce Banner swells to the Incredible Hulk. But where Peter and Robert suffer abrupt, accidental dysregulation that sends each man on the run from the law, the pawn in chess soldiers across the board, deliberate and resolute, to become in plain view:

Queen.

I was surprised to learn while fact-checking this essay that the game says you may instead choose to transform the pawn into bishop, knight, or rook. I had not heard about those possibilities because queen is the piece we choose, to strike at any distance in any direction, like an eagle.

A sovereign, like the president. Well, a viceroy acting for the king as the captain of a naval ship does at sea.

ZERO IN ON EFFORT AND RESULTS FOR SUCCESS

That is the message. I would call it the subtitle, under-title, but here it is over the title. Super-title!

UNDERDOG NATION

That slashing red font baffles me. It comes from the cover of the longtime bestseller Helter Skelter, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s study of the criminal Charles Manson, who had interpreted the Beatles’ song as a call for race war.

What? UNDERDOG means nothing like that.

If you were watching cartoons Saturday mornings from 1964 through 1973, what do you know, from UNDERDOG Saigon raiding the Chinese boats at Hon Me island, to UNDERDOG Le Duc Tho refusing his Nobel, you may recall the theme song:

Speed of lightning, roar of thunder
Fighting all who rob or plunder
UNDERDOG. UNDERDOG!

This mock heroism captures the dignity of the UNDERDOG, not cruel or proud but determined. It does not capture my own experience down by the ravine, with the canine UNDERDOG I rescued just as my top dog began to eviscerate him.

Is that what the book designer meant to convey?

Forbes Books

I feel sure they meant something by the title font, as they did with all these other legends and symbols I read on the cover just now. Quang’s publishing partner develops a business book in collaboration with a leader to get a message out.

The Forbes family and magazines have cheered on enterprise since, what do you know, 1917 when our side first sent men in suits with briefcases to Moscow and St. Petersburg to promote capitalism. They know what they are doing.

Viet Nam letters has addressed the work of other CHILD REFUGEES. See for instance this first of the 2 so far on Sigh, Gone by Phuc Tran, also the third of 4 so far on Jonathan Hill and his Lizard Boy.

We have published many many Viet Nam letters about the works of US MARINES. Most of them concern Wayne Karlin, like Quang a helicopter Marine, as author or editor.

Many Viet Nam letters concern BIOTECH. This 1 starts on Arthur Galston, inventor and nemesis of dioxin.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.