ABOUT FACE

One of the most important things I learned while becoming a Vietnamese linguist was that one doesn’t really speak a language until one is able to think in that language. Most of us speak English, which is also considered a Romantic language. If you compare romantic languages to Latin, the grammar is remarkably similar:

English She always closes the window before she dines/before dining.
Latin (Ea) semper antequam cenat fenestram claudit.

But an oriental language has very different grammar. When speaking, they think different than those who speak English. When I was in Vietnam, many of my fellow Americans said racist things about the Vietnamese. They considered them to be ignorant and inferior. I knew better. I knew that they were very smart, honest, and hardworking. It has been no surprise to me that so many Vietnamese who were able to get to the U.S. have been so successful.

I also knew why so few Americans figured out to speak Vietnamese. It is far harder for an American to learn Vietnamese than for a Vietnamese person to learn English. I often listened to Americans try, and fail, to speak Vietnamese. Sometimes this was hysterical. A large part of the problem is that Americans literally cannot hear Vietnamese. That is because they use sounds that are never used in English and Americans don’t even hear them. Vietnamese is also a monosyllabic and tonal language. But another problem was the difference in grammar which is also reflective of how they think.

This is impossible for me to explain. But one of the things I learned was the importance of face. It is very easy for us, as Americans, to be very insulting to someone who is Asian, without even realizing it. That is because we put people in positions where if they do what we want, they lose face. Even today, as an insurance agent, I see this all the time. There have been several times when I have talked to someone from an Asian country or even someplace like India with very different results than when they talked to someone else from the agency. Sometimes my associate will say, “I don’t understand, you said the same thing I said, and they accepted it, but they didn’t accept it from me.” I cannot really explain this very well, but part of it is that I am very sensitive to not causing someone to lose face.

We just saw this play out on our televisions this morning and it is stunningly bad for the U.S. First, the U.S. tried to scold China for human rights abuses. If China had tolerated that, they would have lost face. As a result, China responded by insulting us. They threw the Democratic claims that we are a racist nation with systemic abuse of minorities right back in our face. Democrats clearly fail to recognize the enormous harm done when they trash their own country. Then China simply said that the U.S. was not serious enough to matter. This was a public slap in the face of the Biden administration. Failure to deal with this will create huge problems. The only thing worse than causing someone else to lose face is to lose face yourself. The Biden administration did both, during one brief session televised around the world.

Previous Presidents understood this. But Democrats, including Biden, have morphed into self-righteous, hypocritical, arrogant, patronizing jerks. Professing themselves to be wise, they are instead proving themselves to be fools. They often lecture other people harshly criticizing things they do themselves. This may or may not impress the impressionable here in the U.S. It absolutely does not play overseas.

Biden did the same thing with Putin, when he directly insulted him. The result is an immediate deterioration in U.S. Russian relationships.  More importantly, Russia responded by commenting on Biden’s obvious mental deterioration. To make things worse, Biden literally fell while foolishly trying to run up the stairs to Air Force One. Remember how Biden criticized Trump for walking down carefully. That was because Trump knew that falling on your face on national TV is not all that inspiring.

Ironically, the man who lectures us about restoring U.S. prestige around the world is instead becoming an international embarrassment. This is obvious to everyone not working for the DNC or the subservient MSM.

We will all pay a price for this, but the people who will pay the highest price are those who foolishly rigged an election to put someone so obviously incompetent into the White House.

TDM