Reunification Palace

Good evening from Vietnam.

Today I went to see the "Reunification Palace," which had been the "white house" of the presidents of South Vietnam until 1975.

I was expecting to see a display of decadence. I had been told to expect this by an Australian academic I met in Bangkok some years ago, who had just come from a tour of Vietnam. He and his family said they had been shocked by the tasteless extravagance they had seen there.

In the event, it did not really strike me as over the top at all--not for a nation's seat of government. Sure, the official halls were lush, but that's an issue of national prestige. And no lusher than, say, the halls of University of Toronto. When it came to the actual quarters of the first family, they were just three rooms--a master bedroom, one shared bedroom for the children, and a dining room. This is decadent luxury? I live in larger and more luxurious quarters; and so, I warrant, do most Australians. Certainly any Australian academics past graduate school. The president's office--the local equivalent of the "Oval Office"--was smaller than that of your typical corporate president, in my experience, or, say, that of the president of a university.

There were also, it is true, in the more public areas, a bar, a small movie theatre, and a small dance floor.

Was this over the top? I don't think so. No more than you'd see it a typical private club; which is exactly what it was, for the country's high officials. Indeed, it was no better rigged out than the average faculty club.

In other words, this Auistralian academic seems to have been criticising as wildly extravagant a lifestyle quite comparable to his own.

Leaves me wondering. Does modern higher education serve to make you blind to the real world around you? Is it actually a matter of indoctrination, something like a cult?

Or was his objection, possibly, to someone of a lower class acting uppity?

I suspect all of the above.