WHO'D HAVE THUNK?
The picture tells the story almost as well as the New York Times story that it accompanies.
Titled "Communist Vietnam Lunges for Capitalism's Brass Ring", it tells the story of how far Vietnam has come. Here's how the article begins:
"HANOI, Vietnam, April 26 — It was Lenin's birthday. The most important Communist Party meeting in five years was under way. And the star of the show was the world's most famous capitalist, Bill Gates.
The president, the prime minister and the deputy prime minister all excused themselves from the party meeting on Saturday to have their pictures taken with Mr. Gates, who has more star power in Vietnam than any of them.
When people heard he was in town, hundreds climbed trees and pushed through police lines to get a glimpse of him. He was the subject of the lead article in the next day's newspapers."
A country of 83 million people, 31 years after the end of the war with the US, the article describes the evolution underway there as follows:
"It is 20 years since Vietnam, still struggling in the aftermath of war, began a sort of perestroika that has moved it from a strict planned economy to the more helter-skelter mechanisms of the marketplace."
It's been a long road indeed from this picture (via Corante) to the one above.
It's an article worth reading in it's entirety, not only for understanding the present in the context of the past, but for understanding what the present might look like in the future.
And the present I'm referring to today? Iran, Iraq, North Korea are some of the places that might look very different in a few decades, despite our relations with them today.
Who knows? In a few decades, there may yet be crowds of kids in the capitals of some of these countries with pictures of Larry and Sergey, along of course with Bill.
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