STUMBLING INTO KONY 2012

It was one of those accidental juxtapositions that my post about the Rwanda genocide yesterday, prompted by a series of movies I’d ordered from Netflix a year or more ago, and then a comment in the form of a url from a friend who’s more alert to social networks than I, has involved me in thinking about Kony 2012. This publicity event sets up opposition between some handsome young “millennials” and a “heart of darkness” warlord who hijacks, mutilates, and murders youngsters as part of his terrorism against villages while claiming to be a freedom guerilla. It’s a confrontation of video against guns and machetes. (Just google to save me from listing ten url’s, please. Or consult the New York Times. Even the Great Falls Tribune has picked it up now.

I began this post with ideas about the warring YouTubes and blogs trying to figure out why Kony 2012 went viral, whether it will do any good, whether to contribute, whether these filmmakers are just getting rich, and the true nature of Kony. It’s a much larger and more dramatic version of things like, for example, the quarrel over Mortenson and his teacups. (Friends in Bozeman say forget the books and money -- some people just don’t like Mortenson’s personal attitude.) The arguments range all the way from the highest political philosophy (Why is the white West once again trying to step in and solve African problems versus only a few years ago begging the West to send troops to resolve the Rwanda genocide) on down to Millennial name-calling which is strangely low-class sexual (cunt, douchebag).

It’s one of those situations that can either be an opportunity to learn or a mudfest that can damage philanthropic efforts for decades. “Invisible Children,” which is the name of the idealistic organization, is taking the high road, making everything “transparent,” meaning disclosing their money sources, expenses and salaries. (This is as much political as factual. And whether $80,000 annual salaries sound high or low to you will be relative.)

I’m going to do my usual attempt to come in from the side, horizontal drilling, you might say. First of all, the REAL money is in the harvest of email addresses that “Invisible Children” is compiling -- not just a select group of YouTubers (young, prosperous, educated) but also the fan lists of every celebrity involved. These addresses are worth BIG money and are the main way that social networks can monetize their web presence. A big adversarial issue inflates that list beyond understanding. These lists are power and they are going into the hands of international corporations who do more damage than Kony could do in a lifetime.

Which takes me to my second point. Humans see danger in terms of individuals. The superintendent when I taught in Heart Butte kept a list of ten kids he wanted to get rid of, no matter how he had to do it. When the boy at the top of the list tried to fight adults, he was arrested and removed in handcuffs. No attempt to counsel. This is the heart of rebellion. That superintendent also had a list of trouble-making teachers: I was on it. To him I was Kony. He did not grasp that getting rid of me only replaced me with others, maybe more powerful and resourceful than I.

My conviction, experience, and training is that rebellion arises out of the structure of the situation (often unjust), not from the orneriness of disaffected individuals who simply get pulled into alignment by the circumstances. In short, I would say that Kony is the product of whatever complex situation exists where he is (and in the six years since the Invisible Children film was made he has moved to a different area with a different government). The Rwanda genocide was an opportunity to identify many of those forces, many of them the debris of the colonial era and the excesses of the post-colonial decades. I suspect that Kony is part of that as well.

My point is that if someone managed to murder Kony tomorrow (the bin Laden solution) he would soon be replaced by another smart handsome ruthless fellow who has found the formula. It amounts to a big game of whack-a-mole unless the ecology is changed to eliminate mole-ness. Otherwise, the game of predator/prey simply continues with the younglings merely “mushrooms” as some in the drug wars call them. Collateral damage.

But we react to babies with their lips cut off. We don’t react to corporate machinations or the internal politics of African nations. So why not use this point of entry that the Millennials can understand? If Invisible Children is willing to take the issue to the level of Jason Russell’s small son, they do it because it works, but also it is an irritatingly smarmy use of sentimentality to oppose reptilian opportunism. (That child is amazing and MUST be getting offers to be in the movies.)

Everything we do in this culture is monetized. Even Romeo Allaire, whose true bravery SHOULD be celebrated, can be opposed by Belgian senators who want to attract voters by using dissension. By choosing social media as their means, Invisible Children is in danger of making the heart of darkness into a “like” issue with thumbs up or down buttons. (I never get over the echo of the Roman coliseum in those thumbs.) Idealism is a precious commodity and should never be discouraged, but it can be twisted into a new excuse for domination.

The United States IS part of this problem. “Occupy” is responding to systemic forces in the same way as African guerrillas and Israeli politicians and Canadian resource developers crossing Montana with their big pipe-lines, electrical transmission lines, gigantic hauling loads. The same as the environmental citizen groups increasingly organizing and hardening to push back against a multitude of invasions. The same as mayors determined to make their towns centers of profit. Personally, I thought “The Constant Gardener” did a better job of lining out the forces and the price of opposing them, but that was a big-time movie -- not three guys and a camera.

I was interested to be able to watch Kony’s face as he was questioned. He was concentrating hard to mind-read these white boys who had come to confront him and play with his guns. What do they want? Can they come up with money or arms? What would happen if he just killed them? I’ll say this for sure: if Kony kills those handsome boys now, the stakes will be entirely changed. But maybe the stakes for a child in Africa are the same.

RISKY OLD MEN

I once said the name “Peter Beard” in the presence of Peter Matthiessen and saw that it had roughly the same effect on the latter as being plugged into a wall socket. “What?” he demanded. “What about him?” I love both Peters, though I’ve only met Peter M. and own all his books but have never owned any of Peter B’s photo books. Just now I googled Peter Beard and discovered that he is the great-grandson of James Jerome Hill, the founder of the Great Northern Railroad which opened the northern prairie to homesteading and provoked the creation of Glacier National Park, which means that he relates to the past of this part of the world in much the same way as Barnaby Conrad III. But Peter Beard himself has become greatly identified with the Kenya of Isak Dinesen. They were only alive at the same time for a brief period, but their spirit was similar. He met her the same year I came to Browning, Montana.

I have always said that this part of Montana was my Africa. Peter B. is a year older than me and very, very rich to say nothing of being very very well connected. He takes fabulous photos with magnificent cameras and then besmirches and adorns the enlarged photos with bloody handprints, tiny India ink drawings, glued on bugs and leaves, anything. He’s a little like Robert Kennedy (who was a friend) crossed with (if you must know) Tim Barrus. And not terribly unlike his Yale compatriot, Peter Matthiessen, except that everyone loves Peter M. and some people think Peter Beard is, well, too much the free spirit. He probably has as much of what he calls “jewelry” in his hips as Tim Barrus does, but because an elephant trampled him, an event that was filmed, right out to the moment he actually died as he was wheeled into the Nairobi hospital. They did revive him and he’s still out there having art shows and getting into trouble, which is like Tim Barrus.

Beard’s specialty is photos of supermodels, meaning very skinny and young women with long necks, like gracile gerenuks, who are willing to take all their clothes off and stand against a background of the least modern African people Beard can find. Splashed with paint, encouraged into extreme poses, adorned with extravagant objects, they are quite stunning. Beard says they are NOT fashion photos and one has to agree. Who would show up at a cocktail party looking like that? The Africans are terrific -- work-worn, humorous, always up for anything. The most famous photo of Beard is the one he took of himself half-inserted into a dead croc. It had only been dead a short time and some of its reflexes remained, so he ended up with painful tooth marks. I’ll bet his toenails got bleached as well. I just rented “Peter Beard Scrapbooks: Africa and Beyond” from Netflix.

I love these kinds of wild and original guys. Yesterday one of our local examples (a good reason for loving Montana), Rib Gustafson, took me to lunch at the Panther Cafe. 84, Rib and his beautiful artistic wife have raised five kids, four of them men, two of those veterinarians like their dad, in addition to a famous singer (Wiley) and a math teacher. They all write, especially Sid. The daughter is a lawyer who has just finished a book on maritime law.

Rib met Bob Scriver for the first time in what must have been the late Fifties after a rousing bar fight that caused him to be jugged until he sobered up. Bob was the City Magistrate who tried Rib's case, but I didn’t ask what the sentence was. The other story Rib told happened in the Nineties. Bob had a pet badger, which can be thought of as either a weasel on steroids or a mini-grizzly. The badger had caught one of its formidable claws under a piece of heavy machinery in the shop and was so frantic that Bob couldn’t get near it to help. So at midnight, happily asleep, Rib’s phone rings and Bob wants help -- NOW. It’s an eighty mile drive, but Rib gets up and heads to Browning where he rendered the badger comatose with a shot. Even the two men working together had to remove the wedged claw to get the animal loose. Rib said when he left Bob was holding “Badgie” on his lap, soothing his beloved pet.

It’s not that I love these extravagant guys because I want a romantic relationship with them. Been there, done that. My thing is that I wish I could live the risky life as they do. I wish I were them. But women in bar fights end up dead and I’m not willing to go that far. The next best thing is to sit across a table or in front of a fireplace and hear all about it. Not that I haven’t managed to do a few far-out things, but it doesn’t matter how liberated a woman is, she still can’t live quite so “large.” Of course, men die along the way, too. Now and then.

Rib has the great advantage of being in a position to do a great deal of good for people and they reward him by watching out for him. In his several books Rib tells about some of his strategies. For instance, once he was called by a threadbare rancher with a cow teetering on the edge of oblivion, a man too proud to go into debt. So Rib proposed that the rancher make him the half-owner of the cow as payment. That way there was a chance the cow would be saved and the rancher would have half a cow -- without treatment he would have nothing. When word got around, Rib accumulated quite a little herd of half-cows.

Society theoretically likes the dependable wage-earner who protects his children and comforts his wife and we do, we do. But we also love the guy who gets out there and tastes everything the world has to offer, risks big-time pain but also big-time gain, and then can tell us all about it. I’m going to watch this movie from Netflix about Peter Beard about five more times before I send it back. Then I’ll try to buy the disc. In the meantime, I’ll watch for Rib or any of his sons, or any of a dozen other resourceful reprobates around here. And, of course, I can email Barrus any time and I do, I do.

NOWHERE IN AFRICA: A Reflection

In 1961, over the summer before starting to teach in Browning, Montana, I read and reread “Out of Africa” by Isak Dinesen, sometimes reading it out loud to a tape recorder with selected music in the background. That was before the movie, so I wasn’t playing the clarinet solo from the sound track of the movie. To me, Africa equaled Montana, an Africa I could reach without a passport, with Blackfeet instead of Masai. That idea persists. The Blackfeet reservation is about the same size as the Serengeti.

So I’m delighted to acquire a new movie for my complex of Africa stories. This one is “Nowhere in Africa,” a German film made in 2001 with a young woman, Caroline Link, directing. The plot is not a lot different from the Anglo-centered “Flame Trees of Thika,” but the “vibe” is quite different. Added to the frontier theme is the complex of relationships among different races and religions and the constant shadow of the Jews in Germany. This little father/mother/daughter set has HAD to emigrate to save their lives: it’s not a matter of getting rich or seeking adventure. In particular, the mother is opposed to Africa (unlike Hayley Mills’ character) because she is a “clinger” who puts down roots where she is. By the end of the movie, she is uprooted again, unwilling to go back to Germany, but attached to her husband who wants to go. The father is not heroic but there is a grizzled old-timer who knows the big picture (one of my favorite types!), and the little girl soon finds a champion in the cook, Owuor played by Sidede Onyulo. It is THIS man who gives the key to this particular film. Tall, slender, strong -- I don’t know what tribe Onyulo is -- with an exuberant grin and good English -- says that the Americans make spectacular films that are not particularly deep, but the Germans are able to recognize and show the spiritual depth that in truth characterizes African life. For once, he says, he was not asked to give a paper-thin portrait of a Masai with a spear.

The disc of explanation, which includes an interview with Stephanie Zweig, who is the real-life writer whose memoir is the story, equivalent to Elspeth Huxley, is invaluable in extending one’s understanding of the movie. I would recommend watching the movie, then the extra information, then the movie again. Evidently the memoir was harder on the mother, who remained spoiled and rather childish even after several years of running the farm by herself while her husband was interned and then in the British army. In the movie she is capable of growth. I loved the scene in which she wears a couture evening gown -- which she stupidly bought with money meant for a refrigerator -- to a dusty and bloody indigenous ceremony, showing that she has recognized the importance of -- shall we say “liturgy.”

The relationship between the two parents is complex, erotic, and beautifully enacted by the two stage-trained actors. The two actresses who play the daughter are also wonderful in that straightforward and adaptable way that healthy children can be. Caroline Link is known for her ability to work with children, which is especially clear with the black children. All of them are unique, colorful and intriguing, but esp. the boy who is Regina’s best friend. Owuor, though, is her stay and her comfort in that wonderfully accepting way that has been nearly destroyed in our own culture, contaminated by obsession with sexual perversion. When Regina needs comforting, she folds herself into bed alongside Owuor with the same innocence as when she nestles between her two parents at an age contemporary Americans would find shocking.

Perhaps this same straightforwardness is what makes the ceremonials so convincing, though Sidede Onyulo suggests that much is attributable to shooting in actual remote Kenya rather than South Africa. Everyone speaks their own language with subtitles as necessary. (Another beauty of the DVD is that one can choose one’s nationality.) Onyulo says this is particularly helpful for Kenyans who tire of bad Swahili. The producer, surprisingly, mentions “Dances with Wolves” as a model.

Zweig says that one of the two books they had on the frontier was “Out of Africa” which she read and reread. Dinesen was Danish in an Anglo community. Huxley was Anglo in the same Nairobi community, though a different part of it. “White Mischief” is the same community again, and the same people as Dinesen knew but from QUITE a different point of view. (This is the one the guys like! Very wicked.) I’ve ordered “I Dreamed of Africa” and I suppose I’ll have to watch “Blood Diamonds.” Forget “Shaft in Africa.” Forget the Pointer Sisters, Ernest, Bulldog Drummond (!!), Queen Latifa or Obama (!!!) in Africa. But I’m curious about Peter Beard’s scrapbooks (nonfiction). He’s the photographer, character and (I gather) bounder who posed with his legs seemingly swallowed by a ‘gator. I ordered “Faraw! Mother of the Dunes” and “Sia, le reve du python” -- both indigenous -- as well as the new version of “King Solomon’s Mines.” (Oh, how I loved that moment in the old one when Deborah Kerr -- so much fun to pull the hairpins out of her old-maid hairdos! -- has changed into khaki safari clothes and Stewart Granger has to knock a huge tarantula off her skirt! Maybe I’ll order “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” but Hemingway’s Africa is not mine. No one seems to have filmed H. Rider Haggard's “She,” which surprises me. Netflix is as useful as an index as it is as a source, something like Amazon.

But I think what I’m really after is a kind of movie that is also made about Australia or Western China, a grasslands story on the frontier told through the eyes of a child. “Little House on the Prairie” maybe. (An IMDB commenter suggests “Whale Rider.”) But we still don’t have a really excellent version of this archetype on the northern prairie in the rainshadow of the Rockies -- still a bit of a frontier. Something to think about. The small daughter of a fossil hunter trying to survive a summer on Egg Mountain? A girl reunited with her estranged father who is clumsily running a ranch on the High Line? Or is that a grandfather with a black foreman? I’d better order “An Unfinished Life.” Been meaning to anyway because I like Mark Spragg as a person and as a writer. Never met the wife and collaborator.

I wonder what such a story would be like if it were told through the eyes of a Blackfeet version of Owour: patient, spiritual, and protective of little girls as well as all other creatures. Not a warrior, but a cook, a nurturer. I suppose I’d have to fight the publisher so I wouldn’t have to include recipes for Tanka Bars.