Читать книгу Blaming No One - Dan Inc. Whitman - Страница 6

Reprinted from Africa-Info.org

December 30, 1941, Armenian-born photographer Yousuf Karsh got a photo session with Winston Churchill, after the latter’s speech to Canadian Parliament during Britain’s darkest days of World War II. Unable to get the look of defiance he thought was needed for the occasion, Karsh ripped the cigar from Churchill’s hand. The iconic photo resulted, with Churchill’s famous scowl.

April 11, 2011, photographers recorded the apprehension of Cote d’Ivoire’s now ex-president, Laurent Gbagbo. Take any news service you want, but the Reuters version shows the bewilderment of a wronged three-year-old boy with his red fire engine taken away. In this case it was a nation state of 21 million inhabitants, the world’s largest cocoa producer, with a per capita GDP of $1800. Cote d’Ivoire, once the economic engine of francophone West Africa, emerged, barely, from five months of one giant toothache as its president refused to accept the outcome of the November, 2010 elections. Order restored, sort of. The Great Birnham Woods did to Dunsinane march, and the community was restored to relative sanity. Election winner Alassane Ouattara showed magnanimity in assuring Gbagbo’s physical well-being while assuring a trial to determine the latter’s possible human rights violations.

Classical theater shows us that the boy with the fire engine is the more interesting character than the one who restores the community. The former is usually a tenor in the opera version, the latter a bass-baritone. In Calderón de la Barca’s seventeenth-century classic, a cranky Pedro Crespo gets to be mayor of Zalamea and behaves badly, as does his mistress Chispa. The fuss is brought into line by the king’s soldiers. In the Soviet version, the people—not the central government authority—take things into their own hands.

Bullies have whipped us around since the invention of speech, and probably even before. No one has yet figured out how to confine them, other than laboriously beating them at their own game – usually with unacceptable numbers of casualties. It gets to be labor intensive to do so.

Think of the little gangster Abimael Guzman arrested in Peru in 1992 and put on trial as the magus behind the Sendero Luminoso in Peru. Or the pudgy Buddha, Aum Shinrikyo, who staged murderous sarin chemical attacks in the Tokyo subway in 1995. Unmasked, they usually turn out to be punks.

With Divine Right out of style and monarchies no longer keeping temporal structures on an even keel, we seem to have only fiction and theater to address the monstrous wrongs done to us. Gorgeous opera can result, but this is the Real Thing. The question arises, why maintain vertical, hierarchical structures at all, if this is the best we can do?

I am not talking anarchy here, or world government. Sovereignty is the model we have before us, until something better comes along.

Once the fools, the bullies, are unmasked, they are shown to be mollusks without their protective shells, as in the unforgettable photos of Laurent Gbagbo that hit the wires April 12, the day after his arrest. The vulnerability of the invertebrates at the hour of their reckoning does not give us blood lust, but more sadness at their bewilderment, and at our own inability to defend ourselves against them.

The good news for the Christian Laurent Gbagbo (Alassane Ouattara is Muslim) is that he enjoys continued support from Senator James M. Inhofe, (R-OK). Quoted by the Foreign Policy blog April 14, he said, “It is more of a Jesus thing, but I have spent a lot of time in Africa.”

My understanding is that Jesus meant for authority to be taken away from abusers and given to the Meek. High time for this to happen. No more Gbagbos please, and in the meantime let’s at least keep them distracted with the fire engines they crave.

A university in Boston offered Gbagbo a professorship some weeks ago, as incentive to give up power in Cote d’Ivoire. Nice gesture. But imagine sharing an office space with him. Would you leave your own red fire engine overnight in the office?