Tag Archives: china

The Beast

14 Oct

David Duckworth, Weapons.  Acrylic, 2012. Stencil executed by Philippe Barnoud on bridge near Paris University 8, Saint-Denis, for exhibition, Écritures en migration[s].

Reading about Smedley Butler in public can be quite engaging.  Some people notice the book in hand and smile.  Oh, Butler, the general who said no to war!  Indeed he was, once qualified.  As a military careerist, his decision to retire at age fifty from the Marine Corps in 1931 may have seemed a renunciation of war as it followed a highly publicized fracas with the State Department under President Herbert Hoover.  Butler had just given a speech in Philadelphia on the topic of the prevention of war, in which his second-hand anecdote regarding Prime Minister Benito Mussolini, running down a child with an automobile in the Italian countryside, was probably provocative, at best.  But, his stated conclusion that certain nations could not be trusted to honor disarmament agreements, during the same speech, was surely incendiary in diplomatic circles.  For the speech, Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson issued a formal apology to Mussolini; Hoover, in turn, ordered house arrest and court martial by the navy for Butler.

Hans Schmidt makes clear, though, that Butler was already considering early retirement before the Philadelphia engagement.  Schmidt, in his biography Maverick Marine: General Smedley D. Butler and the Contradictions of American Military History (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1987; see pages 208-9 for the above account), emphasizes the issues at heart in Butler’s move to civilian life.  During Butler’s career the Marines served as a police force for the Navy.  It was during this era that the so-called gunboat diplomacy of the United States engaged the Navy in coercive intervention elsewhere in the world in order to support American business interests.  In 1898, Butler, at 16 years of age, volunteered for the Marine Corps in order to participate in the war against Spain in Cuba.  His father, Thomas S. Butler, who served continuously in Congress from 1896 to 1928, would follow the son’s interests as a member of the House Naval Affairs Committee for three decades.

In 1899, advancing to first lieutenant, Butler shipped to the Philippines where a guerrilla war based on Filipino resistance to the American colonial regime was heating up.  Not content to remain garrisoned in Cavité, Butler soon enough participated in direct fire against Filipino insurrectos in the field.  This fervor to prove his fighting mettle would characterize his service throughout his career.  Schmidt notes that with his “irrepressible zeal and warrior instincts, he was the ideal commander for colonial small wars where adept light infantry operations could be the critical factor in discouraging resistance and efficiently consolidating American domination” (38).  In 1900, he was a member of an international fleet intent on protecting interests in Tientsin and Peking in North China during the Boxer Rebellion, as Chinese peasant soldiers rose up against foreign control.  Butler assisted in toppling the Liberal dictator and nationalist José Santos Zelaya in Nicaragua (1909-12).  He was in Veracruz, Mexico, in 1914, to assert American investments and oil prospects against General Victoriano Huerta’s revolutionary nationalism.  In 1915, Butler, by this time a major, engaged in expeditionary maneuvers from Cap Haitien against guerrilla fighters, or cacos, in the interior of Haiti.  With the establishment of a U.S.-sponsored client government and a period of martial law, Butler remained to supervise the formation of a native constabulary, all the while exhibiting the racist attitudes and employing the racist language of the day.  Under Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, Butler played a key role in forcing the National Assembly to accept a new American constitution so that Haiti’s prohibition against alien land ownership would end.

Butler continued to have a colorful career, at one point even, while on leave during 1924-25, becoming commissioner of police for the city of Philadelphia, intent on applying the restrictions of Prohibition equally to all parties and all classes of society.  The Marine came to despise the ascendency of an elite, college-trained, bureaucracy within the Corps.  Schmidt shows that the distinction between Butler’s “achievements as an enterprising leader of small combat units,” valued today in its professionalism, with a class of “staff officers, desk admirals, and war college intelligentsia,” does not account for Butler’s mass leadership skills and skillful employment of contemporary mass-media public relations, qualities which have since merged with the professionalism of today’s armed services (248).

Outside of military circles, Butler is remembered today for his rhetoric denouncing war.  During the 1930s, the ex-Marine was a frequent speaker at platforms in which intervention in a looming war between European powers was addressed.  Sharing podia with isolationists and pacifists, his speech was directed from an experience uniquely his own.  “War is a racket . . . ,” begins a text that was published in 1935 (see Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler, War Is a Racket [Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003]).  He went on to write:

“. . . It always has been.  It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.  It is the only one international in scope.  It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”

“A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people.  Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about.  It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many.  Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.” (23)

Munitions makers, ship builders, manufacturers, meat packers, and speculators were the few whom Butler identified to make a profit from a war in either Europe or Asia.  He was wise enough to link the escalation of national debt to participation in war, looking back to America’s advent in imperialist ambition, in 1898, through to the effect of political alliances during World War I.  While the war profiteers profited, the American people shouldered this debt: the du Ponts accruing fifty-eight million dollars profit yearly during 1914-18, or an increase of 950 percent, while the national debt soared to $52,000,000,000, or “$400 to every man, woman, and child” (27).  Or, Bethlehem Steel’s munition-making profitability of $49,000,000 per annum, over a peacetime annual income of $6,000,000.  His figures take in United States Steel, Anaconda, Utah Copper, Central Leather Company, General Chemical Company, International Nickel Company, American Sugar Refining Company, meat packers, cotton manufactures, garment makers, and coal producers.  Last, but not least, the bankers, whose “cream of the profits” were kept secret from the American public.  The waste that Butler accounted for was tremendous.  For instance, airplane and engine manufacturers received $1,000,000,000 from the Federal government for equipment that never left the ground.  Remember that $500 hammer that made headlines during the occupation of Iraq?  During World War I, there was the case of twelve dozen 48-inch wrenches that only worked with nuts specifically manufactured for turbines at Niagara Falls.  They never found a use here nor overseas; the nuts were never produced to fit the wrenches (27-31).  (For another citation of World War I corporate profiteering, see the post “Parade of Pain,” dated June 17, 2012).

Butler devoted himself to the cause of the soldier, citing the toll war takes on the average man, including, beyond the dead, “about 50,000 destroyed men” in the eighteen veterans’ hospitals which he had visited (33).  Butler’s prescription for smashing the war racket was to conscript all individuals involved in government and industry to receive the same monthly pay as the soldier, at that time $30 a month.  (During the Bonus March of 1932 he was in Washington, D.C. to booster the spirits of World War I veterans demanding back pay [see the post “The Gifting Society,” dated May 9, 2012, for further information on the March]).  Additionally, he proposed a plebiscite to determine a declaration of war comprised only of those who would actually serve as soldiers.  Thirdly, and this is where one must understand that Butler was not a pacifist, he proposed that military force only be used in defense of the nation.  (He did not live to see the bombing of Pearl Harbor, although he understood the long term tensions that had been building in Asia over regional control.)  Later, in 1936, he went further by proposing an Amendment for Peace, to the Constitution of the United States, which would restrict the movement of the members of the armed forces to within the continental limits of the United States and the Panama Canal Zone, and a proscribed number of miles outside the nation’s coastlines (first published in Woman’s Home Companion, September 1936, the text is reprinted in War Is a Racket).

While still a soldier, Butler advanced one trajectory of the armed forces that eventually came to be known as the military-industrial complex.  During the early 1920s, while serving at Quantico Marine Base, south of Washington on the Potomac, Butler promoted aviation and numerous innovations and improvements in war equipment.  Chinese nationalism brought the Marine back to the Peking-Tientsin region in 1927, where Butler capitalized on the use of an air force, with an airdrome in protective distance of a Standard Oil compound.  Thus, his later words regarding peace contrast sharply with his earlier career:

“The professional soldiers and sailors don’t want to disarm.  No admiral wants to be without a ship.  No general wants to be without a command.  Both mean men without jobs.  They are not for disarmament.  They cannot be for limitations of arms.  And at all these [disarmament] conferences, lurking in the background but all-powerful, just the same, are the sinister agents of those who profit by war.  They see to it that these conferences do not disarm or seriously limit armaments.” (44)

President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address on radio and television (January 17, 1961) warned the American people that they “must guard against unwarranted influence by the military-industrial complex” (quoted in Richard F. Kaufman, “ ‘We Must Guard Against Unwarranted Influence By the Military-Industrial Complex’ ,” New York Times, June 22, 1969).  Having already engaged in intervention in Asia during the Korean War, the United States was actively involved in assisting the French government in suppressing revolution in Vietnam by the time of Eisenhower’s speech.  The expansion of that engagement soon included the commitment of ground troops for a prolonged and failed war against the Vietnamese people while the French exited their former colonial possession.  This was also an opportunity for the United States to expand its military arsenal.  One of the ways in which the U.S. deployed newer methods of destruction was through the use of chemical warfare.  During World War II, U.S. bombers first tested napalm against German soldiers occupying French civilian territory (see Howard Zinn, who was one of those bombers, in his testimony in the documentary film, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train).  In Vietnam, the Dow Chemical Company was the only manufacturer supplying the Defense Department with napalm B, a petroleum jelly that burns at 1000° F.  Its horrific propensity for sticking to whatever it burned, including human flesh, symbolized for the anti-war movement the scale of atrocity the architects of the war had devised (see Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the Vietnam War, 1963-1975 [New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1984], page 104).  Photojournalist Philip Jones Griffiths’s 1971 book-length essay on the Vietnam War included the testimony of an informant, an American pilot from 1966, on the strategic value of this chemical:

“We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow.  The original product wasn’t so hot—if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off.  So the boys started adding polystyrene—now it sticks like shit to a blanket.  But then if the gooks jumped under water it stopped burning, so they started adding Willie Peter (WP—white phosphorous) so’s to make it burn better.  It’ll even burn under water now.  And just one drop is enough, it’ll keep on burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from phosphorous poisoning.” (Griffiths, Vietnam Inc. [London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2001; orig. pub. 1971], p. 210)

Sydney D. Rubbo remarked how chemical and biological warfare (C.B.W.), or “toxic warfare,” had so engaged public discourse internationally that “the sinister danger of nuclear warfare seems to be taking second place” (Rubbo, “The Lethal Knife—Chemical and Biological Warfare,” The Australian Quarterly [December 1968], page 22).  The two main units in the Western world producing biological weapons were Proton in England and Fort Detrick in the United States.  U.S. expenditure for research and development in C.B.W. rose from $35 million in 1959 to $150 million by 1964 (26).  Besides the use of napalm against human targets, the U.S. engaged in the massive use of defoliants against whole ecosystems and crop areas, with the express purpose of depriving North Vietnamese soldiers, or the Vietcong, from having access to shelter and supplies in South Vietnam.  This, of course, led in turn to depriving rural South Vietnamese from the same, forcing them to migrate or surrender to U.S.-sponsored relocation to shantytowns outside Saigon and other cities, termed “pacification” by U.S. civilian and military strategists at the time, creating a huge underclass of unemployed and underfed people without access to adequate medical care.

Kaufman outlined a U.S. Federal military budget that in 1968 accounted for 45 percent of all Federal expenditures, or $77.4-billion in Defense Department outlays, with “such related programs as military assistance to foreign countries, atomic energy and the Selective Service System rais[ing] the figure to $80.5-billion” (page SM10).  Procurement accounted for the single largest item in the 1968 budget, a term which covered “purchasing, renting or leasing supplies and services (and all the machinery for drawing up and administering the contracts under which these purchases and rentals are made)” (ibid).  About 22,000 prime contractors and 100,000 subcontractors were involved in this vast defense-oriented industrial complex, employing about four million people.  Of this, the largest share of procurement was among a “relative handful of major contractors,” the 100 largest defense suppliers receiving $26.2-billion in contracts (10-11).  Property holdings were extensive at the time, an “almost arbitrary and vastly underestimated” value of $202.5-billion in military real and personal property at the end of fiscal year 1968, of which supplies and plant equipment accounted for $55.6 billion.  Kaufman remarks upon the Pentagon’s stated value of $38.7-billion for 29 million acres of property it controlled by pointing to another $9-billion, or 9.7 million acres, under the Army Civil Works Division and $4.7-billion of unspecified additional property.  Acquisition cost ignored the cost of property acquired prior to the 1968 fiscal year, thus undervaluing property attained during a period of over 100 years (ibid).

By contrast, A.E. Lieberman attempted to counter Kaufman’s arguments outlining an active co-interest between private industry and the military in an article in which the author offered the following epitomization:

“. . . all of industry has a role in supplying defense requirements, whether as an active participant or on call.  Rather than conspiratorial gain, the element of indenture in industry’s responsibility suggests that major companies engaged in defense contracting may soon alter their business emphasis in favor of civilian markets and that the industry stake in D.O.D. [Department of Defense] as a market may soon become relatively smaller” (Lieberman, “Updating Impressions of the Military-Industry Complex,” California Management Review XI:4 [Summer 1969], page 51).

Lieberman was then Manager of Marketing Services with Dorne and Margolin and a former Manager, Market Planning and Analysis with Kollsman Instrument Company.  Thus, the immediate question arises as to Lieberman’s investment in promoting an alternative, public interest view of the matter in which military procurement contractors are characterized as good neighbor participants realizing relatively lower profit gains when compared to the profit they would receive from private industrial activity.  This is a sign along the road of what later critics would term a military-industrial-media complex.  Think the televised broadcasts of the invasion of Baghdad in 2003.

Cold War ideology had driven our military prerogatives since the closing of World War II.  Surprisingly or not, ten years following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the U.S. defense budget at approximately $260-billion in 1998, William Greider examined a military-industrial complex that was still operating as if the Cold War had not ended (Greider, Fortress America: The American Military and the Consequences of Peace [New York: PublicAffairs, 1999]).  With a political culture unwilling at the time to enlarge that budget and a shrinking market resulting in the loss of more than one million factory jobs, defense manufacturers continued to prosper:

“The dramatic consolidation of defense companies has left an impression that at least the industrial side of the military-industrial complex has been rationally restructured.  That belief is wildly mistaken . . . Despite a dramatic downsizing in employment, the structure of the defense industry remains enormously bloated with overcapacity—too many factories, with not enough sales to keep the factories busy.  The government pays for this surplus of productive capacity.” (xii-xiii)

Noam Chomsky identifies the U.S. invasion of Panama in December 1989 as “the first U.S. act of international violence in the post-World War II era that was not justified by the pretext of a Soviet threat” (Chomsky, Terrorizing the Neighborhood: American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era [Stirling, Scotland: AK Press, 1991], 19).  National consensus on the justification of this action involved, according to the State Department, both “conservatives” advocating “a violent and powerful state” and “liberals,” “who sometimes disagree with the ‘conservatives’ on tactical grounds” (20).  A rationale for military intervention developed alongside this consensus with variations in content.  For Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, actions “designed to succeed,” “vital to our national interest,” and taken as “a last resort” were appropriate.  Presidential nominee Michael Dukakis proposed his own standards for military intervention, failing peaceful means: “to deter aggression against its territory, to protect American citizens, to honor our treaty obligations and to take action against terrorists” (21).

The gunboat diplomacy that propelled Smedley Butler’s career was revealed by this 1989 invasion to be useful once again under familiar terminology, “protect American citizens” (read protect corporate interests, as in the American citizens at the Standard Oil compound at Tientsin in 1927), and newer terminology, “designed to succeed,” whereby the arrogance of the American past that all imperialist ventures into foreign territory, whether it was the Philippines or Haiti, would, without question, succeed, capitulates today to an uncertainty of success based on a world in which resistance could foil any positive assumptions, read the dragging of an American soldier’s body through the streets of Mogadishu or the burnt and hanging effigy of a transport work in Iraq.  Greider points to the invasion of Kosovo by NATO forces in the spring of 1999, with firepower principally from the United States, as an example of “the casualty-free war” (Greider, 187), where the use of industrialized, high-technology weaponry probably would have appalled the fighting instincts of a Smedley Butler (in this example, “airborne explosives delivered from a great distance” [ibid, 188]).  Today a soldier sits comfortably with hand on joystick thousands of miles away from where he directs a drone to fire its missiles at designated human targets in Afghanistan.

Understanding Greider’s text serves as a prelude to recognizing the advent of this country’s War On Terrorism for what it serves.  What better means to continue and expand a military-industrial complex, failing a clearly defined enemy such as the Red menace that was supposedly the reaching tentacles of Soviet Union and China, than to create an amorphous, non-nation state, continuous field of siting?  And what better way to deflect criticism from itself by removing the ability of the American body politic to perceive the nature of this reconstituted global beast.  Yet, in the newest incarnation of rhetorical posturing for the good of this military-industrial complex we hear a presidential candidate pounding his chest over  the nation state once again: Iran.  It would be interesting to pinpoint when “terrorism” entered the American lexicon, which I imagine has been attempted, if not by Chomsky, then by others.  Chomsky, though, observes that United States behavior during the Cold War era “has primarily been a history of worldwide subversion, aggression and state-run international terrorism . . . ,” entrenching the military-industrial complex “that was Eisenhower’s farewell warning,” or, essentially, “a smoothly functioning welfare state for the rich with a national security ideology for population control” (Chomsky, 24).

Here we are, without voice if we needed one, contemplating a withdrawal from Afghanistan and waiting for the ascendancy of our next target of aggression, unable to stop the internal beast that continues to terrorize the world.

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An American Love for Automated War

22 Feb

Drawing created by a displaced 27-year-old Laotian farmer in 1972. Courtesy of Fred Branfman.

What sadness!  Formerly, the fragrance of ripening rice

would fill the ricefields

I would see flowers opening their blossoms everywhere

in the forests

How beautiful it was for us!

— by a 20-year-old Laotian man, a traditional singer

It was a fertile land, a land of temperate weather and lush landscapes, rich in forests, jungles and mountain scapes.  Rice was the main crop of the region.  Water buffalo, cows, pigs, horses, ducks and chickens were staple livestock.  People lived in small villages where a pagoda might serve as a focal point.  Needs were simple enough that marketing was limited to occasional trips to purchase textiles and clothing.  Then the American bombers came.

From 1964 to 1969, the American government conducted a secret air war against the Laotian people occupying the Plain of Jars, the people there known locally as the Lao Phouen.  The Plain of Jars, so named because of receptacles found in the region believed to be from an ancient Mon-Khmer race, was located in the central Xieng Khouang province.  Editor Fred Branfman’s book, Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life under an Air War (Harper Colophon Books, Harper & Row, New York, 1972) documents the complete disappearance of a civilization through the testimony of survivors from this American-waged Guernica, survivors who were eventually herded into encampments outside the southern Laotian city of Ventiane.

It was the political victory of the Pathet Lao (“nation of Laos”) in May, 1964 that prompted the American government to act.  The United States had earlier attempted to control the Plain: from 1955 to 1963, funding Ventiane regime and far-right coups at a cost of $480.7 million; expanding a right-wing Lao army from a few thousand in 1954 to over thirty thousand by 1960; organizing a separate army of Meos, Laotian hill tribesmen originally from China, under the leadership of the C.I.A.; and establishing Air America bases owned by the C.I.A. (see Branfman, pages 12-13).  Following Western loss of control of most of the Plain, United States influence shrank to an area southwest of the Plain, where the C.I.A. directed the military base Long Tieng (Branfman 13-14).  Strategically, the United States had used northern Laos for Meo and American special forces teams entering North Vietnam on espionage, sabotage and assassination raids, from the 1950’s on; radar sites aiding American bombers attacking North Vietnam in the mid-1960’s; and, also, as a base for carrying out espionage missions into China (Branfman 16 fn. 14).

According to a U.S. Senate Staff Report, quoted by Branfman, the air war was meant “to destroy the social and economic infrastructure of Pathet Lao held areas,” with clarification from Branfman that “it was meant to hurt them by depriving them of local food supplies, disrupting transport and communications, killing off potential recruits and rice porters, demoralizing the civilian population, and eventually causing a refugee flow away from the Plain” (17-18).  Indeed, every aspect of civilian living became targeted under this “automated battlefield.”  Villages were bombed to smoldering ruins.  Rice paddies were destroyed.  As civilians fled to forests and jungles, these refugee sites were destroyed.  Even attempts to live in holes dug in the ground and farm at night were without avail; reconnaissance and electronic aircraft filmed and tracked the people below everyday for five and a half years (Branfman 18).

I found a copy of this book two months ago quite by accident.  Although a teenager in 1972, I was completely unaware of this remarkable testimony from the survivors of an American automated air war.  The words of these people, many who could not understand why the United States was bombing, saddens me greatly.  The drawings that are included are harrowing visions of the destruction we wrought against a people we held absolutely no compassion for.  What are we ignorant of today as our government acts secretly elsewhere in the world?

Branfman continues to educate people about the morality of automated war and the targeting of civilian populations.  You can learn about his life-long peace and justice work, and greater detail about the bombing of the Plain of Jars, at his blog: http://fredbranfman.wordpress.com.  His website, Truly Alive: Facing Death in the Prime of Life, at www.trulyalive.org, addresses psychological and spiritual principles with concern for societal and biospheric well-being.

Note: the above poem appears on page 37 of Voices from the Plain of Jars.

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Planet Home: Part II

12 Nov

“…a staid old house, where hoops and powder and patches, embroidered coats rolled stockings ruffles and swords, had had their court days many a time.  Some ancient trees before the house were still cut into fashions as formal and unnatural as the hoops and wigs and stiff skirts; but their own allotted places in the great procession of the dead were not far off, and they would soon drop into them and go the silent way of the rest.” — Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“The negro [sic] has an artistic charm that the white man has not.  The negro has inherited the charm of music, the love of nature and the simplicity of life.” — “A Talk Given by Mr. Louis P. Wilson in the Salon of the Art Center Association,” typescript, 2 pp. Scrapbook 293: Exhibit of work of negro artists (first of two scrapbooks), The Records of the Harmon Foundation (Box No. 121, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

I have come to detest lawns.  My step-father decided that a rock garden with shrubbery was preferable to a lawn as he designed the front landscape for our home in Southern California.  Still, the back yard featured a lawn with lovely jacaranda trees and a border of mint.  Very few neighbors on the block understood that an arid climate would not naturally support the production of lawns, and so, also cultivated rock gardening with heat and drought tolerant plants.  With an unlimited supply of water diverted from and piped in from sources hundreds of miles away, what resident would think about their use of an absolutely precious commodity?  Los Angeles and the history of its misuse of water is widely known.  Still to this day, over a century since it exhausted its own water tables, the city and county consumes water from afar.  The battle for the survival of Mono Lake (http://www.itvs.org/films/battle-for-mono-lake and http://www.monolake.org/about/film) is epic in proportions, a water source that, quoting the second website cited here, underwent dramatic change: “From 1941 until 1990, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) diverted excessive amounts of water from Mono Basin streams. Mono Lake dropped 45 vertical feet, lost half its volume, and doubled in salinity.”  Activists were able to stop the death of this lake.

The problem of natural resources is not confined to the illogic of pumping water to a naturally waterless terrain.  Communities across the planet are now fighting against the incursion of global corporations that have usurped local rights to water, begging the question, “Is water a human right or a commodity to be bought and sold in a global marketplace?” (http://www.thirstthemovie.org/).  Waterways have been besieged for decades by pollution at our hands.  When I was a child growing up, the use of natural gas seemed absolutely benign.  It is only now, in very recent time, that I understand that the extraction of natural gas through “fracking” pollutes water tables and waterways (http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/whats-fracking).

My interest here in the extraction of resources, though, cannot be separated from man’s desire to transform environments into aesthetic and fashionable enclosures for the pursuit of comfort and pleasure.  Man has separated himself from nature during a very long history.  The separation between civilization and wilderness, between communal ecosystems and forest and other natural ecosystems is age old and universal.  Man’s fear and abhorrence of nature runs deep.

Within the United States, the encroachment of industrialization produced an irrational formulation of a pre-industrial man representing a oneness with nature.  By the 1920s, finding a symbol for this mythic being was directed at African Americans.  Observing the effects of the industrial age, Daniel Gregory Mason, in his book The Dilemma of American Music, wrote: “Perhaps the  most insidious one is the jaded emotional state…The fatigue-poisoned mind and body, too dull to enjoy quiet beauty and true thought, crave the crude excitements so abused among us; restless speeding in motor cars from nowhere to nowhere;…violent plastic arts using harsh angles and garish colors; noisy, mechanical, over-accented music.  The ‘jazz age’…is a joyless age, incapable of the happy serenity of creative leisure.” (William Heard Kilpatrick quoting Mason in Our Educational Task As Illustrated in the Changing South [Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1930], pages 61-2).  Thus, the Negro, to use the term applied extensively at the time, long before popular usage of Afro-American or African American, was singled out for being an emotion-centered being, childlike, “primitive,” and, so, as close to nature as man could be.  The evidence of this belief could be found in the extensive writings of the period praising the qualities of Negro spirituals.  Never mind that popular music such as ragtime and jazz were also cultural products of African American creativity.  Music critics and musicologists before 1930, such as European American song collector William Francis Allen or European pianist and folklorist Albert Friedenthal, predominantly found in this output of musical creation another type of the “primitive,” an expressed belief by some in a “savagery” that could be linked back to Africa.  African American writer Benjamin Brawley perceived even in the spiritual something akin to the primitive.  Critiquing London-born Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Brawley found his music based on Negro folk-songs to be “characteristic of the melancholy beauty, the barbaric color, and the passion of the true Negro music” (Brawley, The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States [New York: AMS Press Inc., 1971; reprint of 1930 edition published by Duffield & Company, New York], pages 164-5).

The modern Western mind has been searching for the primitive font of wisdom for several centuries.  Frances S. Connelly’s book, The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European Art and Aesthetics, 1725-1907, is a good source for reading about eighteenth and nineteenth century attempts to derive inspiration from “primitive” cultural sources.  The cultures of Archaic Greece, Gothic Europe, even European folk cultures, served towards this end.  By the advent of Cubism early in the twentieth century, the artifacts of non-Western cultures were already being aggressively plumbed for aesthetic borrowing. Two occasions in New York during 1985 redirected my thinking about the use of cultural artifacts.  With the occasion of Te Maori: Maori Art from New Zealand Collections, an exhibition organized by The American Federation of Arts, the process of interpretation was no longer a Western enterprise.  Maori writers and spokesmen shaped both the exhibition and catalogue.  I saw this incredibly beautiful show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Through the catalogue, I learned of a Maori oral tradition, which accomplished the feat of recording Maori history for posterity over centuries.  By contrast, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) offered “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: The Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, with a team of cultural analysts seemingly replaying the tropes of Western cultural appropriation and manufacture.  Although both exhibitions were breathtaking, MoMA’s show stirred considerable controversy, with criticism, such as Thomas McEvilley’s now classic essay, “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief: ‘Primitivism’ in Twentieth-Century Art at the Museum of Modern Art,” questioning the very basis of placing Western and non-Western cultural objects within a comparative analytic framework.  The entire enterprise of colonialism in a post-colonial world had become suspect, and the narrative of great Western artists deriving inspiration from the forms of colonial subject manufacture had become hollow.  As much as I love African art, I knew then that, taken out of cultural context, objects considered art by Western standards did not speak for the culture from which these objects sprang.  The standard art history textbooks at the time relegated African art to a minor chapter.  These objects were described as fetish objects without any clues to the nature of the spirits they supposedly represented nor the character of the ancestors they supposedly worshipped.  The only obvious factor involved was that Westerners were fetishizing objects from outside their realm of experience.

This is why I greeted the film Oka! with mild concern.  That I wanted to see it was certain.  I just did not want my enthusiasm to be distracted by the burdens of representation.  The film was recently playing here in San Francisco for a very short time.  Based on ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno’s more than twenty-five years among the BaAka, or Bayaka, (“Pygmy”) in Yandoumbe, Central African Republic, the story tells of one Larry Whitman, played by Kris Marshall, who travels to Africa to record the music of this community.  The BaAka play the characters of this story, characters who represent people in Sarno’s life from an earlier generation.  Directed by Lavinia Currier, and co-written by Currier and Sarno, the film is filled with rich acoustic and visual textures.  The performance by a group of non-actors is excellent.  I am reminded of earlier attempts to film stories within traditional cultures using non-actors.  Director F.W. Murnau’s Tabu, a Story of the South Seas (1931) advertised the fact that only native-born South Sea islanders, “half-castes,” and Chinese played the roles portrayed in the film.  Michael Powell directed The Edge of the World (1937) at Foula on the Shetland Islands off the coast of Scotland, focusing on two families that are torn between preserving their native island culture and younger members leaving for a modern world.  Powell did use professional actors but drew the acting corps from true islanders.  Salt of the Earth (1954), directed by blacklist victim Herbert J. Biberman, involved actual Mexican American miners and their families in telling the story of the 1951 strike against Empire Zinc Company in Grant County, New Mexico.  Director Gillo Pontecorvo strove for realism in The Battle of Algiers (1966) by employing Algerian non-actors.  Rolf de Heer’s production of Ten Canoes (2006) involved an Arnhem Land, Australia community casting themselves as actors based on a 1936 photograph taken by anthropologist Donald Thomson and shown to director De Heer by actor David Gulpilil.  The BaAka are master storytellers, as Sarno relates in his memoir, Song from the Forest: My Life Among the Ba-Benjellé Pygmies (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1993).  The acting demanded of them for the film ushered in a new dimension of story telling and required a different understanding than their familiarity with the documentary film process (refer to http://okamovie.com/).

My only experience with Pygmy music was through Deep Forest, Michel Sanchez and Eric Mouquet’s 1993 debut album.  The musicians combined New Age electronics with UNESCO field recordings of music from Zaire, the Solomon Islands, Burundi, Tibesti and the Sahel.  The vocal recordings of the Pygmy on the album are enchanting.  In the film Oka!, the title taken from the Benjellé meaning “listen,” the music of the people and the sounds of the forest merge and separate in subtle ways, an orchestration that makes this film an aural pleasure.  Steeped in the love of music, having once had the boyhood ambition of later becoming a composer, Sarno was reawakened by a song heard on a Flemish radio station.  Leaving from Paris with a one-way ticket and what remained of his savings, Sarno traveled to Bangui in Central African Repulblic.

The journey that Sarno (and Whitman) take is problematic for its exploration of an exotic people.  Sarno’s first impression at the camp where the BaAka live, is that “the Pygmies of Amopolo had strayed far from their roots and had degenerated into a decultured people” (Sarno, 46).  But, like the narratives within Tabu and The Edge of the World, there are forces from the outside world greater than a people can merely deflect.  Amopolo is a government-directed community, the BaAka considered uncivilized by their Bantu neighbors.  They have been forced to leave their ancestral home in the forest in order to live a civilized life, which also does not permit them to hunt.  Amopolo is near the Sangha-sangha village Bomandjombo, where the BaAka depend on a steady supply of manioc, cigarettes, marijuana, and mbaku, a locally produced moonshine.  In exchange, the Sangha-sangha depend upon the BaAka for meat (illegally hunted) and raffia.  Sarno’s relationship to his hosts is problematic for the fact that from the beginning he provides money and other goods in exchange for the privilege of living with and recording the music of the BaAka.  As Sarno himself muses, “Yet what, I now wondered, could I have brought such a culture but corruption, jealousy, and rivalry, with my cigarettes and gifts?  What could I have been to them but a kind of Pandora’s box, unleashing hungers that could never be satiated?” (Sarno, 291).

Sarno’s place within his adopted community gradually changes, so much so that he enables the BaAka to return to the forest.  In the film, shaman Sataka and wife Ekadi, played by Mapumba and Essanje, respectively, live continuously in the forest, refusing to partake in the Bantu’s terms of civilization.  They function as a mythic ancestral couple.  Unlike Adam and Eve of the garden who did not know their god, they know the forest and the spirits within.  It is their wisdom that draws the BaAka away from conditions that are unhealthy.  In Sarno’s narrative, the forest-cleared, sandy encampments that the BaAka live in are rife with mosquitoes and chigoes, sand fleas that burrow into human flesh.  Malaria kills a number of people.  Excessive mbaku consumption and other forms of aberrant behavior are rampant.

Another thread within both Sarno’s narrative and the film’s focuses on the destruction of the forest by non-African logging interests.  When Sarno first arrived in Bomandjombo, the logging company was run by Yugoslavians.  Their business eventually failed.  An attempt to revive the sawmill failed in 1989.  In the film, the Chinese businessman Mr. Yi, played by Will Yun Lee, who manages the mill, has a keen interest in hunting animals, and hopes, through a corrupt Bantu mayor, to implicate the BaAka in an elephant hunt, forcing them permanently off the reserve for the crime of poaching and, thus, opening the land to unlimited logging.

I recently attended a SF Debate event hosted by the Commonwealth Club.  The resolution posed to the group was: “This House supports the Occupy Wall Street Movement.”  Opening pro and con arguments were formally presented by two members.  Thereafter, discussion was opened to attendees.  One of the criticisms of the Occupy Wall Street Movement was that the movement’s concern over income inequality was misguided.  A young person, by my consideration, of little practical experience or knowledge of history, offered his insight to correct this.  Outside of the homeless, a “miniscule” portion of people in our society (those apparently dispossessed of possessions), people in poverty still had many consumer goods, including flat screen TVs.  Obviously this was a sign that our economy was healthy.  Of course, as a person who is temporarily housed, but still homeless, I challenged the ability of anyone present to accurately assert the number of people homeless.  But I also challenged the notion that wealth could be measured in terms of the production of consumer goods.  Where is our moral compass when a health prognoses upon our society is based on common access to  a select group of goods within a steady stream of consumption?  The poor in this context are so much like the BaAka under the civilizing terms of Bantu supervision.

I often think in mythic terms when questioning the viability of an earth mastered and run by a human population with an unlimited appetite for its resources.  In San Francisco, I see signs of engagement with the earth that envisions a symbiosis not based on exploitation for the material consumption of plastic goods and electronic gadgets.  During many Sundays in 2010, I participated in communal activities at Hayes Valley Farm, a volunteer-run farm on land temporarily leased by the city (http://www.hayesvalleyfarm.com/).  The push there is to regenerate soil through practices that do not take healthy soil from other areas of the state; the products of the farm are simply handed out.  There is a green movement afoot that I want to see succeed, that will take us, in Joni Mitchell’s words, “back to the garden.”  A garden conceived in our own moral health and the health of the natural world surrounding us.

Untitled, digital photograph, Felton, California, 2006.

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