Theory According to Chuck Berry

Flying to Liberia

I remember the days of one narrative. It came down to my history teacher in high school. Or maybe it was geography. He also taught drivers' ed and coached something. He had a flat top, the mouth of a shark, and a slim waist under those polo shirts. I could have thrown him farther than I trusted him, and it was in his class that I decided history was boring because it was a lie.

Two years later, perhaps, I discovered, in the novels of Virginia Woolf, the phrase which explained it all to me:

                Raising her eyebrows at the discrepancy --
                that was what she was thinking, this was
                what she was doing -- ladling out soup --
                she felt, more and more strongly, outside
                that eddy.... (To the Lighthouse)

I got into the newspaper business just as the then New Journalism was cutting to the chase and showing, on deadline, dictated from notes, that objective journalism was a whiteboy narrative and that there were alternate points of view. One such story by me, emphasizing the different camera angles a camera crew used to frame the rich felon who'd hired them on his big night (Joe Hirshhorn, opening his museum) was anthologized not least, I think now, because of the implication that objectivity was scientifically possible as long as three angles were described. And also I jumped into his Valiant limo without permission and got some great quotes.

I was flying over the CIA the other day, courtesy of Google Earth, and the Empire State building, trying to get my Mohammed Atta on, and found it quite impossible. The CIA building -- well it's flat, for starters, and well-contextualized by the two notes people have left on it. One says, I posted here a list of all the military bases on the planet but it has been deleted. The other says, here's a link to the list of all the military bases on the planet.

The Empire State building is invisible on account of the little bullet or camera icons indicating a link to a photograph taken from or of the spot.

Flying to Liberia brought me to tears, for many reasons. Not least that you can't zoom into Gbarnga -- or indeed any third world street address that I've tried -- and there is a bullet indicating a link over Gbarnga. It says it was Charles Taylor's headquarters during the Liberian civil war; Gbarnga is also the location of one of my earliest philosophical insights. It's about mediation. I was four. And one of the gifts of Africa is that you take things seriously from the beginning. I want to write a book about it, and I've been saving material for it ever since I woke up one day like 20 years ago with a phrase, one I have only slowly come to understand, on my lips: One thing I know about you is Africa.

So I fly Air Google over Liberia and see the red clay earth and the bush, and the rutted red clay roads, and the girdled rubber trees at the plantation, and smell the wood smoke. I read that Cuttington College was completely destroyed in the wars. I know, without knowing any facts, that Charles Taylor and Prince Johnson and Samuel Doe were covered by the American newspapers as the apotheosis of blood diamond, wig-wearing, Qaddafi-sponsored, snuff video posing, child-soldier-conscripting, big black very very bad niggers, the first of the new wave of barbarians. I know because I read, years ago, about the Doe snuff video in Vanity Fair magazine. A story about big black very very bad niggers passes for hard-hitting journalism at Vanity Fair. Because snuff videos? Do not lie. And they're so hott.

And I dig out the book about them from my one-thing-I-know-about-you-is-Africa carton -- it is one of my desert island possessions. And the first thing it says is, even African-American reporters depicted these guys as motiveless malignants. Whereas any old Third World hand would, as I did, look at the wigs and not get freaked -- and it does seem the gender bend really shook reporters to their toes. A Third World hand would say, oh sure, they're confusing the hungry ghosts by posing as girls.  Everybody who knows one thing about Africa knows that.

And that, precisely, is what the book I began to read yesterday by a very even-handed Africanist, called Stephen Ellis, is slowly and meticulously beginning to say. He quotes the coverage of these warriors by the black reporter Keith Richburg -- who draws them, in their flowered shower caps and skirts, Ellis writes, in typically non-judgemental prose, as "inexplicable". What's tragic about this, and Richburg's interesting saga away from sentimental Afro-philia, is that African-American reporters were thought to be less judgemental about big black very very bad niggers. Calling their religion "magic", and their jihad inexplicable, would be something somebody with a degree in Afro-American studies -- even if only from the university of DWB -- might be thought to avoid. Richburg's own saga, Out of America, is not atypical, and not atypically, he got skewered by African-Americans patriotic to Epcot Africa. Exile is, as everyone who knows even one thing about Africa, knows, a place in the imagination.

http://www.thetheatreaddict.com/blogpics/lovestory.jpg

The paper today, by which I mean the New York Times, has two stories which acknowledge or imply the Rashomon angle of the news. This didn't used to happen. And it doesn't happen on video, which holds out the same fallacious bonafide the anthology people liked about my little Hirshhorn story, and what editors and terrorists alike like about snuff videos. Reporters are cameras. And cameras do not lie.

One of them is about the situation on the ground in Iraq. Really good reporting indicates the existence of several different narratives, including, between the lines, the actionably bad war the Americans have fought, the jeopardy they've put the people of Iraq into by sheer incompetence. The line in graf 47, or whatever it is, about the great success they've had in reducing the smuggling of oil by "mafias" by establishing checkpoints.

You're telling me there haven't been checkpoints along all the oil-truck routes since day one?

And the security of the entire nation depends on oil revenues devolving to the government? Our stated purpose for being there and "liberating" them?

The other is the competing narratives on why the price of oil has reached historic highs. The American Petroleum Institute, which is, trust me, not your friend, is now on televsion claiming that union pension funds, if you're a Democrat, and hedge funds, if you're a plutocrat, are investing in commodities and driving up the price of oil. This, as the piece points out, is a stone lie.

Because, well, everybody who knows even just one thing about Africa knows that.

Dumb & Ugly

The prospect of being old for 40 years is a daunting one.

There's always suicide, which I last thought about consistently through my twenties. Nothing was bad enough to warrant it, and indeed the onset of life-threatening problems showed it for the Suzy Creamcheese amenity it is and banished all thought of it as the resilience genes clicked in.

A black parent once summed up what he didn't want in terms of education for his little girl -- that she shouldn't be made, in white majority schools, to feel dumb and ugly.

Add handicapped -- sight and hearing an effort, getting up and walking a pain -- and you've got 40 years of old age.

I was just watching Martha Stewart who had a feature on how fabulous it is to be a woman of 50, and it's true. You know who you are, the resilience gene has kicked in (if it hasn't, you're not going to be on television talking about how great it is to be 50), your children have disappeared (ooops!), and you are left with the prospect of another 50 years of creativity.

The creativity is the key. A life of the mind is the pre-requisite -- that is to say, you can live without the validation of being good-looking. Because there is a point where you become invisible and also mute. Men, including gay ones, simply do not hear what you have to say -- one reason I've had so many problems with the mice infestation. The exterminator, like all men of his class, stopped listening to me when I was about 44 years old. You have to hire a man to speak to these guys. That Hillary should claim them as her constituency is preposterous.

Creativity doesn't mean painting high art easel pictures. Although it can. It entails concatenation, contemplation, experimentation, and, I suspect, having your own nest arranged exactly as you see fit. I've never trusted a girl who didn't have her own functional nest, and the rubric of don't sleep with a man who doesn't own his own furniture eliminates about 50 per cent of the Mars and Venus problems from human communication. (If only I had followed this rule.)

Creativity entails a spiritual life. We all know people who wallow in the special effects of Epcot church ritual and emotional transaction without ever actually, you know, undertaking amendment and reform of their vicious lives. A belief in change and gratitude for everything, for that which does change, for that which does not change, are the only tools for enduring pleasure and resilience that I know of, and it has not been my experience that human will power can sustain either against the catastrophic blows, or the little ones that hurt you every time you stand up and walk across the room. There really isn't any defense against any of the atrocities. Except the kind of delusion you see people in their forties and fifties electing to embrace, the one summed up for me by the vision in the movie, Death in Venice, of the mini-me-sized playboy, dressed exactly like our hero, flirting with the boys on the boat, his cheeks just a touch too heavily rouged. The Spanish have a nicely medieval turn of phrase for such an one -- a viejo verde.

Change entails willingness, which is hard to calibrate when you're also mustering ignorance of pain and debility. That's not true, actually, willingness, as opposed to will, is what makes the pain go away.

Isolation is the inescapable companion of 40 years of old age. I watch the people who live together in the old peoples' gulag and see each other every day for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Half of them, if not all of them, are demented <i>because</i> of isolation. My mother stopped seeing her last faithful friend 30 years ago. I finally asked her why. She said her husband made a pass. And I have seen the difficulty of keeping up with friendships outgrown -- people do get bent out of shape by parenthood, bad marriages, the vicissitudes of their profession -- and the difficulty of making new friends dumb and ugly.

Coupling seems to be the most delusionary action to take in old age. My observation is that it's only available to women who are willing very seriously to strangle any signs of life or wisdom they've accrued -- the viejas verdes. I'm recovering my eight-year-old's sense of how very strange, what an enormity, sex is. I've just been reading about what John McCain did to his first wife, who had survived an awful accident while he was in POW camp, shrank four inches as surgeons removed bone, gained weight, and, not incidentally, turned 40. Toast. And this is the quotidian, just the way it is, not the monstrous.

Isolation as dealt with by the nursing homes, I don't know. You can't believe the number of losers who come there peddling their dreadful wares to a captive audience, from the creepy ministers to the folk singers and infantilizing potters. Oh jeez.

That's the big one. It's not a hundred years of solitude. Only 50. That's big.

Erving Goffman years ago studied the management of spoiled identity and stilll has a lot to teach. I'm going to think about him. And about the very ancient ladies I saw sitting on the benches in the median at about 103rd and Broadway, all dressed up and made up.

Cities, public space, the amenities of the agora, of pedestrians, all of which are under sustained attack by neo-liberals, are made for old people. Is being surrounded by the love of strangers the real solution? I think it is. The Hindu nomad was advised, as he set off on the third, hermitage ashram of Hindu life, Let India take care of you.

Mattie Breedlove, with her swept yard and rare heirloom rose, Heirloom Rose catalog, ca. 1991.
http://www.amazon.com/No-Space-Hidden-African-American/dp/1572333561/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213199895&sr=1-4
http://www.amazon.com/Keep-Your-Head-Sky-Interpreting/dp/0813918243/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213199965&sr=1-2

-- Jeannette Smyth