Years of Poems and Spirits

Again, heard this piece from Diane’s show while hiking … George Orwell once said, “A Liberal is a power worshipper without power”. At first, I thought it was a catchy phrase but then I was deeply impressed by it. What he is saying is that the liberals, or those who want to break up the status quo, tend to be the losers in the current system. Therefore, this is a very political point of view but not ideological at all. In other words, one can be a social reactionary but still count himself as a political “liberal” at times.

No, I am not talking about Barry Goldwater here. Rather, I am thinking black evangelicals or xenophobic union members: socially, they can be very conservative but politically, they are the agitators, constantly pointing out inequality and pressing for reforms.

The interesting counterfactual argument is, what if they have power? Again, thinking back to Orwell now, they are liberal because they are without power. But what if they have power all of a sudden? Are they still liberals? Who is “the true liberal”: a social conservative but a political liberal or a social liberal but political conservative (aka a Rockefeller Republican)? It is interesting how a one dimensional issue can become two-dimensional.

Saw The Last King of Scotland last night. Here is what I thought: it is a good, serious movie. Yet its artistic richness cannot overcome the story’s hollowness.

The movies uses a fictional character to paint a picture of Idi Amin who, perhaps more than anyone else, defines the term “African dictator”. Although the movie raises several good points, such as the peril of blind liberal allegiance with the downtrodden, or how terrible Ami was as a ruler (especially for the younger generation who have never heard of him before), I was struck by how Euro-centric the movie is–”not there is anything wrong with it”, but that is what I mean “hollow”.

The whole story was told by the young doctor from Scotland, who escaped from a bourgeois future to seek excitement and adventure. He was soon secuded by power, statue and charisma and became a unwilling servant of Idi Amin. It is really odd to look at Idi Amin this way because he meant so much more to his people, his neighbors and to history than he could ever have been to a lone Westerner.

In the movie, Amin, played by Whitaker, invoked his tribe, his agenda against colonialism, Libya and the PLO during conversations. Those names, each saturated with historical significance, matters a lot to everyone else except the young Scot who was engaged in a passionate affair with one of Amin’s wives. Therefore, the enormity of Amin’s crimes came to the young Scot’s–and us viewers’–consciousness only through the terrors he cast upon the two adulterers. I thought this arrangement errorneously aggrandized western individualism (I doubt even Satre would object to an Ugandan dictator torturing a green-eyed hunk for screwing his wife behind his back. If so, then what Amin did wrong?) but trivialized the suffering of the victims–after all, hundreds of kids starved to death before they are old enough to play Paolo and Francesca!

Another issue I have with this movie, and the portrait of African politics in the West in general, is that the picture is too simplistic: it is either “he’s his people’s savior” or “he will turn the country into his personal checkings account”–as if there is no shade of grey in between. After all, nationalism was invented in the West, when Amin keeps saying, “my country”, what exactly does he mean? Does he equates a head of state to a chief of a tribe? If so, where is the evidence? If not, where are the nuances? It is always the subtlety that tells a more complete story. Unfortunately, all the subtlety The Last King of Scotland has is the flirtacious eye contacts between the young Scot and his black beauty. What a waste of time!

A day after I wrote about Steven Bach’s book on Leni Riefenstahl, here comes another documentory film maker controversy: Ken Burns was critisized by Latino groups for failing to include the stories of their soldiers in his WWII documentary. The story went to extra inning when Burns refused to alter his story at first but gave in after Hispanic politicians threatened to cut PBS funding because of this.

The cacophony from the left and the right ridiculed the strong-arm tactic by the Hispanic lawmakers, yet their colleagues in the Congress largely remain silent. As much as I dislike anyone taking political shortcuts, I am grudgingly agreeing with the agitators: everything they have done so far is by the book (i.e. the Huntington’s book, that is): they stayed within the political system, participated in it and claimed their stake through legislative venue.

This is particularly important because of Latino citizens’ relative marginal status in our society. More specifically, they are politically under-represented because of their immigrant stigma. They filled the cities, the factories, the schools, and the churches of this land, yet their political status is forever in precarious state because of a piece of paper issued by the only institute of the land they do not fill. Therefore, the “justification” of their political exclusion is even more ridiculous than that against the Blacks during the segregation era. In this regard, we should be appreciative that they stayed in the current political regime and exercised their influence the way we are accustomed to.

I got side-tracked a little because what I meant to say was how Latino activists justified their tactic. Recently, one such lady on Jim Lehrer’s News Hour put in one sentence why Burns must change his movie: because of the sacrifice of the Latino soldiers and the large Latino population we have in America today. The congruence of the two arguments struck me as odd at first but moments later, it makes so much sense! As a matter of fact, I myself have written on it: what is history? Or does history belong to the people in the past or people in the present? My thought was triggered by a story on dying WWI veterans: even if there is a time machine that we can travel back with them to their time, we would not come back with the same “history”. It is so fascinating that I found some supporting argument but didn’t recognize it. Apparently, as I have learned from Marketing, there is a substantial difference between thinking and feeling.