|
|
Cynosure The Soft Touch
by William E. Merritt
If you feel you’re being watched, it’s because you are — by the rest of an Americanized planet.
It's not going to surprise any reader of Liberty that America's astonishing ability to remake the world in its own image doesn't have much to do with sending our military into unlikely places. Still, it can come as a surprise to bump headlong into the physical reality behind the cliche.
| |
Bill Merritt is a sometimes-novelist living in Gaborone, Botswana. If you are offended at what he has to say, you are welcome to try to pursue him through the Botswana legal system.
|
|
A while ago I was walking along the corniche in Dar es Salaam. Beat-up vehicles were sputtering and fuming and honking to my right. A sunlit bay on my left led to the Indian Ocean.
Not as exotic as I had imagined, but definitely a landscape to catch your eye, when something really eye-catching came down the sidewalk toward me.
She was a Masai swinging along in full, glorious, flowing, maroon tribal regalia. Tall and athletic. Early 20s, I would guess. Slender and haughty, she could have been Queen Hatshepsut, or Sheba, from the aristocratic way she carried herself.
Now Masai are famously aristocratic people and, maybe, there are ladies from other cultures who are just as elegant, but I have yet to see one. The ladies I have seen who fancy themselves something special or, more usually, the ladies I have seen pictures of — Princess Di comes to mind, along with Chyna of WWE fame — never pulled it off the way this Masai did. Beside her, all the actual royalty I have seen in pictures just look tawdry.
In one hand she held a short staff, like the sticks British army officers strut around with. In the other, a modest-sized boom box playing . . . "My Darling Clementine" in full-throated nasal country-western-twang American. Nobody needed to send an army to corrupt this woman out of hundreds of years of proud, ancient tradition.
All it took was the soundtrack from a 62-year-old John Ford movie.
I was thinking about her the other day when I ran into a British newspaper reporter named Steve Bevan. We were visiting the same game park in South Africa and fell to talking. He asked my opinion about various aspects of American politics and, since I have lots of opinions about the subjects, some straightforward, some subtle, many obscure, and way too many that turn out to be contradictory, I was charmed.
After a bit, the fascination of listening to me wore off, at least as far as Steve's wife and sons were concerned, and they drifted away to more interesting pursuits: the sons to check out the action on their individual handheld PlayStations and the wife to remind them that, hey, we are in one of the great game parks on the planet, here. You might want to look around a bit. There could be animals, you know.
Steve didn't say much about himself and, looking back, I wish I had asked. At one point he mentioned he had spent time in a Zimbabwe jail along with a New York Times correspondent named Barry Bearak, then pretty much let the subject drop.
When I got home I began to wonder what I had missed by spending so much time rattling on about my own opinions, most of which I already knew, and not asking Steve more about that Zimbabwe jail and what he was doing in it. And how he got out. And what it was like. So I googled him.
|
|
The ladies I have seen who fancy themselves something special never pulled it off the way this Masai did. Beside her, all the actual royalty I have seen in pictures just look tawdry.
|
|
What I learned was that he and Bearak had been rousted from their hotel by about 40 cops from the scary-sounding Law and Order Division of the Zimbabwe Republic Police and hauled off to the Central Harare Police Station on suspicion of "practicing journalism." That was the crime Steve was busted for: practicing journalism.
He was arrested because, in fact, the Law-And-Order cops were right. He had been practicing journalism. The London Telegraph had sent him to Harare 36 hours earlier to try and get a line on when, if ever, Robert Mugabe was going to release the results of the presidential election that had been held a few days before.
The Central Harare Police Station, né the Central Salisbury Police Station, is a grim, Orwellian fortress where the old regime used to disappear black revolutionaries in the '60s and '70s. Conditions inside were pretty much what you would imagine, at least in the generally accepted standards of cleanliness department. Bearak and Bevan spent a few long days inside, and a few much longer nights, before being released.
The proximate cause of their release was their lawyer's discovery that practicing journalism is no longer against the law in Zimbabwe. Now, the crime is "holding oneself out as an accredited journalist," and the prosecutor had charged them with the wrong thing. So, in the finest tradition of our shared common-law heritage, they skated on a technicality.
But it wasn't the sort of technicality that was going to keep them out for long. All the prosecutor had to do was refile the charges under the right law, and as soon as Steve and Barry showed up at the airport for their flight out, they were going to be rearrested — this time, probably forever.
So, in the time-honored tradition of reporters on the run, they tried not to do what the police expected. Instead of heading for Harare International, they beat feet straight for the most popular tourist border-crossing into Zambia, made themselves look as casual as they could, and scooted to freedom by land.
What grabbed me about Steve's story, other than the fact that I had no idea that anybody ever got sprung from a totalitarian prison on a technicality, was the topic of conversation inside the prison — at least the topic among the policemen who ran the place.
At a time when the inflation rate of the Zim dollar was running at 118,000% per year, and accelerating; at a time when real inflation lurked behind the artificial monetary inflation that President Robert Mugabe had set in motion because there were no goods to be had for any currency, no matter how hard; at a time four days after Chairman Bob had clearly lost his bid for reelection but showed no signs of giving up power, and the country seemed on the brink of flying into factional violence; at a time when the new president of Botswana was a couple of days away from casting Zimbabwe into outer darkness by cutting off bulk-fuel shipments; at a time when the Southern Africa Development Commission was about to say naughty-naughty to the first revolutionary leader in history it had ever said naughty-naughty to; at a time when thousands of fellow citizens were fleeing to Botswana and South Africa as fast as they could slip under the barbed wire — the hot topic in the Central Harare Police Station was . . . Obama's and Hillary's showing in the Pennsylvania primary.
|
|
What grabbed me about Steve’s story was the topic of conversation inside the prison: the Pennsylvania primary.
|
|
Here's something just as interesting. The article that Google referred me to when I typed in Steve's name turned out to be on the Al Jazeera website. I had never logged onto Al Jazeera before, and the first thing that struck me wasn't the sober quality of its reporting. (I actually had to read some of the articles to find out that, for my money, Al Jazeera covers world news with the quality and depth of the BBC. In fact, if you don't see the fancy Arabic Al Jazeera logo, you could easily think you had logged onto the BBC.) The first thing that struck me about Al Jazeera was a big, round button with the wavy red-and-white stripes of the American flag — that's right, Old Glory, right there on Al Jazeera — superimposed with the number 08 and the words "Cast your virtual vote."
Cast your virtual vote?
People in Yemen or Sudan or Iran, people who, by and large, don't seem to like America very much, care enough about our politics that the major — maybe, even, the only — universally accepted news outlet in the Muslim world gives them the opportunity to vote in a straw-version of our Democrat primaries.
Al Jazeera has discussion groups, too. Under the heading of "Most active discussions," right along with "Should the Israeli Prime minister step down?," "60 years of Israel, your views," and "What does Egypt's emergency law mean for human rights?" Al Jazeera had: "Should Clinton pull out of the Democratic nomination race?"
People from Syria use Al Jazeera to debate people from Qatar about whether Hillary is gutsy for staying in or just a plain jackass.
I'm not sure what to make of all this. Thoughts of the corrosive soft power of our culture run through my mind. Thoughts that if we would just leave our army at home the entire planet would be American within a generation cross my mind, too. My mind could probably come across with a lot more thoughts that everybody else has already had, but the thought I like best is from Steve Bevan: "People all over the world who have no power in their own politics feel like they can participate in yours. That is something that should make you Americans very proud."
John Ford movies make me proud of America, too.
|
| |
|
