views, notions, reactions, and autobiographical fragments. Of Francis Bacon’s options I see them as readings to be tasted, chewed, not necessarily “swallowed,” even if swallowed sounds better.
My wish is for some moments of combined and shared thought, certainly not notoriety or profit. For those, I will turn to other irresponsible pursuits.
Dan Whitman
May, 2012
Not the Gbagbo I Knew
April 6, 2011
Reprinted from the Examiner
By the time you read this, Cote d’Ivoire’s president and strong-arm dictator Laurent Gbagbo will be out or in, alive, dead, or in flight. He’s not about to return as the friend I knew in 1980 when he traveled to the U.S.
At that time, Laurent wasn’t even of the rank of enfant terrible, though he strived to be. With others, I served as his interpreter, chauffeur, drinking partner, and foxhole comrade. Those who knew him found him funny. He had us in stitches.
Gbagbo, an historian, traveled to seven states in five weeks that year with Operation Crossroads Africa. Crossroaders were familial, adventurous, willing to live and travel in basic accommodations, open to mutual discovery.
Laurent was selected from a competitive pool, and financed, by the U.S. Embassy in Abidjan, as a “Young African Leader.” The irony here is striking, but does not impugn the fine work of U.S. government educational and cultural exchange over six decades.
Laurent was one of Africa’s benchwarmers, hoping for a brighter time when their countries would correct their courses and accountability would prevail. The term “kleptocracy” came up in the 1970s, and with it, the hurtful stereotypes of African rulers more out for themselves than for the well-being of their countrymen.
I remember Laurent’s railings against his country’s president at that time, the long ruling Felix Houphouet-Boigny. Laurent saw Houphouet as a ruthless dictator, and knew he could do better.
He had unlikely schemes to replace him one day, and amazingly he did, after two unsuccessful attempts. I wasn’t even sure if he would make it through in one piece, judging from his own horror stories about his country’s regime at the time. He was a utopian. Utopians don’t usually take over countries.
What happened, then? How do humans become the very oppressors they spend their energies and equities to remove? Shakespeare and Verdi blamed it on the wife behind the throne. Of this I know nothing.
And yet, have better explanations come along? Inspired leaders go rancid too often not to beggar explanation. We ignore this quirk at our peril, a science should be cobbled together ASAP to see why these things happen.
The Laurent I knew wouldn’t spill his countrymen’s blood even if the UN, U.S., EU, and AU had all been mistaken in declaring Alassane Ouattara the winner of the 2010 elections. My Laurent was inclined to compassion over others’ misfortunes. A sadist he was not.
Lessons learned? People change. A lot. So far, the variables and causes have eluded social scientists, psychologists, political strategists. A little humility here: We need to figure this out, and fast. I don’t follow: how could a fun-loving person willingly harm his country for an unattainable degree of self aggrandizement? The train has no brakes, we’d better retrofit them wherever we can.
Another Shakespeare character would have picked up the skull of the demised, and said, “Alas, poor Laurent! I knew him, Horatio.” But that was at a kinder time, when a single person could disappear safely to obscurity.
With a Thousand Pictures, Nothing is Still Nothing
April 18, 2011
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?
Of Apes and Arms: When Brains Prevail
April 27, 2011