Sample Reality

Tarzan, Africa, and Cellphones

After writing Thursday’s post about the August 25, 2005 NYT article on soaring cellphone use in Africa, I got the urge to reread Tarzan. It must have been this memorable line from journalist Sharon LaFraniere’s article:

On a continent where some remote villages still communicate by beating drums, cellphones are a technological revolution akin to television in the 1940’s in the United States.

Beating drums. Beating drums. Now where had I seen that before?

Oh, here, in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ original Tarzan of the Apes, when he describes the fictional “Dum-Dum” ritual. This ritual “marked important events in the life of the tribe—a victory, the capture of a prisoner, the killing of some large fierce denizen of the jungle, the death or accession of a king, and were conducted with set ceremonialism” (page 52 in my worn and tattered 1982 edition of the novel, featuring cover art by former DC Comics illustrator Neal Adams). (Cover art, I should add, that my tweenage self in 1982 found, uh, titillating, to say the least, with that half-naked Jane lying on the jungle floor.)

The kicker with the Dum-Dum ceremony is that the “tribe” Burroughs writes about is an ape tribe. During this particular Dum-Dum dance, celebrating the slaying of another tribe’s ape, female apes beat drums while males dance and attack the dead enemy gorilla. The Dum-Dum culminates with the apes devouring the mutilated dead ape.

Now, there is a human tribe in Tarzan as well. What’s disturbing in Burroughs’ imagination is that their human rituals closely resemble the ape rituals. In one celebration, women sit in a large circle, “yelling and beating upon drums” (81), while warriors dance around their still-alive prisoner, piercing his “eyes, ears, arms, and legs” with spears (81). The dance ends with the women “preparing the prisoner for their cooking pots” (82).

The only significant difference between the two rituals is that the apes’ victim is already dead, while the cannibals’ victim is alive during the ritual. This detail makes the Blacks seem all the more savage, for the ethics of other jungle creatures “meted a quick and merciful death to their victims” (80).

The black Africans are nothing more than jungle animals in Burroughs’ classic work, with “bestial faces, …yellow teeth, … [and] demon eyes” (176).

It doesn’t take a genius to know that Burroughs was writing from a racist viewpoint, playing upon the ignorant stereotypes of the time (1912). Sadly, with the NYT’s allusion to “beating drums,” this Newspaper of Record rearticulates the same stereotypes, albeit disguised as a liberal self-congratulatory note on the progress of the continent.

Cellphones in Africa (New York Times article)

There’s an article in the Times about the amazing popularity of cellphones in Africa. Factually, the data is quite amazing: between 1999 and 2004, the number of subscribers to mobile phone services increased at an annual rate averaging 58 percent. There are now nearly 77 million cellphone subscribers in Africa, up from just 7.5 million a few years ago.

As I said, the data is amazing.

But the article itself and the presentation of the numbers is shockingly full of a number of egregious American stereotypes about Africa. A generous reading of the article would be that the reporter, Sharon LaFraniere, is attempting to show how Africa is so not like what we think it is. But in doing so, she replays and builds upon a dozen different negative images of Africa. The title itself—“Cellphones Catapult Rural Africa to 21st Century”—presumes that all of rural Africa is exactly the same, and that this gigantic generalized Africa has been, prior to the appearance of the cellphone, stuck in a backwards, even primitive era. It reminds me of The Gods Must Be Crazy, except substitute a Coke bottle with a Nokia. In either case, Africans are primitive people “rescued” by Western culture and technology.

But wait, there’s more.

In the following lines from the article, I don’t know who should be more offended, Africans or Mongolians:

Africa’s cellphone boom has taken the industry by surprise. Africans have never been rabid telephone users; even Mongolians have twice as many land lines per person.

Perhaps the most offensive stereotype evoked in the article is this description of Africa that would fit better in a Tarzan movie:

On a continent where some remote villages still communicate by beating drums, cellphones are a technological revolution akin to television in the 1940’s in the United States.

Did I really just read that? “Beating drums”?

Even if it’s true (and I’m not saying it is), the image of the black African beating a drum is so loaded with cultural stereotypes and assumptions that it really shouldn’t be the basis of a metaphor in a serious journalistic piece. The image speaks volumes about power, control, language, and technology, and in every way positions Europe and North America as superior to Africa.

I think it’s time to go read some Edgar Rice Burroughs.

GMU Course Blogs

I’ve been fed up with the standard issue university courseware options—namely Blackboard and WebCT—so I decided this semester to wing it with my own version of courseware (what I’m calling “of-courseware”) powered by WordPress.

Although Sample Reality runs on Movable Type, I’ve been hearing good things about WordPress, and I thought I’d give it a spin. So now my Fall 2005 courses at George Mason University run on the open-source WordPress platform. The syllabi, links to online readings, and most important as the semester develops, the collectively-written class blog, are online, open to the public, indexed by Google, and just generally out there. Which is something you cannot say for courses kept chained up, locked down, and closed up by Blackboard or WebCT.

Here are the courses. The sites are in their embryonic stages (the semester hasn’t even begun yet), but I expect them to turn into full-blown resources as time goes on:

• American Postmodernism
• Digital Textuality

I should add that the subject matter of both of these courses—postmodern culture and new media—could not be better suited for an networked environment. It would be absurd not to develop these courses in an open, linked way, connected to the rest of the web. It’s of-courseware!

Disney babies are always dreaming

The following text is from the packaging of an “easy-grasp” fork and spoon set some kind, Disney-loving soul gave our son:

Playtime is filled with pixies and princesses. Bathtime overflows with pirate ships and mermaids. Meals are shared with bears who love honey. And Naps take place in castles, not cribs. So whether they are fast asleep or wide-awake, Disney babies are always Dreaming.

Well. Aside from slyly mentioning a host of Disney characters, this little piece of whimsical poetry actually makes me feel guilty for not encouraging my son to think of bathtime as an exciting Little Mermaid/Pirates of the Caribbean adventure.

Although, I do get a kick out of the idea of imagining the only Pixie I know by name—Frank Black—playing blocks with my son during playtime.

Going in for tests…

Sitting in the local coffeeshop I overheard a group of fifty-ish women having their weekly coffee clutch. Their conversation drifted toward doctors and illnesses, and one of them related how the husband of a mutual friend was “going in for tests.”

I’ve never thought much about this phrase before, but suddenly today it struck me somehow as one of the key phrases of modern American society, over-medicalized, over-diagnosed, aging as we are.

The patient—well, he wasn’t technically a patient, really, because the tests were performed on an out-patient basis—underwent a “series of tests,” a “battery of tests” and after all of them the results were inconclusive.

Again, this somehow seems like a metaphor for today’s America. Something’s wrong, but we don’t know what. The doctors are baffled, puzzled, stumped. The specialists are called in. The machines are fired up, foreign electrons pulsating through our flesh, our blood drawn, our tissues sampled, and all we have in return is a printout that’s inconclusive, too-soon-to-tell, let’s adopt a wait-and-see approach and come in again for tests in a month. Nobody can explain it to us, nobody knows, and we leave the chilled air-conditioned waiting room, walk into the bright sunwashed parking lot, a blast of hot summer air at the door, feeling Damocles sword above our head.

This is a test, this is only a test.

“The more we rehearse disaster, the safer we’ll be from the real thing…..There is no substitute for a planned simulation.” So says a character in Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise, as a midwestern town is overrun by men in Mylar suits, conducting a simulated evacuation from some vague chemical disaster.

Yesterday we had out own rehearsed disaster here at the McGuire Nuclear plant. Here is the official news release, sent via email to local residents:

On Tuesday, August 9, 2005 McGuire Nuclear Plant, Mecklenburg County Homeland Security, and regional first responder agencies will conduct a full-scale facility exercise to test the plant’s response systems as well as local resources and their capabilities in the event of an emergency. So if you live in Huntersville you may see more activity around the plant than normal, no worries. We will share the results after the event debriefing, take care, and be safe.

I had really wanted to go hang around the plant to see what a “full-scale” exercise looks like, but unfortunately I was out shopping. Nothing big, just some groceries—milk, cereal, whatever. Come to think of it, maybe my trip to the store was some sort of defense mechanisim. As Jack Gladney observes, once again in White Noise, “Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip.” The irony of it all is that the supermarket is, according to the email Duke sent out, likely more dangerous than a nuclear power plant. The email continues:

People have always been exposed to low levels of natural radiation. These levels provide a “background level” for comparison to exposures that occur from man-made sources. Basically, natural radiation is the result of cosmic rays from outer space and from radioactive materials in the earth. Man-made radiation comes from a variety of sources including medical and industrial uses, nuclear weapons testing, consumer products, and the nuclear power industry.

Damn those “consumer products”!!! I like how the email nestles this phrase in between the equally innocuous phrases “nuclear weapons testing” and “nuclear power industry.”

The good people at Duke Power then attached an informative graphic which details exactly how tiny a threat our neighborhood nuclear reactor poses (larger image):

What I love about this image is the juxtaposition of the Coleman lantern and the nuclear power plant. (Although, as I’ve mentioned before, McGuire Nuclear Power Plant looks disappointingly nothing like the towering nuclear plants of my childhood imagination, which is how the nuclear reactor appears in this image.)

This image informs me that natural background radiation is 300 times greater than the radiation released by a low-level nuclear waste storage facility. If that’s true, why is one of the lead stories in this morning newspapers the EPA’s announcement that the Yucca Mountain Facility in Nevada, where much of the nation’s nuclear waste is stored, should shield the outside world from radiation for 1,000,000 years? As most critics note, the one million years rule is a ruse to conceal the fact that the EPA is actually raising the allowable radiation limit for the first ten thousand years of those million years—the years that probably matter more to the Nevadan citizens living near Yucca Mountain.

If you’re a terrorist and you’re reading this, then the terrorists have already won.

I just can’t leave the nuclear power plant in my backyard alone.

I recently discovered a site from the Eyeball Series that lists formerly public FEMA information about McGuire Nuclear Power Station, information which was taken offline in the aftermath of 9/11.

The Eyeball site faithfully reproduces the FEMA information, which, according to what I’ve learned from TV shows like 24 and Alias, contains everything a terrorist needs to know to sabotage a heavily guarded nuclear plant.

As a bonus, the site posts a few high-resolution satellite images of the facility, so the terrorists can even find the parking lot with the best spaces.

The Evil Democracy

Here is a lesson in ironic juxtaposition: A freeze-frame of President Bush delivering his State of the Union address, with the closed captioning scrolling the words “THE EVIL DEMOCRACY.”

Ironies abound in this photograph (which I found on the Flickr Bush cluster).

First, obviously, Bush is (purely accidently, purely coincidentally) linked to the idea of an evil democracy. Now, of course, I do not believe that America is evil. I don’t even believe that President Bush is evil. Misguided, maybe, but not evil.

The second irony is the word “democracy”—which is one thing the U.S.A. (symbolized by Bush) is not. It’s barely even the republic it formally declares itself to be.

The most subtle irony is the source of the caption. “THE EVIL” and “DEMOCRACY” come from two different lines of text, maybe even two different sentences. In Bush’s original speech the adjective “evil” does not qualify “democracy.” Because remember, DEMOCRACY = GOOD (except in the case of Saudi Arabia, where Dysfunctional + Misogynistic + Monarchy = GOOD as well).

But, with some clever cropping, we have a postmodern critique of President Bush and his foreign policies, a kind of Max Headroom for the new millennium.