December 2011 – education and deconstruction.com

Savages

The Book of the Week is “Savages” by Joe Kane, published in 1996. The author describes his encounter with the Huaorani tribe– people living in the Amazon rain forest in Ecuador.

The author recounts an interesting episode in which the natives take a jaunt in a food store– a place they had never visited before, and comments on their strange eating habits. He also writes about the health problems contracted by non-natives in the rain forest.

The bottom line of the book though, is that in the early 1980’s, the Ecuadorian government colluded with American oil companies to keep the natives politically powerless. The country was burdened by staggering international debt and was dependent on oil-related business for half of its revenue. It therefore felt disinclined to share approximately $2 billion in oil revenue with the Huaorani. The author details how the Americans destroyed the land and consequently, the tribe’s ability to survive.

The Seeing Glass

The Book of the Week is “The Seeing Glass” by Jacquelin Gorman, published in 1998. This is the personal account of a woman who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The major symptom she experienced was blindness. This generated an amusing anecdote.

When Gorman was admitted to a hospital in New York City for which she served as an attorney, she found the legalese in the documents she was required to sign, familiar (her husband read them aloud to her). She was the one who had written that legalese, irony of ironies.

Gorman also discusses her family members; most memorable among them, her uncle Ogden Nash, and autistic brother.

Long Walk to Freedom

The Book of the Week is “Long Walk to Freedom” by Nelson Mandela, published in 1994. This is Mandela’s autobiography.

The author’s father died when he was nine. The author was destined for a dreadful life of poverty under South African apartheid, were it not for a lucky break. His mother had a connection to a wealthy, powerful Xhosa chief, who raised him along with his son. They acquired a quality, British-style education.

Although he was a poor student, Mandela earned an undergraduate degree and eventually, after many years, a law degree. An attorney with whom he worked, advised him against entering politics, as this would cause him to “get in trouble with the authorities, lose all his clients, go bankrupt, break up his family and end up in jail.” Unfortunately, most of the above came to pass.

The South African government employed “divide and conquer” tactics to prevent the Whites, Africans, Indians and Coloureds from uniting and overthrowing White rule. However, there were indications that it cared about world opinion during the decades Mandela was in prison (the 1960’s into the 1990’s). The government could have summarily executed Mandela and his fellow African National Congress party members (as well as committed genocide against all dark-skinned ethnic groups), but it did not.

Instead, it held Stalinesque show trials to inevitably determine that politically active protest groups were dangerous subversives who had to be locked up. It oppressed all non-whites by restricting many aspects of their lives, including voting, employment, place of residence, local travel, curfew hours; even medical care. Mandela’s boyhood was completely absent of physicians. Black ones did not exist in his generation, and going to see a white one was unheard of.

In 1962, Mandela, was living “underground” during a respite from prison. With the help of friends, he found a way to travel internationally to attend political conferences. He recounted that, “…as I was boarding the plane I saw that the pilot was black. I had never seen a black pilot before, and the instant I did I had to quell my panic. How could a black man fly a plane? But a moment later I caught myself: I had fallen into the apartheid mind-set, thinking Africans were inferior and that flying was a white man’s job. I sat back in my seat, and chided myself for such thoughts.”

Mandela experienced conflicting feelings about his Xhosa-tribe origins and English upbringing. “I confess to being something of an Anglophile. When I thought of Western democracy and freedom, I thought of the British parliamentary system. Despite Britain being the home of parliamentary democracy, it was that democracy that had helped to inflict a pernicious system of iniquity on my people. While I abhorred the notion of British imperialism, I never rejected the trappings of British style and manners.”

Too Fat to Fish

The Book of the Week is “Too Fat to Fish” by Artie Lange, published in 2009. This is Lange’s autobiography. He discusses his father’s untimely death, his mother’s saintliness, bouts of cocaine addiction, being a dockworker, career as a television and radio comedian, and the title of his book, among other topics.

He claims his mother, who embodies the idiosyncratic stereotype of an “Italian mama,” was cleaning the house at the crack of dawn on a Saturday, when his friend called regarding a fishing trip that day. His mother got on the phone and aggressively gave the friend an earful about how Lange, who was 23 at the time, was “too fat to fish” and would fall off the boat and drown. She thus would not let him go. Having a bad hangover, he was secretly glad that her concern for him, even if a bit overprotective, gave him an excuse to go back to sleep.