25 September 2004Manass-end of NowhereI've been archaeological contract work near Manassas, Virginia, for the past week. I'm working for the environmental division of an international construction company that has been buying up other construction companies and archaeological contract firms in the region in the period since I last lived in Baltimore, six years ago. It also bought out part of the Bush-connected Carlyle Group last year, and, as it happens, it is involved in certain self-styled "reconstruction" projects in Iraq. One of its longtime employees told me off the record that he wouldn't be surprised if the company goes down in Enron-colored flames soon. After being reintroduced to the prettiness of Baltimore, Manassas is a shocking reminder of what urban "sprawl" means in America. Greater Manassas is a florid mass of asphalt and fluorescent lights, metastasized by the virus of car culture. The company is putting me up in a motel on the outskirts of town -- meaning the intersection of two multi-lane highways -- five miles from the historic center. I reckon that I would be three miles closer to downtown and that Manassas would take up about one sixth of the area it does, if one got rid of half the parking lots surrounding the concatenation of strip malls that follow the web of hardened arteries delimiting the town. It cost me thirteen dollars to travel by commuter train from Baltimore to Washington and thence to Manassas and fifteen dollars more just to take a cab from the Manassas railway station to the motel. The Afghan cab driver -- as well as expressing his disgust for the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq at the expense of all but token development efforts in his native land -- also bemoaned the way in which his adopted town was expanding. He remarked with dismay about how plans invariably started with laying out a network of streets, which then provided a rationale for the infilling of the area around them with homes and office blocks. Our archaeological outfit in Manassas is supposedly keeping the building contractors in compliance with state and federal historic preservation law, but it feels sometimes like we are just making our own small contribution to the accelerating sprawl by digging series of evenly spaced standard-size shovel test pits (or "STPs," as they are known in the trade) in a vast area to the north of town. Already, there is a road being paved, and several sewage and electricity easements cut swathes through the woods. On the first day I was posted in Manassas, I set out on foot from the motel (still being car-less) in an attempt to find a supermarket from which to purchase rations for the week. It was a harrowing lesson in how the sprawl shows no mercy to pedestrians. Living abroad has spoiled me. I expected illuminated crossings, at least, across the six lanes of Sudley Road and similar monster car-ways, if not the exactly noisy ones found in Britain that alert drivers to the right of way of walkers. None such exists. Where sidewalks are to be found -- and they are not consistent -- they seem to exist to connect one strip mall or chain restaurant to the next, in the strange event that they do not share a parking lot, or to provide a way for motorists whose cars have broken down to make their way to the nearest strip mall or chain restaurant for help. When, after several nervous moments evading traffic, I made my way to the Bull Run shopping concentration ("center" implying too much consolidation), I had to walk at least a quarter mile across a parking lot that is bigger than many English market towns. (Indeed, the Bull Run mall is larger in area than the obviously named Market Bosworth in Leicestershire or Market Deeping in Lincolnshire.) That evening, mainly to escape from the confines of my hotel room, I headed over to the nearest chain restaurant for a beer and a bite to eat. It was a T.G.I. Friday's, a well known American institution of reward for plus-good American working stiffs at the end of the day, and what passes for entertainment in the northerly tendrils of Manassas. Now British chain pubs are notoriously saturated by loud gambling machines and football coverage, the latter almost exclusively courtesy of Murdoch's BSkyB, and British vodka bars, without exception, concuss customers' brains with ear-splitting house music, but American sports bar-restaurants set the standard for sensory overload. In addition to the piped-in "classic rock" and the bank of television sets showing different channels, there is a variety of cheap beers and cocktails and heaps of "lifestyle"-oriented food, including (as is no longer surprising to me) an "Atkins menu." What was new to me, since I'd been away, was the trend in watching people play poker on television, as the spectators at the bar at "T.G.I.'s" were. Observing Americans in precarious economic circumstances at the end of the day-in-day-out watching people like them risk it all over colorful bits of paper -- while their government plays a macrocosmic high-stakes game with an ante of millions of human lives around the world -- seemed darkly momentous to me. Back in my room, I sampled from the delights of cable television. There's something for everyone here, from a feminized retelling of the Homer's Iliad grafted to Aiskhylos' Agamemnon (featuring a righteous Klytaimnestra), to "The wire," a candid look at sordid city life in Baltimore, to a homely nun preaching to the camera from a prie-dieu. Yet the whole lacked reality, given the disconnection of each part from the other and the slightly tingling comfort of my air-conditioned repose on the queen-size bed. Early the next morning, bubbly, big-haired Robin Meade, CNN Headline News' anchorwoman, comments on a dog trained to skateboard and massacre of innocents in Iraq with equal gravitas (or levity). "Good news," she says, "Martha Stewart will serve her sentence for deception and fraud soon and be out in five months," as if it were either her place to express this opinion or she assumes that I naturally will agree that this is a happy event. With such complete leveling of every experience, I wonder how there can be such a big market for Zoloft in this country. When every place is the same as every other -- in spite of the multiplication labels and the diversification of broadcast consumables -- then everywhere is nowhere. It is the logical conclusion of the commoditization of space. So long as the gasoline and beer flow, there is cheap chicken and beef, the croupier deals good hands and the winners buy the spectators a round a drinks, then thus suburban America will go -- from nowhere to nowhere and back again. Feedback should be sent to me, Michael Lane, at mflane@acephale.org.24 September 2004Who is Jim Ricky?The most gripping and troubling thing that I read last week was Tim Judah's article "Uganda: the secret war" in the New York Review of Books, which concerns the massacres and kidnappings carried out by the Lord's Resistance Army in their seventeen-year-old war against the Museveni's National Resistance Movement-based government in Uganda [1]. I must confess that I was ignorant of these horrors, and, having followed the politics of AIDS fairly closely, I had perhaps been seduced into thinking that Uganda since the 1990s was a bed of tranquility and a guiding light in positive, assertive African self-determination -- a "success story," as the Western media might patronizingly call it. The LRA marauds widely in the north of this country, the provinces of Gulu, Kitgum and Pader being most affected. The region is economically depressed and includes Nilotic groups who constitute a minority of the Bantu-dominated government, which is based in Kampala in the south. According to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group, the LRA may have killed as many as 30,000 people and press-ganged 20,000 children in Uganda, not to mention the number of people carried off as booty, tortured, raped and displaced [2]. In arithmetic terms, at least, this catastrophe in the north of Uganda larger than that caused by the Janjuwid in the Darfur region of the western Sudan, which has received so much publicity lately [3]. The LRA consists mainly of people who identify themselves as Acholi, and its leader is a man named Joseph Kony, who preaches a peculiar mixture of Christianity and traditional animism and professes to want to forge the Acholi into a national state ruled by the Ten Commandments. Only lately has the International Criminal Court begun to consider arbitration of the conflict between the LRA and the Ugandan government and bringing charges against Kony, as well as officers of the Ugandan armed forces who may be complicit in perpetuating and expanding the war [4]. For some time now, it seems that Kony has called upon a committee of spirits to help direct his mission. This consists of two Chinese, two Sudanese, three Americans and a Congolese. He sometimes assumes the personae of certain of these spirits so as to make authoritative utterances to his following, armed or otherwise. There is a broad tradition of exploiting spirits through magical acts in east Africa, and each member of the pantheon-cum-committee duly seems to have a special role. One such spirit, known as a jok among the Acholi and Langi, is Selindi, presumably feminine and Sudanese, who speaks as the general quartermaster of the LRA. She is a relatively benign jok; while women are generally dominated by men politically in Acholi society, they play an important role in religion, especially as healers. Another is Juma Oris, who though supposedly the single Congolese on the committee, seems to act as the chief spirit or to represent the animistic principle. Thus he may be something like the Kwoth of the Nuer of east Africa, as described by Evans-Pritchard, or the Hindu Brahma. The third spirit of Kony's trinity appears to be a local, bad jok known as "Who Are You?" Who Are You? controls all military operations. It is he who orders all the murder and sadistic cruelty. To my sensibilities, the least disgusting and disturbing of Who Are You?'s perpetrations, as described in Judah's article, is his commanding forty initiands to the LRA ritually to eat the brains of eighty live captives, the brain of one man and one woman for each persons taking part in Kony's mysteries. Who Are You's uses for children are more terrible to describe. The situation reminds me somewhat of Fran¨ois "Papa Doc" Duvalier's terroristic rule of Haiti through his pretorian, voodoo-practicing Tonton Macoutes. Not only is a long tradition for invoking joks a constituent the religion of the Acholi, which makes Kony's claims to authority seem less outlandish and bizarre in Uganda than to Western eyes, but there is also precedent for spirits giving advice on strategy to Acholi resistance movements. Kony seems to have inherited the military mantle from his aunt, whose nom de guerre was Alice Lakwana (the second element of which is Acholi for "messenger"), though the precise motives and aims of both temporal leaders remain rather mysterious. Lakwana claimed to be inhabited by a the jok of a First World War Italian army officer. It may be significant that Italy was briefly a colonial power in east Africa. Judah reports that some of those who have escaped from the LRA say that there is an esoteric side to Kony's spirit committee, particularly to the spirit Who Are You? They say that Who Are You? is actually the shade of an American soldier named Jim Ricky. The precedent for possession by spirits representing foreign nationalities was certainly set before Kony came to command the LRA, but regardless of whether this persona is Kony's own mystic secret or whether it is an independent local interpretation of Kony's power, it nevertheless reveals an exoteric aspect of his claims to legitimacy. Claims to arcane or exotic knowledge, particularly that of distant lands not accessible to everyone in a certain social setting, is a age-old means of asserting one's authority, well known in anthropological literature and probably best theorized in Mary Helms's Ulysses' Sail. Kony is clearly already employing this strategy for power by introducing the Judeo-Islamo-Christian oikoumene into local animism. (I suspect that it also serves well to stave off foreign Christian missionaries.) It is surely no accident that Kony and his predecessor Lakwana have also made claims to the knowledge imparted to them by spirits from foreign lands. The Sudan and the Congo are countries that have fought bitter anti-colonial wars in the past century and a half, as well as decimating internecine battles in the last few decades. China is a world superpower which, in the name of "Third Worldism," has sold arms fairly indiscriminately across the greater part of the globe (and has an interest in Sudan's oil). However, what I think is most perturbing is the special role allotted to the representative of American power, of the one world empire today. Is Jim Ricky a benevolent and munificent dictator clearing ground for future freedom and democracy -- a sort of gun-slinging Second-Time-Around Jesus -- as first-among-equals Bush leads us to believe? No. American imperial power, manifest through Jim Ricky, whatever his origins, is to the Acholi the Angel of Death. I told this story to someone I often sit with in a local bar here in Baltimore. He made the cogent point that Jim Ricky's public persona, Who Are You?, has a suitably truculent name: rather than offering a name that asserts something about his proper identity, in declaring his name, he immediately demands instead that the hearer reveal his or hers. Americans might well contemplate the psychology of Kony's profane and esoteric names: is this the return of the repressed American nightmare, turning its vengeance on those who sleep less comfortably than we? Or the bare face of imperialism demanding that we declare ourselves truly for what we are? Footnotes1. A good article on the topic can also be found in the November 2003 issue of
2. See also Amnesty International's report "Breaking God's commands" and The ICG's "Northern Uganda: Solving the Crisis" [Back]
3. The Independent (UK) carried a story recently about humanitarian relief agencies' complaints that the US Agency of International Development is cynically exaggerating the extent of the already horrible conflict in Darfur so as to promote US military invention in the region.
[Back]
4. See this article by the Associated Press. [Back]
|