[Nov 13]
We're having a bit of a day off today; Monrovia rolls up its proverbial sidewalks on Sundays, with the local populace engaged mainly in church through the morning and well into the afternoon (one universality among African Christian is they scrimp not on worship of the Lord). It is not entirely ubiquitous; others relax with their families, men play football [soccer] with friends, girls clubs play kickball in the afternoons, etc. There is the mistaken aspect of ubiquity as churches are plentiful, few business are open, streetside vendors are far fewer, and church-goers are dressed to the nines ... men ill-fitted in their best suits, second-hand affairs that fit their spare frames like boxes, women well-fitted in the explosion of color that serves as the Continent-wide feminine sartorial expression.
Speaking of boxy suits; as is my wont, I mainline news via the television (we activated our DSTV subscription) and through the internet. It seems that something major happened this past week; a man who had been treated as a clown and buffoon for most of the over-long primary election season and then was summarily reviled by the mainstream media as a misogynist, racist, protectionist incompetent gained more than half of the electoral voting population's ballots (there is an ongoing outcry against the electoral college, as for the second time in living memory, the President-elect apparently did not win the popular vote). Since the world woke up to the changed reality Wednesday morning, there has been a significant uptick in urban protests against the as-of-yet-inaugurated administration, with a concurrent level of anxiety attendant to Balzac's oft-misquoted expression that "Our greatest fears lie in anticipation".
I'm not much of a political wonk; you lose a bit of connection to politics when you are not in the States, and our interregnum period in D.C. between February and August (punctuated by a month in Zambia in July) was nestled in the bosom of Democratic leanings ...D.C. polled something like 90% for Clinton. Most of our handful of friends, inclusive of government workers, NGO types, etc., thought little of the GOP candidate's chances, trusting in the fundamental goodness of the American voter to, if at least not like Clinton, to vote for her as a rejection of the unprecedented crassness of her opponent.
[Jan. 18]
A few days off now from the Inauguration. The import of the job hasn't seemed to wear off on The Box yet. He has since the election tweeted what seems to be endlessly (I would count, but holding the pg dn key still took forever to scroll through the list). They say he's redefining how the presidency interacts with the media; from what I can gather, that means we'll get 160 characters assembled into Tweets that resemble little more than what they are ... electronic shouts, digital soundbites that gain enormous, albeit temporal, weight through unseen algorithms and news cycles that hone in on each shout as if it was some gravitational singularity. Then a day later, another Shweet, another blurb, and something new to pay attention to. A week, two weeks, the collective number of chaotic Shweets (or Shwits?) have overwhelmed your capacity to discern a pattern to the Shwit. The mistaken assumption is that there is no pattern - that it's a massive, random cloud of Shwit. All the way around the world from that, the chaos is the pattern. Keep everybody guessing. Keep everyone following conspiracy theories down rabbit holes. Systematic vs. direct causation.
... Nearly a decade ago when working with the USFS in Ketchikan, Alaska, my crew of YCC workers were helping with the cabin / rec team to restock the firewood on a spit of the mainland east of Revillagiggedo Island. On the return trip quartering southeast towards Clover Pass, our shallow-draught landing craft was suddenly surrounded by piling water, an unfortunate regularity in the Behm Channel with its demonic combinations of tide, currents, and wind. We were fortunate to have a man named Abele (pr. "able") at the tiller who, after hollering at us to clear the scuppers and "button-up" (secure our emergency flotation jackets), took us up on a broad northeastern arc around the mess. However, it was touch-and-go, with waves coming over the gunwales and desperate glances between Abele and I over the head of the crew (who thought it was a fun ride, oh to be young).
I think now some ephemeral waves are piling up around us. In the waves, I had few thoughts other than that crystallising awareness of the thin veil between this life and the next (the flotation suits gave us 20 minutes before we went into hypothermic shock). When you have the appearance of confusion and panic, you do tend to shut down and focus on aspects which you perceive as pre-eminent to your survival, or lesser so, your persistence in a given state.
You can worry persistently about the Box and his ideologies, but I wonder if not his campaign was quite simply his salemanship at work. He was selling a product ... himself. Hats off ... he did it in spite of very limited endorsement, celebrity or political (both rendered somewhat meaningless in this campaign; the prideful part of me that reads books, published a thesis, and entering arguably a third career in developing countries has a good ol' boys dislike of some smug know-it-all talking down at you). He won; he sold himself.
Now to unwrap the package and see if it's snake-oil or substance.
[ .... ]
Boy, this is going nowhere slow.
Liberia. So much to process, but as per my earlier anecdote, you pare it down to the basic necessities. As a student of configurations, I both reject and succumb to the absurd Western practice of treating both Africa the continent, and by proxy, Africans, as a collective whole ... scratch that. I have neither the sufficient imagination, nor the gullibility, to suppose on how people are in Cote D'Ivoire or Sierra Leone. All I know is Zambia, bits of Malawi, and now Liberia. As per the configuration terminology, what "resonates"?
(Harmonies - similar between the two)
- Love of carbohydrates in ample quantities;
- Street vendors;
- Daily subsistence allowances;
- Supremacy of vehicles as a determination of class;
- Availability and quality of lager beer;
- Church;
- Basic respect between individuals that mandates greetings and basic respect prior to interacting;
- Too many convoys on crowded streets;
(Discordant ... Discordia; here vs. [...] there)
- History, pt. 1 great social / political disruption ... none
- History, pt. 2 (America ... UK)
- Stout beer that is more like a burnt porter;
- Rice ... maize;
- Cassava rendered edible in six ways [fresh, roasted, fufu, dumbo, GB, gari] ... cassava rendered edible in three [fresh, roasted, nshima];
- Stews ... separation;
- Humid... Semi-arid ... ;
- No cows ... cows;
- Imported foodstuffs ... local production;
- Coast ... landlocked;
The preceding post does not reflect the views of the author's employer, Fauna-Flora International.
