In a Funk from The Fever

I’ve been in a bit of a funk the last couple of days. That’s mostly because night before last I watched an HBO movie titled The Fever. Here’s a synopsis:

Director Carlo Gabriel Nero brings actor/playwright Wallace Shawn’s controversial study of the growing chasm between the first and third world from stage to screen with this tale of a privileged woman whose reality suddenly suffers a profound shift. A bourgeois woman awakens suffering from a particularly intense fever and trapped in an unidentified third-world country. Later, upon venturing out into her war-torn surroundings, the once-wealthy woman is forced to contend with such unfamiliar issues as luxury, culpability, and revolution. Angelina Jolie, Joely Richardson, and Michael Moore co-star in a drama that employs animation and thought-provoking first-person monologues to explore the concept of bourgeois privilege.

If you’d like to read Shawn’s original writing, you can find it here. Part of me wants to do like many critics have done and write this off as merely playing on liberal guilt. But for me, it brought all those ugly questions that linger in the back of my mind to the fore.  

Here’s a taste:

There’s still the preface-everything that happened before I was born. The voluptuous field that was given to me-how did I come to be given that one, and not the one that was black and barren? Yes, it happened like that because before I was born, the fields were apportioned, and some of the fields were pieced together.

Not by chance, not by fate. The fields were pieced together one by one, by thieves, by killers. Over years, over centuries, night after night, knives glittering, throats cut, again and again, until the beautiful Christmas morning we woke up, and our proud parents showed us the gorgeous, shining, blood-soaked fields which now were ours. Cultivate, they said, husband everything you pull from the earth, guard, save, then give your own children the next hillside, the next valley. From each advantage, draw up more. Grow, cultivate, preserve, guard. Drive forward till you have everything. The others will fall back, retreat, give you what you want or sell you what you want for the price you want. They have no choice, because they’re sick and weak. They’ve become “the poor.”

And the book runs on, years, centuries, till the moment comes when our parents say the time of apportionment is now over. We have what we need-our position well defended from every side. Now, finally, everything can be frozen, just as it is. The violence can stop. From now on, no more stealing, no more killing. From this moment, an eternal silence, the rule of law.

So we have everything, but there’s one difficulty we just can’t overcome, a curse: we can’t escape our connection to the poor.

We need the poor. Without the poor to get the fruit off the trees, to tend the excrement under the ground, to bathe our babies on the day they’re born, we couldn’t exist. With out the poor to do awful work, we would spend our lives doing awful work. If the poor were not poor, if the poor were paid the way we’re paid, we couldn’t afford to buy an apple, a shirt, we couldn’t afford to take a trip, to spend a night at an inn in a nearby town. But the horror is that the poor grow everywhere, like moss, grass. And we can never forget the time when they owned the land. We can never forget the death of their families, those vows of revenge screamed out in those rooms that were running with gore. And the poor don’t forget. They live on their rage. They eat rage. They want to rise up and finish us, wipe us off the earth as soon as they can.

And so in our frozen world, our silent world, we have to talk to the poor. Talk, listen, clarify, explain. They want things to be different. They want change. And so we say, Yes. Change. But not violent change. Not theft, not revolt, no revenge. Instead, listen to the idea of gradual change. Change that will help you, but that won’t hurt us. Morality. Law. Gradual change. We explain it all: a two-sided contract: we’ll give you things, many things, but in exchange you must accept that you don’t have the right just to take what you want. We’re going to give you wonderful things. Sit down, wait, don’t try to grab- The most important thing is patience, waiting. We’re going to give you much much more than you’re getting now, but there are certain things that must happen first-these are the things for which we must wait. First, we have to make more and we gave to grow more, so more will be available for us to give. Otherwise, if we give you more, we’ll have less. When we make more and we grow more, we can all have more-some of the increase can go to you. But the other thing is, once there is more, we have to make sure that morality prevails. Morality is the key. Last year, we made more and we grew more, but we didn’t give you more. All of the increase was kept for ourselves. That was wrong. The same thing happened the year before, and the year before that. We have to convince everyone to accept morality and next year give some of the increase to you.

When I read that last paragraph, I think of the election as it is playing out now. As much as I feel for people in this country who are struggling, all the words are about our own “middle class” who want to maintain their ability to fill up their cars with gas, keep their homes, and send their children to college. We’re bargaining that the poor in this country and around the world will allow us to continue to say wait…be patient. But they know that we’ve said that before and before and before.

And we know that if the poor of the world were to ever challenge this “morality” we’re holding onto and revolt, what we saw in St. Paul last week would be the type of response we can expect. After all, we must maintain the “rule of law” (cough, cough).

Of course, if anyone running for office were to talk about these things, they would be cast on the trash heap of “has-been politicians.” Our fellow citizens do not want to think about this or ask these questions. Hell, even I don’t. So democracy gets in the way of thinking about the hard stuff and asking the hard questions. Because after all, Americans want to hear how this illusion can be maintained – even as it starts to crumble around us.

But then, part of the reason I don’t want to hear this is that I really don’t have any answers. For two days now I’ve been thinking about all this and wondering what I can do or what can be done to change things. Alot of the funk I’m feeling is because I haven’t been able to come up with any answers. Its like we’re caught in some kind of epic drama where “our side” has benefited beyond reason and at some point the scales will be balanced…and its not likely to be pretty.