Who's the Dingo Now?

Ayers Rock is an island mountain, an august mountain of radiant red rising more than a thousand feet from the horizontal plain near the geographic center of the Australian continent. Around it in every direction stretch seemingly endless miles of orange, white and yellow sand, interspersed by roughly hewn waddies, desultory copses of desert oak and tussocks of spinifex. The Rock is renowned for its propensity to change color spectacularly through the day, from twilight’s inscrutable bluish violet to midday ochre to a brilliant glowing crimson at sunset. The Rock’s centrality to Australia is not merely geographic, but laden with symbolism. It has long been a central actor in Aboriginal creation myths and has emerged as an emblem of Australia and Australian-ness, both domestically and abroad. In short, something about Ayers Rock - or Uluru as it is known by Australia’s native Aboriginal peoples - has long engaged, beguiled, and mystified mankind, as an entity both familiar and arcane.

In the shadow of the Rock, a cry escaped through the hot heady air shortly after eight p.m. on the night of August 17th, 1980. Sitting around a barbecue in Ayers Rock’s sole campground, Michael Chamberlain, a 36 year-old preacher on vacation for the August school recess with his wife and three children, heard the sound and leaned over to his wife Lindy and asked, “was that the baby?” Lindy Chamberlain walked down the footpath to their tent; a minute later the campers heard her cry, “My God, My God, the dingo’s got my baby!” A swiftly assembled search party of policemen, park rangers, tourists and Aboriginal trackers fanned out over the area that night, but that cry remains the last thing ever heard from nine-week old Azaria Chamberlain.

The disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain, the ensuing trial and public condemnation of her parents for her murder, and their eventual exoneration was a shared experience - with little comparison - which brought Australians together and tore them apart during the twentieth century’s penultimate decade. Professor Stuart Piggin of the University of Wallongong’s history department posited in the late 1980’s that Lindy Chamberlain might be the most hated person in Australia’s two hundred year history. Julie Marcus, a professor of anthropology at the University of Adelaide wrote that, “[f]or months it was impossible to discuss any other topic and still, eight years later, in spite of the final outcome in the courts, everyone still has a theory…on whether the dingo could, or could not, have perpetrated such a dastardly deed.” The pervasive appeal of this case across Australian society as a cultural phenomenon constitutes an often-inscrutable puzzle for the outsider peering in, but the Chamberlain case, in all its singularity, can perhaps be best understood in terms of it having chafed at the raw nerves of Australian society. The fountainhead of this intensity of absorption lies far away from Ayers Rock in the post-war development of Australia and its efforts at foundational realignment as a multicultural society, built on religious, gender, and ethnic parity.

Lost in Translation

What might have been a simple summer eve’s snack for a dingo at the center of the Australian continent - stealthily snatched, ingloriously eaten, and swiftly forgotten - set off a veritable circus of human activity, conjecture and emotion, which would consume a nation for close to a decade and that remains a contentious issue to this day. Coverage of Azaria’s disappearance began with a short and unassuming column on the third page of the August 19th edition of the Sydney Morning Herald. The report is succinct, methodical and impassive, much as one would expect from a news story about a missing child, presumably dragged off by a wild animal to be, but its style stands in marked contrast to the flurry of ensuing media coverage. Something about the case immediately caught the public’s attention, and interest in the story soon snowballed across the nation. Lindy’s claim that a dingo had taken her baby was met with skepticism from the outset, and by October Lindy was telling the media, “I feel that I am the victim of a medieval witch-hunt.” The Australian press mobbed the Northern Territory government’s inquest into the disappearance and of Azaria, and coroner Denis Barritt took the unprecedented step of broadcasting the findings of the inquest on live television in February 1981. One story told by Chamberlain in her book, Through My Eyes, is useful in communicating the extent of public absorption in the case:
We also discovered later that the girls on the switchboard of a large well-known hospital in Brisbane, desperately wanted to watch the telecast of Barritt’s summary so they took a portable television into work, just in case the could catch the inference of a few words during phone calls. One of the girls told me later that normally the only time the switchboard was quiet in the whole year was during the running of the Melbourne Cup. Much to their surprise, as soon as the coroner started his actual telecast, the switchboard went silent and not one phone call came through until the end of his summation (This was about twenty minutes).

Taken out of its specific context, this passage is staggering in its implications, and invariably prompts one to ask, “why?” Public interest and media coverage would indeed continue unadulterated for the remainder of the decade. Before I set about answering this question, let me present another point of opacity that I find even more puzzling.

After the first inquest corroborated the Chamberlains’ version of events, public outrage and lingering suspicions led to a second inquest, which overturned the original findings and charged that Lindy had murdered Azaria. The Chamberlains were incarcerated on February 2, 1982, and after a sensational seven-week trial, a pregnant Lindy was found guilty of murder, and sentenced to life in prison with hard labor. Based on a close reading of the case and examination of the body of evidence turned up by the seven official inquiries into Azaria Chamberlain’s disappearance, it does not surprise me that the fate of Azaria remains unresolved: no body has ever found, and key pieces of evidence contradict each other. The Chamberlains’ story of a dingo carrying Azaria away in its mouth poses some significant problems, but surely it is no more difficult to believe than the Crown’s claim that Lindy Chamberlain carried her baby from the barbecue to the car, slit her throat, zipped the body into her husband’s camera bag, only to return serenely to the gathering around the fire. Unless Azaria’s body is eventually found, it seems very unlikely that we will ever know for certain what happened on the night of August 17th. That being said, Lindy’s conviction by a jury “of her peers” as guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt” is confusing, even troubling. Our status as outsiders to the world where these events took place somehow obfuscates the coherence of this chain of events. For reasons that are opaque to the culturally uninitiated, Australians were enthralled by this case, which they found as mysteriously captivating and teeming with symbolism as Uluru - that reticent monolith of red rock at their nation’s heart - itself. As National Times reporter Frank Moorhouse wrote in a December 1981 report on the “Dingo Baby” case:
All this folk fiction doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about the death of Azaria, but it tells us a lot about ourselves: we are not only talking about the case, we are talking about ourselves.

Dingo Baiting

The previously referenced August 19th Sydney Morning Herald article provides us with a convenient and revealing point of entry. The story appears as a straightforward, fairly innocuous, news report:
Azaria Chamberlain, the 10-weeks-old daughter of Mr Michael Chamberlain, 36, and his wife, Lindy, 32, was taken from her carry basket in a tent near the Rock. Mr Chamberlain, as Seventh Day Adventist minister from Mr Isa, and his wife saw “a shape just like a dingo” slinking out of the tent at about 8:30 am on Sunday.

The author of the article introduces the religious affiliation of the Chamberlains within the first hundred words of the column, in a way that – especially when taken together with the queerly worded citation of “shape just like a dingo” seems to qualify the reliability of Michael Chamberlain’s testimony. This detail could easily be altogether innocent, though when viewed in the context of the subsequent suspicion and vitriol heaped on the Chamberlains because of their heterodox religious ideology, it begins to look suspicious. An examination of related documents, which, when taken in accordance with wider socio-historical trends, reveal numerous illustrations of similar implicit chauvinism on the part of “mainstream” Australian society against what were perceived as cultural outsiders: specifically, members of non-mainstream religious sects and women.

The circumstances of the Azaria Chamberlain case couched it in terms that were subjectively challenging to traditional Australian hegemonies. The facts of the case were profuse with symbols that themselves conveyed Australian-ness - Ayers Rock, dingoes, the camping trip in the Outback – such that the case itself became affiliated, and came to help define Australia both at home and internationally. Secondly, the trial involved, and forced Australians to engage with two different groups of cultural outsiders - members of non-mainstream religious sects and women – and their own perceptions of them. Irrespective of the guilt or innocence of Lindy and Michael Chamberlain, it was their mischance to step inadvertently into a maelstrom of symbolic intimations and innuendos that uncovered tensions and prejudices buried deep under the surface of the Australian psyche.

Despite Australia’s latent inclusion in the amorphous concept of the liberal-progressive “Western” world, its geographic isolation and distinct historical development make this generalization inaccurate. The traditional mainstream of Australian society – white, Anglo, and male – had begun to slip in cultural dominance during the post-year wars, as a result of loosened immigration controls, the broadening of Australia’s religious discourse, and campaigns for women’s rights of the 1960’s and 70’s. The Chamberlain case galvanized attention, and illustrated attitudes, to these minority groups within Australian culture. These factors, combined with the questionable circumstances of Azaria’s disappearance, led many to presume the Chamberlains’ guilt.

The ardent attention to the case and whiplash public condemnation of the Chamberlains were, at least in part, the results of discomfort about the forceful momentum of cultural progressivism, which in the second half of the twentieth century began to overwhelm the cloistered and culturally autonomous mainstream Australian society, used to being able to define development in its own terms. Public reactions to the case provide a window into unresolved discomforts in the relationship between mainstream (White, Anglo-descended male) Australian society, and the country’s minority groups (women, and fringe religious groups). The articulation of feelings about the case, in turn, allowed – consciously or not – discussion and utterance of opinions on these deeper taboo topics.

Religious Heterodoxy

From the time of its founding by jailed prisoners from the British Isles in 1788, the established nation of Australia was overwhelmingly White, ethnically English, and religiously Protestant and Anglican. Lifting of the so-called “White Australia” immigration embargo for those outside of Western Europe in the 1960’s led to a swift and large-scale broadening of cultural and religious diversity in Australia. At the same time, religious diversity among “ethnic Australians” began to expand, as non-traditional Christian sects like Mormonism and Seventh-Day Adventism drew increasing numbers of converts at the expense of more conventional and orthodox denominations. Mainstream Australian society tended to ignore these dissenters from conventional religious norms. The result was that when Australians learned about the Chamberlains’ Adventism, their reaction was one of unfamiliarity and distrust. Adventist customs such as the observation of the Saturday Sabbath, ritual foot-washing, greeting with the “holy kiss,” temperance and vegetarianism were viewed with hesitation, as strange and anomalous behavior, clearly emblematic of their “otherness.” Mainstream Australian society, which had already marginalized and disregarded faiths they viewed as dissident, seized on symbols from the case and let the public imagination fill in for their paucity of knowledge. The Chamberlains, and indeed all Seventh Day Adventists, were characterized implicitly and explicitly as child-murdering practitioners of witchcraft. A rumor that the name Azaria actually meant some variation on “sacrifice in the desert” became so widespread and persistent that coroner Denis Barritt felt it necessary to declare in the televised announcement of his inquest’s findings, “I find that the name Azaria does not mean, and never has meant, sacrifice in the wilderness.” Religious discrimination derived from the case as well. Adventist churches were defaced by graffiti, and allegations of witchcraft and human sacrifice were extended to all members of the Chamberlains’ church.

This kind of narrow-mindedness influenced the case in a subtler, but perhaps even more detrimental way. Lindy’s calm and self-possessed demeanor throughout the trial was widely perceived as attestation of her guilt. Communications experts pointed to Lindy’s “stoney-faced reaction” to the television cameras and the dearth of “constant and profuse” tears as a main reason for the public’s hostility. It did not seem to occur to many that her “curious” faith might be what was providing her with the emotional resilience and resolve that they found so alien to their notions of what grieving should look like. This interpretation was portrayed in the American docudrama film A Cry in the Dark, which illustrates the cultural differences between Australia and the United States in its sympathetic portrait of Lindy. Portrayed by actress Meryl Streep, Lindy is presented as impregnably virtuous and sustained in her adversity by the strength of her faith.

The Case of the Castrating Bitch

A striking counterpart to the media frenzy aroused by the Chamberlain case can be found looking back two decades earlier in Australian history. In 1965, two women – Ro Bagnor and Merle Thornton, the wives of University lecturers – chained themselves to the foot rail of a Brisbane bar to protest a law that prohibited women from being served alcohol in public bars. The responding policemen’s first question to the women was, “Where are your children? Who are looking after them?” Their action set off other similar protests, in which young educated Australian women began to actively campaign against sexist and paternalistic social inequalities in the country. Another woman, Zelda D’Aprano chained herself to the Commonwealth building in Brisbane. These public protests became sensationalized media events that set off strong public reactions, not dissimilar to the Chamberlain case. One Frederick White, in a letter to a paper, asked, “Would the ladies feel any guilt if some person had kidnapped one of their children while they were chained to the bar?” while a Queensland Labor MP suggested that these women’s “neglected” children should be committed to the state. Even while the Australian women’s rights movement gained considerable ground in the 1960’s and 70’s, many women were astonished to find that their outspokenness enraged their male friends, lovers and brothers, who vilified them as “castrating bitches.”

In the case of the Chamberlain trial, Lindy’s perceived dominance over her husband allowed members of the old male Australian hegemony to express their anger and resentment, no longer acceptable for explicit expression. Many men responded to the fact that Lindy was more outspoken than her more passive husband, and the suggestion that she had forced him to cover up the murder of his own child, with vitriol inspired by the earlier women’s rights movement and the concessions to women they felt has been forced upon them. Without any certitude of evidence, it seems as if many Australians felt that Lindy must be guilty for her implied crime of forsaking her maternal duty. The symbolism of witchcraft swirled around allegations that Lindy had “bewitched” her husband in order to sacrifice her daughter to the wild untamed desert. When Lindy then accused a dingo, the classic example of free and untrammeled masculine license - the emblem of both the wild and male subjugation over it – of eating her baby, she played into the symbolic discourse of male insecurity, and effectively labeled herself one of those “castrating bitches.”

Conclusion

Like Ayers Rock itself, the dingo is a symbol couched in ambiguity. In the denouement of the Chamberlain affair, an editorial cartoon published in The Age showed a dingo labeled “Northern Territory Government” dragging the lady Justice by the neck. After the Chamberlains’ exoneration from guilt, various sources were blamed for getting carried away with the truth and putting an (now presumably) innocent woman away in prison. The press, legal system, and government were all variously labeled “dingo” in an attempt to both endorse Lindy’s original story, and to assign culpability on some head other than the collective whole, who had all bought into the circus of the trial. However, what was essentially to blame for this whole confusing mess was the brazen masculinity of mainstream Australian culture’s kneejerk assault on what was viewed as an attack on its own abstruse insecurities. Who’s the dingo now, Australia?

No slurring

I don't know why I find these so engrossing.

(Postmodern) Islands in the stream

Lake Nicaragua

















"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one" - Albert Einstein

Irish dingo ate the tent

Requisite procrastinatory paper-writing photobooth self-portrait

Last Few Republican Senators Form Roman Tortoise

Throw Down Your Heart

<...EVERYTHING I WANT...>

~Part 1~
~Part 2~

Love's A Real Thing

A really excellent comp put out by David Byrne's Luaka Bop label. This is the third release in the "World Psychedelic Classics" series, and looks at a few hits from the profusion of psychedelic soul/funk/jazz hits that came out of West Africa in the 70's. Check it out. The title track in particular is really outstanding. I've got a lot more of this stuff, so I'll post more if there's interest.

Gettit 'ere

Sweet Mother

Everyone should own this album. It is highlife at its best. "Sweet Mother" is still the most popular song in Nigerian history. Those Africans sure know how to get down to the tune of filial devotion.

Download it now.

Cambalache (Gardel)

Que el mundo fue y será una porquería, ya lo sé,
en el quinientos seis y en el dos mil también;
que siempre ha habido chorros,
maquiávelos y estafáos,
contentos y amargaos, valores y dublé.
Pero que el siglo veinte es un despliegue
de maldá insolente ya no hay quien lo niegue,
vivimos revolcaos en un merengue
y en el mismo lodo todos manoseaos.

Hoy resulta que es lo mismo ser derecho que traidor,
ignorante, sabio, chorro, generoso, estafador.
¡Todo es igual, nada es mejor,
lo mismo un burro que un gran profesor!
No hay aplazaos ni escalafón,
los inmorales nos han igualao...
Si uno vive en la impostura
y otro afana en su ambición,
da lo mismo que sea cura,
colchonero, rey de bastos,
caradura o polizón.

¡Qué falta de respeto, qué atropello a la razón!
¡Cualquiera es un señor, cualquiera es un ladrón!
Mezclaos con Stavisky van don Bosco y la Mignon,
don Chicho y Napoleón, Carnera y San Martín.
Igual que en la vidriera irrespetuosa
de los cambalaches se ha mezclao la vida,
y herida por un sable sin remache
ves llorar la Biblia contra un calefón.

Siglo veinte, cambalache, problemático y febril,
el que no llora no mama y el que no afana es un gil.
¡Dale nomás, dale que va,
que allá en el horno te vamo a encontrar!
¡No pienses más, tirate a un lao,
que a nadie importa si naciste honrao!
Si es lo mismo el que labura
noche y día como un buey
que el que vive de las minas,
que el que mata o el que cura
o está fuera de la ley.

Dos versiónes, de Carlos Gardel y Caetano Veloso.

Afghan Opium Policy

“Once we thought terrorism was Afghanistan’s biggest enemy [but now the] poppy, its cultivation and drugs are Afghanistan’s major enemy”
–Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan

In 2007 Afghanistan's poppies produced 8,200 tons, or 93% of the world's opium (United Nations). The United States and NATO have waged a long and dirty war on Afghanistan's poppy crop since their occupation of the country in 2001. The eradication of these poppy crops has become a primary objective of the Western powers operating in Afghanistan, spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a smorgasbord of programs, from drug-education in schools to the bulldozing of crops. Despite this, there are 193,000 hectares, or nearly half a million acres, of opium poppies cultivated in Afghanistan, according to a 2007 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report. Afghanistan is the world’s largest producer of illicit narcotics, surpassing the entire relative coca production of all of Latin America. Its exports of the drug constitute more than half of the country's GDP.

The reality of the situation on the ground in Afghanistan is incompatible with the directives coming from the US and NATO. We are at an impasse: the insurgent Taliban lean heavily on illicit poppy crops to finance themselves, and the destruction of farmers’ poppies only turns the populace against the Afghan government and against the United States. General James Jones, the Supreme Commander of NATO and incoming National Security Advisor, has labeled opium “the Achilles’ Heel of Afghanistan” (DeYoung). If President-Elect Obama is serious about winning in Afghanistan, a dramatically modified strategy to combat opium production must play a central role in forging the road ahead. We can learn from the model of what was done in Turkey in the 1970’s. Instead of pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into futile and fruitless crop destruction, the United States should work with Afghan farmers and create a framework through which to purchase opium crops for use in legitimate painkillers, such as morphine and codeine.

History

Poppies have been cultivated and opium isolated from them since around 3400 BCE in Sumeria, where opium was known as gil, meaning “joy”, and the plant as hul gil, meaning “plant of joy.” Opium’s recorded use as a painkiller goes back just as far, to at least 1500 BCE when it was recommended in the Ebers Papyrus as a method to stop the “excessive crying of children.” Arab traders had brought opium to India and China by the 8th century CE, and the drug had reached all parts of Europe by the 12th century (Brownstein). It was described in highly influential treatises by the 10th century Andalusian physician, Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawihe, considered the father of modern surgery, as the most effective surgical anesthetic known to man (Opium). Sponges soaked in opium, known as spongia somnifera, or “soporific sponges” were used as anesthesia during medieval and pre-modern surgeries (Brownstein). The 14th century Ottoman physician Şerafeddin Sabuncuoğlu promoted opium for treatment of such painful ailments as migraines and sciatica (Opium).

The first obvious reference to the recreational use of opium comes 1483, when Chinese courtier Xu Boling wrote that it was "mainly used to aid masculinity, strengthen sperm and regain vigor” and goes on to say that it “enhances the art of alchemists, sex and court ladies" (Opium). Opium’s potential for abuse and addiction first became patent in the 17th century, when widespread addiction to madak (a smokeable blend of opium and tobacco) spread through China. Engelbert Kaempfer, a German traveler and naturalist, writing in 1712 described madak’s addictive properties: "No commodity throughout the Indies is retailed with greater profit…than opium, which [its] users cannot do without, nor can they come by it except it be brought by the ships of the Batavians from Bengal and Coromandel” (Opium). The British East India Company’s monopoly on opium imports into China led to two wars between China and the United Kingdom, in 1840 and 1858. The First Opium War was caused when Chinese authorities seized 20,000 chests of the drug from British traders and burned them. This represented a loss of more than $20,000,000 in current values, and the British reacted by attacking and sinking the Southern Chinese Fleet, and taking control of Hong Kong and other trade concessions (Opium). The Second Opium War ended with Britain forcing China to legalize the growth and production of opium. By 1906 China produced around 85% of the world’s opium and 27% of the adult male population, some 13.5 million people, were addicted to the drug, consuming 39,000 tons every year (Opium). The highly addictive nature of opium resulted in it becoming one of the first substances to be controlled in the United States. San Francisco forced the closure of the city’s opium dens in 1875. The United States government banned imports of the drug in 1909, though it could still be obtained for medical reasons until 1924 (Opium).

Biology and Drug Development

The opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) is native to Western Asia and Southeast Europe, but now grows over much of the world. The active narcotic elements of the opium poppy are located in the poppy’s seedpods, which are scored with a knife while still unripe, causing the pod to “bleed” a milky white latex. The latex dries into a sticky brown resin overnight, and is then collected the next morning. One acre of poppies harvested in this way produces between three and five kilograms of raw opium. Narcotic content of the latex differs between different varieties of poppies. For example, one of the most potent strains, Papaver somniferum L. elite, contains nearly 92% morphine, codeine, and thebaine, while “Marianne,” the variety often used for poppy seed production, has less than one fifth of that content (Opium).

In 1806 the German pharmacist Friedrich Sertürner isolated opium’s active component, and named it Morphine after Morpheus, the god of dreams. Twenty years later another active ingredient was isolated, and named Codeine. Almost immediately, morphine began to be used in place of opium in minor surgical procedures and for treatment of chronic pain (Brownstein). In 1874 an English chemist named C.R. Alder White synthesized heroin by adding an acetyl functional group to morphine through a process of boiling together anhydrous morphine alkaloid and acetic anhydride over a stove (Heroin). White never did anything with this new relative of morphine, and it was not until 1896 that Felix Hoffmann, working for Bayer Pharmaceuticals in Germany, re-synthesized heroin, and it began to be sold as a cough suppressant and, ironically, as a cure for morphine addiction (Heroin).

Opium Production in Afghanistan

The 2006 opium crop, 30% smaller than the 2007 crop previously cited, was the largest single narcotic crop in history (Schweich). Following his tour of duty, Thomas Schweich, the American Ambassador for Counternarcotics and Justice Reform in Afghanistan, wrote a lengthy article in the New York Times Magazine in which he dubbed Afghanistan a “Narco-State” and related in detail the frustrating two years he spent trying to eradicate poppy crops. Afghan officials, including President Hamid Karzai, Schweich claims, have a vested interest in making sure nothing disrupts the country’s illegal opium trade. Not only would the country lose half of its GDP if the trade were put to an end, but many officials, and their relatives, are intimately involved in the drug trade itself. Afghanistan’s Attorney General told Schweich that President Karzai had personally directed him not to prosecute anyone on his list of twenty names of high-profile officials involved in the opium business. (Schweich). Schweich describes how he went to the Afghan ministries to recommend aerial eradication as the cheapest and most effective way to combat rising opium production, and was flat out refused.

The opium trade is not only associated with the Afghan government, but is also closely connected to the insurgent Taliban forces. Antonio Maria Costa, the Executive Director of UNODC, in describing the sharp rise in poppy cultivation in Afghanistan’s southern provinces declared “a very strong connection between the increase in the insurgency on the one hand and the increase in cultivation on the other hand” (Gall). Opium is the linchpin connecting an extensive network of drug traffickers, insurgents, terrorists, corrupt government officials, and tens of thousands of farmers simply trying to make ends meet. As Costa wrote in a 2007 editorial in the Washington Post:
Drug traffickers have a symbiotic relationship with insurgents and terrorist groups such as the Taliban and al-Qaeda...Opium is the glue that holds this murky relationship together. If profits fall, these sinister forces have the most to lose. I suspect that the big traffickers are hoarding surplus opium as a hedge against future price shocks and as a source of funding for future terrorist attacks, in Afghanistan or elsewhere…Instability makes opium cultivation possible; opium buys protection and pays for weapons and foot soldiers, and these in turn create an environment in which drug lords, insurgents and terrorists can operate with impunity (Costa).

“The Turkish Strategy”

In the 1960’s Turkey was the fountainhead of most of the world’s opium, supplying around 80% of the heroin in the United States (Hurst). In 1969, President Richard Nixon, newly elected in part because of campaign promises to pursue a “war on drugs,” contacted the Turkish government and told them that poppy criminalization and eradication in Turkey was a top American priority. He suggested that the United States could fund programs for reimbursing farmers for the crops they destroyed, and that if poppies were not criminalized, Turkey could jeopardize the more than $60 million in American aid it received every year. But as in Afghanistan, the poppy was culturally and economically entrenched, having been grown on the plains of Anatolia for millennia. There were more than 70,000 poppy-farming families in the country. The Turkish Prime Minister, Suleyman Demirel, replied that it would be “impossible to go to farmers and ask them to plow under their crops. We cannot control it. The poppies will just appear illegally” and that imposing a program of eradication would “bring down the government” (Hurst). In 1974, the next Prime Minister, breaking the impasse, asked the United Nations for help in building a poppy processing plant and introducing a system for monitoring and regulating drug production. Today, 600,000 Turks are employed in a “highly regulated” system through which Turkey provides medical-grade morphine and codeine to the West, with “negligible” diversion to the illegal market (Hurst).

Opponents of launching a similar “Turkish Strategy” in Afghanistan assert that Afghanistan does not have the necessary stability and government oversight to effectively regulate a legal poppy licensing system. The US Bureau of International Narcotics contends, reasonably, that “without safeguards, licit and illicit opium would be indistinguishable. Opium really destined for the black market would be produced under the pretense of a legal system” (Hurst). Though Afghanistan cannot be expected to live up to the same kind of stringent and effectual verification as Turkey, is it not better to have 20 or 30 percent of the crop diverted to illegal trade than the current 100 percent?

It has also been argued that there is simply no legitimate market capable of handling the massive amounts of opium produced in Afghanistan every month. This is patently false. Figures from the International Narcotics Control Board, which regulates all legal international trade in narcotics, show that seven Western countries account for nearly 80% of the global consumption of morphine; developing countries, with 80% of the world’s population account for only 6% of morphine use (Hurst). Turkey and India (which also has a legal trade in opium products) contend that if Afghanistan is allowed into their market, that the levels of drugs diverted to illegal trade will rise, but Costa claims that the Afghan supply alone already exceeds global demand by 30%, and that Afghan drug lords are sitting on their supplies in order to drive up prices (Costa). While demand for basic painkilling medications might be met in the United States and other Western countries, there is a dramatic dearth in supply for Third World demand. The United States could dedicate some of the $500 million it has allocated each year to Afghan counternarcotics to buying up Afghan supplies and supplying painkillers to developing countries at affordable prices.

Conclusion

A change in administrations, coupled with President-Elect Obama’s repeated vows in the campaign to refocus American attention on the war in Afghanistan, make this a moment of enormous potential to finally break the status quo of the feeble and ineffectual American drug policy in Afghanistan. In one fell swoop we have the ability to help Afghan farmers, reduce the global share of illegal opium-based drugs like heroin, cut off funding to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and court international goodwill by providing much-needed medicines to the developing world. It would be an act of criminal foolishness to blindly follow old policies that have been proven as failures when Turkey has already proven the efficacy of its legal poppy licensing system.

Pocahontas: Nature and Artifice in the American Imagination

“And being ready with their clubs to beat out his brains, Pocahontas, the king’s dearest daughter, when no entreaty could prevail, got his head in her arms and laid down her own upon his to save him from death” (Smith 36).

The story of Pocahontas saving John Smith from execution has been told and retold in the four hundred years since the incident took place. It has gained the status of a folk tale, becoming part of the national mythology of America alongside Paul Revere’s ride and George Washington’s cherry tree. Considering that it is doubtful whether or not the episode even took place, the tenacity of the tale is remarkable. Pocahontas’s narrative is a compelling one to be sure, and it has been seized upon and used by sources as sundry as the Walt Disney Company, painter John Gadsby Chapman, film director Terrence Malick, and John Smith himself, in pursuit of their own agendas, and to convey their own understandings of the encounter between the Europeans and native peoples of America.

The public first encountered Pocahontas when she traveled to England with a group of other Powhatans, appearing before King James in 1616, and then in John Smith’s own account of his rescue by her in his Generall Historie of Virginia. The story metamorphosed over the years to communicate changing notions about the relationship between white settlers and Native Americans, and to incorporate romantic elements absent from Smith’s telling. 380 years later, American director Terrence Malick released his take on the story, aiming, ostensibly at least, to dispel the inaccuracies of earlier versions, and using Smith’s General History as its source to present a more historically factual version of events. The ways in which these various authors, particularly Smith and Malick, present the story and character of Pocahontas reflect an evolution in fundamental social assumptions about mankind’s relationship with the natural world, and more specifically the evolving understandings of the value of the “natural” versus “artificial” from the time of the settlement of Jamestown in 1607 until the release of Malick’s film in 2005.

The first and most prominent telling of the Pocahontas story was by John Smith in his General History of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles, published in 1624. Smith was actually there, the witness or the subject of many of the events he describes, but the authenticity of his account is colored by his motives in addressing his intended audience as well as by his own cultural prejudices. Smith wrote the General History at a dangerous and pivotal moment for the Virginia Company, on the heels of the Powhatan massacre of Jamestown settlers in 1622, which left about one third of the English population dead. This was a major public relations disaster for the Virginia Company, and for Virginia itself, and there were fears that immigration would drop off to a dangerously unsustainable level. The joint-stock company, operated since 1606 under a charter granted by King James, would be dissolved because of this pressure in 1624, and Virginia would become a royal colony administered by the Crown.

Smith seems to have a few primary objectives in the General History. He hopes to assuage the doubts of investors back in England, alleviate public fears about the dangers posed by starvation and Indian attack in the colony to encourage settlers to migrate to Virginia, and bolster his own reputation and personal glory. He begins with an ethnographic report of the country, in which he describes the land as plentiful, “they plant their fields and live most off acorns, walnuts, and fish…to amend their diet…[they] live upon fish, beasts, crabs, oysters, land tortoises, strawberries, mulberries, and such like” (Smith 8), as well as being free for the taking, “the land is not populous, for the men be few; their far greater number is of women and children” (Smith 5). Smith then describes the history of the settlement at Jamestown up to that point, focusing on his personal role in the colony’s affairs. The key passage comes relatively early, as Smith relays the account of his capture by Powhatan warriors while scouting for the head of the Chickahominy River. He describes fighting off “two hundred savages” before being “shot in his thigh a little…but with no great hurt, till at last they took him prisoner” (31). He says he was held by the Powhatans for seven or eight weeks (though it was actually around three) before “having feasted him after their best barbarous manner…as many as could laid hands on him” and laid his head on “two great stones” (36). At this point Pocahontas enters the narrative for the first time, saving John Smith by appealing to her father for clemency. The rest, as they say, is history. Today many scholars doubt whether this incident took place as Smith described. Smith’s two earlier accounts of his time in Virginia did not include the episode of Pocahontas saving his life, a detail it seems strange to have left out. Furthermore, Smith had already recounted a similar story of being saved by an exotic damsel at least once before. In his earlier book True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captaine John Smith, he is saved by one Charatza Tragabigzanda after being captured by the Ottomans (Kupperman 125). It is impossible to know if Pocahontas actually saved Smith’s life as he tells it, but it does not ultimately matter very much. Whether he decided to relate the story after glossing over it in previous accounts, or if he simply fabricated it seventeen years after the fact, he included the episode in the General History for the same reason.

Pocahontas presented a vivid symbol of a charitable “savage” that could controvert the sinister picture drawn by accounts of the recent Jamestown massacre. She had accompanied her husband, as Mrs. Rebecca Rolfe, to England in 1616 on a publicity tour for the Virginia Company, intended to demonstrate to the Court and the public that the natives of Virginia were friendly, peaceful, and most importantly, amenable to religious conversion and Anglicization. Native peoples from the New World had been brought back to England with relative frequency ever since John Cabot brought three men from Newfoundland back to the court of Henry VII in the 1490’s (101). Previously, these natives had been displayed merely as artifacts from the New World, to satisfy the curiosity of England for exotic objects. They were, in other words, live specimens for the curiosity cabinets which had become hugely popular on the Continent. Pocahontas, on the other hand, was not presented as an artifact of foreignness, but for her very Englishness to be marveled at. It is hugely significant that of the several dozen Native American arrivals in England, Pocahontas was the first to have her portrait made in English pose and dress (269). Pocahontas was presented to the court of King James and to the investors of the Virginia Company as an example of what could be made of the “savages.” She had been baptized, spoke English, was clad in western dress, and was married to an Englishman. The Virginia Company subsequently voted the sum of £100 to begin a program that would convert the Chesapeake Algonquins to Christianity (271). With the addition of the rescue story to his narrative, Smith was relying on, as well as supplementing, the popular image of Pocahontas to again stress a similar point: that the natives of Virginia were not all bloodthirsty and dangerous, but could indeed be successfully converted to Western ways.
This narrative of Pocahontas, as a symbol of the friendly “docile” native, appropriately receptive to “superior” Western thinking, persists for several centuries. A notable example of this perspective of the Pocahontas story is in the painting of the Baptism of Pocahontas by John Gadsby Chapman. Chapman was commissioned in 1837 to paint a historical scene on the rotunda of the Capitol building in Washington, DC (John Gadsby Chapman). This is the image of Pocahontas that became part of America’s national mythology. Very much founded in the 17th century approach to civilizing and converting Native Americans, Pocahontas’ most significant achievement for American society is portrayed as simply receiving a baptism, the blessings of Western civilization.

Elizabethan notions of nature and undeveloped space strongly colored the attitude of the Jamestown settlers toward the land and the Native Americans they encountered. The English viewed the environment as “pure potential” that had to be improved by people, by cultivating the land and building upon it. When they encountered landscapes, as they did in Virginia, that were almost entirely untouched by the hand of man, they believed that it was because the native peoples were not able to properly develop the land, as God intended. This understanding is reflected by the contemporary slang in England, by which a person with below average intelligence would be called ‘natural.’ In contrast, artificiality was a state that should be strived for. Bringing the land to its full potential “through the application of art and intelligence” signified the fulfillment of Man’s role in the world (Kupperman 133-4). Artifice was highly valued even in English gardens, which tended to be highly ordered and managed. The estate of Chatsworth, even included an ersatz willow tree, built in 1695 and made entirely of copper and bronze, which could shoot water at unsuspecting guests out of spigots on each of its branches (Devonshire 74).

The English view of the Powhatans is impacted by the lack of development they saw in the landscape. Smith describes how “their houses are in the midst of their fields and gardens” and “that a man may gallop a horse amongst those woods any way but where the creeks or rivers shall hinder” (Smith 7). The bafflement expressed here is at the lack of fences or walls in the Powhatan settlements. While this merely reflects a different understanding of land ownership and property rights, the settlers viewed the cause as a deficiency on the part of the Powhatans, making them incapable of properly developing their land. Similarly, English observers conveyed confusion concerning the Indian practice of planting multiple crops in the same field, which contrasted with the English practice of monoculture. The English saw disorder and barbarism, when in fact polyculture is a more sustainable approach to agriculture than monoculture.

The early-modern perspectives on nature and development held by the Jamestown settlers can be easily contrasted with those of today. Attitudes have almost wholly flipped in the intervening four hundred years. In America today, pristine, untouched areas of nature are set aside as National Parks to be preserved and enjoyed. Environments and vistas free from signs of human development are seen as beautiful and valuable. The rampant surplus extraction and development of land that marked much of America’s history has been repudiated in favor of preservation and conservation. This is the perspective from which Terrence Malick approaches the arrival of English settlers at Jamestown. The film opens with shots of the unspoiled natural beauty of Virginia, and throughout the film Malick’s camera lingers perceptibly on images of fields of grass, serene forests and flocks of birds filling the skies, and he depicts the natives as living perfectly in concert with these natural rhythms. This spirit is also expressed through Malick’s repeated use of the Prelude from Wagner’s Das Rheingold, which appears in both the opening and closing scenes. In the opera, the Prelude accompanies the Rhinemaidens as they swim in the Rhine, and evokes the unchanging rhythms of the river and its eternal natural tranquility. Malick portrays Smith as being taken in by this natural repose during his captivity among the Powhatans. When Smith returns to Jamestown, the settlement appears muddy and chaotic. A herd of boys, with dirty pockmarked faces, mob around Smith yelling unintelligibly. The contrast drawn with the peaceful and seemingly carefree world of Powhatan is clear, and powerful.

Malick’s aesthetic, manifested as well in his other three films, is consistently meditative and engrossed with images of natural beauty. The calm of nature is always contrasted with an element of discord generated by human society, whether criminal passion in Days of Heaven or war in The Thin Red Line. Pocahontas, portrayed by the young actress Q’orianka Kilcher, is introduced in the film as wild and animal-like, her supple movements are healthy and vigorous, and her wide eyes are curious and intelligent. At the point in the film when she transitions into wearing European dress, around the same time Smith departs Virginia, her demeanor changes prominently. For the remainder of the film she is no longer the playful, inquisitive “natural” encountered at the beginning of the film. She takes on a sort of quiet sadness, along with her petticoats. Later in the film when she visits the court of King James, she is shown alongside a bald eagle in a cage, also brought from America to be exhibited to an English public eager for artifacts from the New World. The visual metaphor is clear, that Pocahontas is a captive in this world, whose freedom has been unfairly fettered. Malick’s aesthetic is an illustrative representation of the 21st century’s perspective on “natural” versus “artificial,” that the natural embodies an ideal, well-ordered world that can never be restored once disrupted.

These depictions reflect an evolution in fundamental social assumptions about the way the natural world functions. Pocahontas’ identity as one of the first individuals to cross the immense cultural divide that separated Native Americans from the Europeans newly arrived in their land, has made her the subject of what can only really be described as propaganda. The story of Pocahontas and her role in the colony’s early development has been utilized to comment on different readings of the encounter between Native American and European, colored by remarkably different worldviews in different periods of history. She may be the most famous figure in American history of whom so little is known. Her legacy is both assured and as unconfined as the Pocahontas portrayed by Malick at the beginning of his film, but most importantly, it is always open to interpretation.