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At the Zoo
Smeared windows and tea parties evoke thoughts of gorillas and our karmic footprint.
Just recently, here in my own home county, someone splattered a front window of the local Democratic Party headquarters with a bucket-full of feces. Behind the glass was a life-sized cardboard cutout picture of President Barack Obama, who is an unpopular man in this neck of the Northwest woods for many reasons. It is impossible to know what motivated the unknown poop-flinger without a confession or claim of responsibility of some sort, but three likely possibilities come to mind: vandalism, political discontent, and racism.
Like any downtown section of any city, Roseburg has ongoing problems with vandalism. These, however, have always been the sort of things one might expect from teenage hooligans or drunken stew-bums. There has also been, over the years, some prankish vandalism at both the Republican and Democratic Party offices—Krazy Glue in the door locks and the like—but nothing before this has ever made such a splash.
• • •
When I picked up the newspaper and saw the front-page color photograph of that dreck-drenched window, I recalled vividly a morose gorilla who lived at the old Griffith Park zoo in Los Angeles fifty-something years ago. He was a large, old silverback whose unhappy fate was to sit all day in a small gazebo being gawked at by people.
The people encircled his small round steel cage completely and there was always a crowd. Since there is both proverbially and actually “always one in every crowd,” there was usually a yahoo, or two or more, trying to provoke a reaction from the sullen beast by waving their arms, shouting, and flicking cigarette butts at him. The gorilla, understandably, was discontented with his lot and expressed his malcontent with sad sour looks and by flinging feces against the glass barriers that surrounded his enclosure.
The ape, of course, had it in his nature to act as he did. Some fear-driven instinctual reaction to his unnaturally stressful life caused him to seek relief in the form which gorillas (and other great apes and monkeys) do. Since (most of the time anyway) humans don’t fling excrement at each other, this—how we deal with our fear—is a difference between us, the humans and our near genetic relations, the apes.
We humans are blessed with two great advantages in the form of superior intelligence and superior culture when compared to the apes. For most of my life I believed that the apes, at best, had a very limited intelligence and, therefore, no culture at all. Nowadays it is known that chimpanzees and gorillas are at least as smart as an average four-year-old human—smart enough to develop culture.
Chimps, it turns out, do have a sort of culture. They learn things, invent, and teach others within their groups and pass learning on to succeeding generations, much as we do. So, what keeps them from writing bad poetry and charging each other interest on loans? In short, why are they (so nearly identical to us genetically) chimps and why are we human? Many scientists now believe that the answer lies not so much in our differing brains as in our adrenal glands. Chimps have high levels of adrenalin, the “fight or flight” hormone. It is our human ability to remain comparatively calm in each other’s presence that allows us to create civilizations and their apish inability to do so that condemns them to short, brutish lives in the brush. Call it love, call it trust, either way it seems, it is in fact we humans, the meekest of apes, who have inherited the earth. It is only the trusting and loving who are humane. To trust no one is, perhaps, worse than insanity—it may be atavistic, apish, less than fully human.
• • •
The window-splashing incident would not trouble me nearly as much as it does if I only knew whether there was a reason for it or not. I hope that it was an irrational act, the result of some ill-considered (and perhaps drunken) momentary rage, or a simple matter of some unfortunate’s coprophilia. In fact, I’d guess that there’s about a 50 percent chance that it amounted to no more than a passing freakish event. Or, then again, it could have just as easily been a hate crime, premeditated and meant to instill fear. We do, after all, have a fairly recent history of local residents making politically motivated death threats and committing acts of vandalism aimed at driving their neighbors out of our county.
• • •
“Highly conservative” is the usual description of the voters of Douglas County, and it is true that we Umpquans generally vote at a rate of 2–1 for Republican Party candidates and at the same rate against nearly every tax increase, no matter how laudable its purpose may be. But it has been an unusually anger-filled year here in Douglas County and in the nation itself as well. There were bitter “Tea Party” protests here in the spring and, this summer, so-called congressional “town hall” meetings that turned downright ugly and hateful at times.
Some of my friends and neighbors ask me, “Who are these people? Why are they so rude and so angry?” Much too distressingly often, they put it to me as, “How could they be so stupid?” without realizing just how arrogant and ignorant that question is. Others of my friends and neighbors are among the very people being asked about, and they are on the whole neither less nor more intelligent than the others.
I suppose that by stupid those people mean the all-too-human willingness to believe outrageous lies and specious theories. I think perhaps naiveté might better (and more kindly) describe this tendency of people to believe in dubious (but comforting) half-truths and fictions—yet this word, too, comes up short. Brain power has nothing to with it and neither does education. I have known many highly intelligent people who have this very same affliction and it is one that is present in every economic class and every nation and all races and both sexes, taking root in the uneducated and the highly educated alike. Intolerance, I think, is not really so much a matter of opinion as it is a symptom of underlying psychological problems—an indication of character flaws that are tied to unresolved anger, a generalized lack of trust, and an inability to remain calm when facing life’s ambiguities. There is an inevitable percentage of humanity that is distrustful, easily excitable, and emotionally unstable.
• • •
I have known a great many people over the years—nice people, decent people—who cling to harmful and repugnant beliefs that are racist, homophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic, or politically intolerant. What they all have had in common is their high levels of frustration and fear. Each has felt insecure and cheated somehow, denied their fair share of power, ignored and disrespected. Many (though not all) have been economic losers, bitter about their failure to succeed. Some have been emotional cripples, unable to sustain loving relationships and unable to tolerate ambiguity. Many have had their lives fall apart due to compulsive boozing or drug abuse or gambling. Others have simply been crushed repeatedly by an indifferent and impersonal system of things that exploits them because it is profitable to do so. Some are people who blame themselves for having suffered terrible blows that came for no good reason at all. All became, in one way or another, shell-shocked veterans of life itself.
What is there to cling to when, by your own doing or by others or by cold fate, you have lost everything? Stripped of dignity, mired in failure, caged in by tough circumstances and uncontrollable forces, what is left to people but to embrace comforting nonsense and to rage against perceived injustice?
• • •
A while back I ran across a fellow who wanted to know where Pomerania was located. We were in a local bookstore at the time and when a woman entered the store carrying a small, mostly white lap dog, he inquired loudly, “Where is Pomerania anyway?”
I explained to him that “Pomerania” was the name of a region located along the Baltic Sea coast in what is now northwestern Poland but which used to be northeastern Germany. “G’dansk is the biggest city there. It used to be called Danzig,” I added.
At the mention of the old port city at the mouth of the Vistula his eyes lit up. “Danzig,” he confidently informed me, “was named for the Tribe of Dan—one of the Lost Tribes of Israel.” He went on to describe how this particular Hebrew tribe, which had been missing in action since Biblical times, had left the Promised Land to wander into Europe and left their name scattered across the face of the continent that they populated. The list of Lost Hebrew Tribe of Dan place-names, he explained, included any name in any language that featured a “d” and an “n” separated by any vowel: Danzig, Denmark, Scandinavia, London, Sardinia, the rivers Danube, Don, D’neister, and D’nieper had all been allegedly visited by these ancient Jewish name-leavers.
It seemed to me a peculiar misunderstanding of both European history and of the way languages work. But he was so clearly pleased with his display of erudition that I didn’t have the heart to tell him just how absurd what he was saying actually was. Besides, the conversation had taken place in the religious books section of the store and clearly these bizarre notions were somehow tied into his spiritual beliefs. Since it is one of the oddities of human nature that irrational beliefs are perversely reinforced by factual challenges to their validity I gave him up as an interesting nut-case.
Later, a quick Internet search for the term “Tribe of Dan” brought the matter into a more disturbing light. To begin with, I found that there actually is a contemporary Tribe of Dan but that no one suspects them of having been lost Hebrews since they are all black folks who live in West Africa.
What I did discover is that his rap is a popular one with an anti-Semitic White Power religious sect known as Identity Christians. Adherents to this movement believe that Jehovah, having cursed the Jews of the Holy Land, allowed his Chosen People designation to fall entirely upon the descendants of the Jewish Tribe of Dan, who were the ancestors of modern Christian Europeans, particularly the fairer-skinned inhabitants of the northern nations. Oregon, it seems, is currently home to two congregations of this odd persuasion, one located in Woodburn and the other in Eugene.
• • •
That there are malcontented people in our society is not surprising. Things being as they are—theoretically egalitarian but factually equal only in our shared vulnerability to chance personal disaster—it is inevitable that some of us will have happier lives than others and that the discontented will resent the happiness of the contented and will view them with envy and distrust. This is sufficient evil in itself and creates, on its own, a good deal of trouble.
There are those in our society, though, who, seeing discontent and the fear behind it, want to use that fear and resentment to further their own ends. Just as the sight of the gorilla moping in his cage brought some people to pity the unhappy beast, some to scorn it, and others to taunt it for their own amusement, so seeing the fears of the downtrodden brings some to compassion and others to contemptuous exploitation.
• • •
A few years ago I ran into an old high school buddy of mine while I was down in Los Angeles working the tradeshow circuit. The town, I’d noticed, had changed in the decades since I’d left, not just physically, but culturally as well. Racism had, once again, become nearly mainstream thinking among an alarming portion of the white citizenry. There was much grousing about the increasing numbers of Armenians, Asians, and Hispanics living in the over-crowded county, a strong demographic fear of being overwhelmed by swarthy foreigners whose obscenely large families were allegedly bankrupting governmental resources. But it was a pleasure to see my school chum again, who, it turned out, was working as a city parks and recreation gardener at the new Griffith Park zoo. He invited me to visit him at his work for a private early-morning behind-the-scenes tour.
The new zoo is a much nicer place than the old one. The animals on display have more room to move about and their enclosures are designed to mimic natural conditions. We have come a long way, I saw, in learning how to reduce stress levels in captive wild animals. My old pal, however, seemed to have changed for the worse. Once an openhearted and unafraid artist, he too, I found, had taken to seeing himself as an oppressed member of an endangered, soon-to-be minority of white people. It disturbed me to hear him talk so vehemently about his anger and frustration over the political and social concerns of the moment. I wondered at it, at the time, and later learned that he habitually listened to talk-radio programming while raking leaves and planting flower beds.
I’m not sure why so many people whom I’ve met over the past decade or so get such a kick out of listening to a steady stream of bad news and outrageous commentary. I suppose, once again, it may come back to the adrenal glands. I think of the thrill-seeking of my youth and the exciting rush that rose within me with the risk of physical harm. Anger, too, brings on much the same hormonal waves. I’ve heard the term “politics junkie” used to describe my friend’s habit and suspect that it may be more of a reality than merely a metaphor.
It saddens me to see my neighbors deceived. I don’t blame them much though. Lying to people for profit has become a multibillion-dollar international industry. I condemn instead those have deceived them, the professional liars and, even more so, those who employ the liars.
Those who profit from the subversion of reason, who inflame smoldering anger for personal or ideological gain, who appeal to the worst in human nature—to our anger, distrust, resentment, and greed—are much more dangerous to the domestic tranquility of this nation than the majority of common criminals. A thief, a burglar, or a robber only harms a few victims, but those who spread anger-inducing lies may harm millions—and their harm often outlives them and perhaps circulates for centuries.
“It is the first duty of the humanist and the fundamental task of intelligence to ensure knowledge and understanding among men,” according to Pablo Neruda, a man who certainly knew about such things. Of the demagogues, professional gasbags, spin doctors, and liars-for-hire who prey upon the vulnerable, I would ask, “If the old poet was right, then what is it to ensure ignorance and misunderstanding among people but to be working against humanity?”
• • •
Looking back on it, it was an odd return to the zoo, a place I hadn’t been since childhood. It seems strange to me now that I returned, after fifty years, to find that the animals are calmer and the people more resentful, frustrated, and angry. What would have happened, I wonder, if we’d spent our time and money coming up with ways to reduce our human worries instead of coming up with ways to increase our anxiety? We have, since Neolithic times, made tremendous advances intellectually and technologically but we have not advanced psychologically at all. We are still going about the world with our frightened caveman hearts that are increasingly ill-adapted to worrisome distractions and stimuli that would have been unimaginable just 100 years ago.
We seem, as a society, to have a great deal of trouble in learning to forgive each other. We suffer the ill effects of a sort of karmic footprint, rather like a carbon footprint. It is said that it takes 100 years for a pound of carbon dioxide to dissipate from the atmosphere. How long does it take for a hatred to no longer circulate? In some cases it can take a lifetime—for some cases, generations. My ancestors often used to say, “Forgiveness is the best revenge.” I have returned to that saying many times over the years and always found it to be true. It tells me that by reacting to injury with anger or violence I am damaging myself more than I am my enemy. It really is better to forgive and forget and to leave the fear and anger and frustration to the harmful to bear than to carry those festering wounds within. This is what the best of humanity’s teachers have taught since ancient times.
Robert Leo Heilman is the author of Overstory Zero: Real Life in Timber Country. He lives in Myrtle Creek.
