Sure, white man

In 1961 I was living in a small and remote village in the Eastern Highlands region of Papua New Guinea. My nearest European neighbor was about seven miles away on a small coffee plantation. I had been living there alone for some time, living with the natives, and conducting anthropological field work. I am quite certain they had no very good idea as to why I was there, but had accepted me, built me a small house, and we got along well. I liked them (most of them) and felt comfortable with them.

You remember it was in 1961 when we sent a chimpanzee in a rocket into space. Friends in the U.S. had sent me a magazine with an article about it. The natives didn't read, of course, but they looked at the pictures and wanted to know what it was about. There are no monkeys or apes of any kind in New Guinea, nor any rocket ships. The people were by no means stupid but as might be expected, they were entirely ignorant of such matters. So how would you explain such a thing as a chimpanzee in a rocket to a bunch of semi-naked natives holding bows and arrows. I started to explain what a chimpanzee was. No, not a man, but sort of like a man. An animal with long arms and somewhat hairy that lived both on the ground and in the trees. I even demonstrated by hunching down and dragging my knuckles on the ground and grunting. No, they didn't have talk, they just made grunting noises, I explained. They were only found in Africa, a place a long, long way away, where the people were black just like they were. The chimpanzees ate bananas and other vegetable things (as they grew bananas and sweet potatoes and other crops they could deal with this, they shook their heads in approval). No, the chimpanzees didn't grow their food, they just found it in the forest like tree possums and wild pigs (they frowned). Then I tried to explain that a rocket ship was sort of like a plane (they had seen small planes) but different, It didn't have wings but it could fly very fast and very, very far, even far out into the sky, all the way to the moon. I explained that we were actually getting ready to send a man to land on the moon. They looked blank, with incomprehension. They believed that the moon was married to the sun and also had something to do with menstruation. The idea that men, even white men, could go there did not ring any bells with them. Anyway, by the time I finished my feeble attempts to explain the wonders of science and the existence of chimpanzees I knew I had lost them. They looked at me rather as if they thought I had completely lost my mind. It wasn't merely that they didn't believe me, it was worse than that. They had no idea what the hell I was even talking about. Melanesian Pidgin does not allow for precision, none of them spoke English. I had tried never to lie to them in our past dealings and I felt I had established their trust, but this performance threatened to undo all I thought I had achieved. They seemed to be both amazed and incredulous, uncertain as to how to react, or even to react at all.

Why do I mention this here and now? Because when I listened to Bush's speech tonight (I had no choice as my wife and son insisted on having it on) that same feeling overcame me. I looked at Bush incredulous, amazed at the remarkable things he was saying. He might just as well have been me trying to explain chimps in outer space. It wasn't simply that I no longer believe him, it was more like being in some kind of space and time warp or slowly waking up from an anaesthetic. Sort of like when trying to explain to Bush supporters that no, there were no WMD's. No, Sadam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. No, there was no yellowcake deal. Outing a CIA operative is really an act of treason. Torture is a war crime, and yes, Libby really was guilty of lying. There were no al Qaida in Iraq before the "war," and so on. They look at me with the same disbelief I encountered in New Guinea. But the New Guinea Highlanders in 1961 had a legitimate claim to their ignorance, what excuse do Bush supporters have?

LKBIQ:
"The trouble with writing a book about yourself is that you can't fool. If you write about someone else, you can stretch the truth from here to Finland. If you write about yourself the slightest deviation makes you realize instantly that there may be honor among thieves, but you are just a dirty liar."
Groucho Marx