Gentlemen's Disagreement

Elia Kazan was a Greek-American theater and film director who, aside from introducing Marlon Brando to the screen, ratted on a number of Hollywood lefties to the notorious HUAC, or House of Unamerican Activities Committee. Kazan was able to keep working in films, which is probably the only reason he did the ratting. Somewhat ironically, he also acquired a reputation for socially committed films.



In 1947 Kazan made a film called Gentleman's Agreement, about a newspaper reporter who poses as a Jew in order to find out if there is any anti-Semitism in America. As incredible as this premise may sound, the film ends on an unfortunate false note of triumph. The reporter, having found anti-Semitism everywhere he goes, comes out from under his Jewish alias as a born-again Gentile. The unintentionally (it is to be hoped) ridiculous moral of the film was Thank God I'm a goy!



Everyone, whether on volunteer work or professional assignment, who observes and reports on the conditions of ordinary life in the poorest places of the world carries around with him his own diplomatic immunity in the form of a foreign passport and a return ticket to places where injustice is merely a gentleman's agreement rather than national policy. No matter how hellish the lives of the people he lives among may be, for him there is at least the promise that it is not his life, that sooner or later he can go home to the comforts of his developed world, to the conveniences and orderliness of an up-to-date post-industrial consumer society.



Then there was Moritz Thomsen. After his four year stint in the Peace Corps was over, he, too, went home to the States. But what he had seen and endured in Ecuador with the handful of people he had befriended and immortalized in his great book Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle, was too much for him to simply put away like so many photographs into an album. Personal disappointments, such as his dying father bequeathing his entire fortune to the Humane Society, helped to make up Thomsen's mind to sell off what little was left that bound him to his homeland and return to Ecuador, to Ramon and his family and to the farm on the River of Emeralds.



In 1976, Joseph Losey, himself a former blacklisted Hollywood director, made a film called Mr. Klein, which is a kind of anti-Gentleman's Agreement. Set during the German occupation of France, it is about a wealthy art dealer named Robert Klein who becomes confused with a Jew who goes by the same name. He spends the duration of the film searching for the other Mr Klein and clear his name. The film concludes when, having pursued his Jewish doppelganger into a stadium where Jews are being herded onto trains for transport to a concentration camp, Klein follows the Jew, swept by the crush of the crowd, into one of the train cars. It is only when the door closes on him and the train begins to move that Klein realizes where he is and where he is going. Surprised, perhaps, by the determination with which the "authorities" were seeking to destroy him - the Jew - Klein decides to join him, to subsume his fate with the Jew's.



In effect, that is what Moritz Thomsen did on returning to Ecuador. After many misadventures, triumphs and disasters, he died there in 1991, of cholera.

Living Poor Revisited

It might almost seem redundant for me to be reading Moritz Thomsen's "Peace Corps Chronicle" Living Poor here on a small island in the heart of the Philippine archipelago. Except that what Thomsen wrote about poverty is representatove of poor people everywhere. And in the forty years since the book's publication, in Ecuador and in poor places all over the world, nothing has changed. There is no River of Emeralds here, but the Pacific Ocean is there, as blue and as unforgiving as ever.

"Living poor is like being sentenced to exist in a stormy sea in a battered canoe, requiring all your strength simply to keep afloat; there is never any question of reaching a destination. True poverty is a state of perpetual crisis, and one wave just a little bigger or coming from an unexpected direction can and usually does wreck things. Some benevolent ignorance denies a poor man the ability to see the squalid sequence of his life, except very rarely; he views it rather as a disconnected string of unfortunate sadnesses. Never having paddled on a calm sea, he is unable to imagine one. I think if he could connect the chronic hunger, the sickness, the death of his children, the almost unrelieved physical and emotional tension into the pattern that his life inevitably takes he would kill himself.

"In South America the poor man is an ignorant man, unaware of the forces that shape his destiny. The shattering truth - that he is kept poor and ignorant as the principal and unspoken component of national policy - escapes him. He cries for land reform, a system of farm loans that will carry him along between crops, unaware that the national economy in almost every country sustained by a one-crop export commodity depends for its success on an unlimited supply of cheap labor. Ecuador needs poor men to compete in the world banana market; Brazil needs poverty to sell its coffee; Chile, its tin; Colombia, its cacao and coffee, and so on. The way United States pressures shape the policies of the South American governments can make a Peace Corps volunteer who is involved and saddened by the poverty in his village tremble to his very roots."

In the Philippines, whose population has been exploding for more than a decade, children are everywhere - especially small children. Imbecile politicians point to this overpopulation as a good sign for the future of the Philippines. And yet no single factor practically guarantees that poverty will endure more than the servitude of women as little more than baby-making machines.

This problem is exacerbated in Roman Catholic countries (like the Philippines and every country in Central and South America) where Papal policy strongly discourages the use of contraceptives and where abortion is either strictly controlled or even banned. The church is always there to welcome the many millions of new souls, but never willing to fill their stomachs. This life is merely a proving ground for the next one, according to their reasoning (if you could call it that), so why bother prolonging it? Why, indeed.

"Death, of course, is the great release. I lay in my house one night trying to sleep, while up the hill a fiesta went on until dawn - drums in an endless and monotonous rhythm connecting a series of increasingly complicated songs, some chanted by women, some by men, some by mixed voices. It gradually became beautiful and moving, but I was puzzled because the celebration was just a week before the great Semana Santa, Holy Easter, a fiesta that everyone saves up for and that leaves everyone broke and exhausted.

"Why were they bombiendo all night on the hill? I asked someone.

"'They were celebrating the death of Crispin's first-born,' I was told. 'He was born dead, an angelito.' There wasn't a bit of sadness in the town; it was a real celebration. Crispin's son had struck it lucky; he was one of God's angels without all of that intervening crap."

So There I Was

I've been using this blog as a pseudo-diary, so I may as well admit the latest event in my life at mid-way. I have transported myself from Alaska to the Philippines in an attempt to "retire early". As my earlier entry "Hallelujah I'm a Bum" attested, I have always held the workaday world in enmity. Given the Plutocracy into which I was born, the choices were actually severely few and my chances of success haphazard.

Needless to say, I failed to succeed by the standards of my own world. I never saw the necessity of any of the wondrous things that it held out as some kind of promise. "Job Security" was nothing more than a guarantor of safe slavery until you are ready for Social Security, which "promise" is being slowly eroded by a rabid government in control of 40% of the world's largest economy.

I brought one of many books with me. Moritz Thomsen's Living Poor can at least give me the consolation that at least I am not living in an Ecuadoran jungle. Cheers.