Cannibals!

Reading this post got me thinking about this.

When my friend and I were baiting 419 scammers on a nearly daily basis, one of my standard characters was a midwestern businessman who was deathly afraid of cannibals. Whenever the exchange got to the point of the Nigerian scammer wanting me to actually go to Nigeria, I would start expressing reservations about going "so deep in the jungle to be at the mercy of cannibals." I would further bait them with things like, "well, Mrs. Abacha, you seem like a nice lady, but how do I know that your family aren't all cannibals?"

The 419ers would be try to go head over heels to prove that their country was free of cannibals. Naturally, the more they tried to prove it, the stranger, more xenophobic and hostile my character became. Eventually I was demanding PROOF! that my contact had never eaten a human being: "Can you provide me a certified psiloscopic resonant image of your intestine so that I can be absolutely sure that you do not have human tissue in there?"

Eventually most of them gave up, although a few kept at it, even as I was degenerating into spewing random bits culled from Mickey Spillane books.

Let's face it. Cannibals are fascinating. All it takes to get me hooked on an episode of Nova is for it to investigate ancient cannibals. It is all very disordered business, this munching on fellow human beings.

Now there was a time in my life when I was a rather doctrinaire relativist: a Marxist CAPITALIST atheist (which is a position I am frankly surprised hasn't caught on: you believe in dialectical materialism and class warfare, but see no reason to go to war for the enemy). It took Thomas Aquinas, Plato, avant-garde music (particularly Stockhausen), abstract expressionism, and Pope John Paul II to get me out of that, but that is a much longer story, best saved for later, over Scotch and cigars, perhaps while sitting under a Pollock and listening to Stockhausen's Hymnen.

Anyway, when I was a doctrinaire relativist (which they all are), I would have maintained that there was nothing intrinsically wrong with cannibalism, and not even anything that dangerous about it, provided it was only done on outside tribes. Obviously once you start eating your own neighbors, it all hits the fan, but eating the losers in warfare could be seen as nothing more than part of the spoils of war.

Anyway, as I said before, I started seeing some holes in this world view, and came to realize that there were a few things that were absolutely right and wrong, not just socially constructed behaviors that could be changed if we had the wrong people in power (next time you think Derrida is bad, just realize how insufferable he would be if he were the champion of the Overdog. Of course he is, but at least he pretends not to be. Must be his social construction). Of course it starts with basics like social order, some respect for life, then along comes the impossible (condensed version): this Aquinas fellow is making a whole lot of sense, much more than Marx or Mohammed (I had already jettisoned any interest in paganism or the various Eastern world-views - I may have been a relativist, but I never liked Wiccans, and my serious interest in Buddhism was short-lived). So, next thing you know, you follow this stuff and find that you are going to mass every Sunday, going to confession, singing in the choir, and all that.

But you still have this little notion that somehow someone could be wrong, but just misguided, that, since you can think of some outlandish instance where it is difficult to discern wrong from right, then one can hedge on the absoluteness of it all, etc. So, you can congratulate a homosexual couple (you still call them "gay") when they fake a marriage, etc. But you are knowing more and more that something rings hollow. Your intellect is finding its own, but your sentiments are still hopelessly modern American.

Now, when I first encountered the life of Tobias Schneebaum (in Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale), I was already a confirmed anti-relativist, but still mostly on the intellectual level, not deep down: "oh, you know that Hitler, bad news certainly, but I would still loved to have sat down and had a discussion with him. He is still human after all. Love the sinner and all that." Here on the screen I was confronted with this toad of a man, this worm who only once (at least in the documentary) had a little sign of remorse that he had partaken of human flesh (and you got the feeling that a little blast of self-esteem talk and he would be doing another book tour touting the glories of cannibalism).

In this film you got 93 minutes of the glory of homosexuality, of how wonderful relativism is, how nifty it is to be so cosmopolitan and superior to these poor dupes who think that there is such a thing as savagery and civilization, with any dissenting view portrayed as nothing but laughable. It pushed me over the top. Love the sinner, sure, see him as a fallen creature made in the image of God and even still liable to be redeemed, yes, but if you ever wanted a picture of Hate the Sin at the same time, here it was.

Watching this cannibal glow with nostalgia over his sexual escapades in the backwaters and then sniff in a superior way over normal civilized folks is one of those moments where you really have to, at all levels, decide where you stand. I know that from the day I saw that film I became a much less accepting, less affirming, even less tolerant person than I was before, and I contend that I am that much better off for it.

Anyway, thanks to Zorak for making me think of Schneebaum!