May 2009

Pirates

I had to laugh when Rachel Maddow pointed out the absurdity of negotiating with pirates. The Somali pirates who had taken an American captain hostage were supposed to have traded him for one of their colleagues, but when the time came to make the swap, the pirates welshed on the deal. “True to their word, the crew let the pirate go,” Maddow said with her trademark arched eyebrow. “But the pirates, they’re pirates! They did not keep their word.”

But as the pirate-hostage-standoff continued, it was clearly no laughing matter, though that did not keep Stephen Colbert from noting sardonically that the rescue had been successful and that “and no one was hurt—I assume it doesn’t hurt when you’re shot in the head by snipers.”

There’s something about the concept of pirates that has always struck us as glamorous—think Johnny Depp playing Keith Richards—as well as amusing—think Pirate Alphabet—so perhaps no one knew how to react when it turned out that the new pirate was not a bedraggled white man with a parrot but in the case of the last surviving Somali pirate, who has been brought to the U.S. to stand trial, a skinny, smiling, harmless-looking African man who bears only a faint resemblance to the guy on the Pirate’s Booty bag.

In the midst of all the celebrations of Captain Phillips’ release, it was hard not to think about the three pirates who had been killed, and to wonder what kind of socio-economic conditions would drive a young man with a big smile to piracy on the high seas. Apparently, Somalia is, in Maddow’s words, “a mess,” with “no government,” and Mohamed Abshir Waldo, a Somali consultant and analyst, has alleged that piracy there is the logical consequence of “illegal fishing and toxic dumping by western ships” off Somalia’s coast that have destroyed the local economy. Conditions are apparently so bad in Somalia that Ken Quinn, the navigation officer of the rescued ship, remarked that while he is “mad because, you know, I could have been dead right now,” his anger isn’t directed specifically at the surviving pirate because “he’s just a skinny little guy, you know, from Somalia where they’re all starving and stuff.” He added that in his opinion, if the pirate goes to jail in the U.S., “it will be a whole lot better than living in Somalia.”

In the same news cycle as the pirate story was an item that got considerably less attention, the suicides of 1,500 farmers in the state of Chattisgarh in India. Evidently, the water level in Chattisgarh has gone down so dramatically that farmers can’t continue farming. Most of the farmers have had to go into debt with predatory lenders to finance seeds and other supplies, and their only hope of repaying these loans is a successful harvest. In the words of one villager, “Most of the farmers here are indebted, and only God can save the ones who do not have a bore well.”

What is behind the decreasing water levels? As everyone who has seen Lagaan knows, India has traditionally had a vexed relationship with rainfall. But perhaps more significant culprits are the environmental impacts of development, the privatization of water, the depletion of forests, and a host of other complex factors that have accompanied India’s economic miracle.

While some Indians were upset by the message of Slumdog Millionaire, which did not show India at its best and failed to point out that plenty of other countries also have terrible poverty, it is clear that India’s economic boom has not extended to all its citizens. On my trip to India last year, I came across plenty of children begging in the streets, often in heavy traffic, and over a year later, their little voices still play endlessly in my head: “Madam! Madam!” or worse still, “Mama!”

As the birthplace of Buddhism, India is often associated with compassion, so it is not surprising that a documentary filmmaker I know who lives in Delhi is making a film about their plight. But I was shocked to hear a Mumbaiker, a friend of a friend, opine that the farmers who committed suicide were just a bunch of “stupid monkeys.” He seemed to think that the farmers had brought their problems upon themselves and ought to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, though he failed to note that they could not have afforded boots.

It’s hard to traverse the crowded streets of Delhi or Mumbai without wondering how people can live surrounded by such terrible suffering. How can anyone stand to see the crowded slums, the crippled men on the pavement, the women holding drugged babies and begging for spare change? I was still wondering this one day as I waited at a stoplight in Bethesda and barely glanced at a scruffy man with a cardboard sign in the median. Then I knew how they did it—we do it here, too, every day, and the Indian people who were furious at America’s self-righteous response to Slumdog were, in my opinion, quite justified in condemning us for our hypocrisy.

In the same news cycle as the pirates and farmers were the teabaggers, the rightwing fake-grassroots (“Astroturf”) movement protesting taxation on April 15. I found this protest confusing, given that the tax laws in effect for 2008 had been crafted by Republicans, though the protest seemed to be directed toward President Obama. It’s never been clear to me in general what rightwing people have against taxation: they claim they want smaller government, but according to a recent report, out of every tax dollar, only 3.1 cents goes for government, whereas the largest percentage, 29.4 cents on the dollar, goes to military spending (and an additional 7.9 cents on military debt), a cause presumably dear to their hearts.

So the protesters’ claims of resisting taxation because of objections to “big government” seemed disingenuous at best. Teabagging may—like piracy—be caused by social conditions such as high unemployment, lack of health insurance, and general malaise (or perhaps, as Jeanine Garafalo hypothesized on Keith Olbermann’s show, racism). The teabaggers, much like the pirates, have found an expression of their suffering that essentially blames the wrong people, expressing free-floating hostility at targets like Obama, who is not responsible for Republican tax policies or for the economic crisis the Bush administration engendered, or at stockbrokers, and before that, at people who defaulted on their mortgages, and perennially, at immigrants.

But who is really to blame for these global economic conditions that have driven everyone to madness? Might it be the corporations that have overfished and polluted the Somalian seas? Corporations that continually displace rural and indigenous people in India, driving them into the slums of Mumbai? Corporations that made predatory mortgage and credit card loans to overworked, underpaid Americans who could not otherwise keep up their steadily declining standard of living? Corporations that moved overseas to avoid paying American taxes? Corporations that took TARP money and then awarded themselves bonuses?

As we prosecute that smiling Somalian man who was evidently delighted to reach our shores, I think we need to ask ourselves just who the real pirates are.

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