Books I can’t face

have a pretty strong stomach as a reader: I’ve read books about the killings in Rwanda and Cambodia, and I have a shelf of books on the Holocaust. But there are some books I feel I should read but just can’t face. Not yet, at least. One of these is Medical Apartheid by Harriet A. Washington.

I knew about the Tuskegee experiments, but not about Thomas Jefferson exposing slaves to an experimental smallpox vaccine. And I certainly didn’t know about more recent medical experiments on black people. From the Washington Post:

In 1945, Ebb Cade, an African American trucker being treated for injuries received in an accident in Tennessee, was surreptitiously placed without his consent into a radiation experiment sponsored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Black Floridians were deliberately exposed to swarms of mosquitoes carrying yellow fever and other diseases in experiments conducted by the Army and the CIA in the early 1950s. Throughout the 1950s and ‘60s, black inmates at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison were used as research subjects by a University of Pennsylvania dermatologist testing pharmaceuticals and personal hygiene products; some of these subjects report pain and disfiguration even now. During the 1960s and ‘70s, black boys were subjected to sometimes paralyzing neurosurgery by a University of Mississippi researcher who believed brain pathology to be the root of the children’s supposed hyperactive behavior. In the 1990s, African American youths in New York were injected with Fenfluramine — half of the deadly, discontinued weight loss drug Fen-Phen — by Columbia researchers investigating a hypothesis about the genetic origins of violence.

I’m sure it’s an important book, and I’m sure I’ll read it sometime. Just not now.

Change in Zimbabwe, at last

When I first went to Zimbabwe, in 1990, I had spent the previous several years raising funds for political prisoners in South Africa and Namibia. I was an admirer of Robert Mugabe because of his support for the ANC, and because he had overturned the expectations of people who expected him to be a tinpot dictator. He had improved health and education in the rural areas, welcomed foreign investors, and given farms back to white commercial farmers who had fled the country. I was troubled by the massacres a few years earlier in Matabeleland — in retrospect I should have been a lot more troubled — but I thought Zimbabwe could have ended up with a leader much worse than Mugabe.

By the end of my six months in the country, I had changed my mind. It was an election year, and thugs belonging to the ruling party’s “youth league” were intimidating and beating up supporters of the opposition. The opposition candidate for vice president was shot, though he survived. Other people who were inconvenient to the government tended to die in car crashes, sometimes in collisions with armored vehicles.

Joshua Nkomo, the widely respected leader of the ZAPU party, had been harmlessly neutralized as a minister without portfolio. I saw him at a ceremony for the tenth anniversary of the country’s independence — a huge sad man in a suit, staring at his lap. Meanwhile the ruling ZANU party was finishing construction on a new and brutal-looking tower in Harare.

Eighteen long years later, Zimbabwe’s economy is in ruins and its people starving. When I was there, the largest bill in general circulation was a blue note worth twenty Zimbabwean dollars. As I recall, it was worth about ten dollars. In January this year, the government printed new money:

On Jan. 18, Zimbabwe’s reserve bank put a $10 million bill into general circulation, a maroon-tinged piece of paper with a sketch of water gushing through a dam that might well have symbolized the escaping value of the note itself. Worth enough at the time to buy a chicken, it now will barely buy a few eggs, with a value of about 40 cents.

As I write, Mugabe has admitted that ZANU has lost control of Parliament, but he has not yet stepped down. I hope he does so soon, that there is a peaceful transition of power, and that foreign governments and aid agencies provide the country with help that actually promotes development and not debt and dependency.

Days of Heaven

Days of Heaven has been one of my favorite movies since I first saw it at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge. When it played a few months ago at the Film Forum in New York, Jenn and I went to see it and noticed Willem Dafoe in the audience. I was amazed at how well I remembered practically every scene, including seemingly random images like the silvery, shivery catspaw that brushes for a second across the surface of a pond.

The eerie voiceover by Linda Manz — 16 years old but playing a somewhat younger girl — is the heart of the movie, as Robert Ebert pointed out in a sensitive essay. I was pleased that he was so struck by one of the same passages that struck me, when Linda (the character shares the actress’s name) is escaping with her grown brother and his lover on a raft. Linda’s curiosity has survived the traumas she’s seen, but any empathy for strangers is gone, or at least dimmed.

The sun looks ghostly when there’s a mist on the river and everything’s quiet. I never knowed it before. And you could see people on the shore but it was far off and you couldn’t see what they were doing. They were probably calling for help or something or they were trying to bury somebody or something.

In the last scene, Linda has escaped in the early morning from a heartless foster home and has met a new friend by the railroad tracks. Linda has nothing and no one, but she is concerned about her friend.

This girl she didn’t know where she was goin’ or what she was gonna do. She didn’t have no money or nothin’. Maybe she’d meet up with a character. I was hoping things would work out for her. She was a good friend of mine.

I got a little teary when I saw that scene, just as I did the first time more than twenty years ago.