Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteFacing civil war, who would not endorse every opportunity to define issues and set to work on them?
Well, Kenya's opposition leader Raila Odinga would not. [1]
In Odinga's head, so one may discern from Reuters reports, there is either nothing to discuss or discussions would not be worth the oxygen consumed: "We will not attend the talks on Friday," he said, "They are a sideshow."
Before one would condemn to death through warfare some mother's son--or, perhaps in the Rift Valley, the mother and father and all their children and as many relatives as possible--one might consider other possibilities:
- Either relegating the past election to audit, resolving the dispute through the courts, or running the election again but with sufficient oversight and accountability from the election start to finish;
- Equivalent affirmative action and the full suite of similar socialist devices designed to reduce discrepencies in economic development and service access across tribal and other lines;
- New Town land requisition and development to alleviate slum conditions wherever they form and help provide for embittered and languishing human beings both the dignity and the rewards associated with productive and socially meaningful and useful work.
- Urban and rural carrying capacity and public health--living with the earth and with ourselves are things societies do as a whole enchilada, and that whether they like it or not.
What, really, is the problem?
Is there an inability to grasp common cause across geographical or tribal boundaries?
Are the fixations on 'bad blood" and revenge so institutionally ingrained through the rants of local politicians or religious leaders that a people who have lived long in peace, albeit with some seriously festering wounds and private axes ground to a fine edge, must now accustom themselves to years, even decades, of aimless posturing and senseless acts of random violence?
Has the capacity for understanding language and how language works been damaged somehow and to the effect that political rhetoric may not be weighed against other indices in states of affairs nor criticized in light of the development of practical solutions focused to redress widespread suffering?
Say it ain't so, Kenya.
To underscore the notion, mine, if no one else's, that the violence so far witnessed in Kenya has other than a political genesis even as it responds to political stimulus, I've included in references Tim Cocks' filing, "Mutiliated bodies found a week after Kenya massacre," in which a farmer's wife discovers the decapitated and hacked remains of her husband.
The feral sadism contained in and communicated through that violence has in Kenya no foundation in either military or political philosophy. Terrifying though it may be, it is not "terrorism" but far rather the Dionysian expression of liberation out of a kind of Hell.
No doubt the world's militaries deny but well know of the intoxication attending revels in blood, that all grown up version of the hunter arm deep in a deer's hot and humid windpipe; it takes an Oliver Stone, however, to spell it in a film like Natural Born Killers.
Crystalizing (through irresponsible rhetoric) the already wayward passions of young men into a ramped up crusade against a scapegoat cut out of equally struggling neighbors may strike as the height of political perversion.
In this too, the whole world suffers with this latest demonstration of the inability of powerful politicians unable to separate their personal bogies and wishes from more remote public interests.
The need for political redress of cast- and class-based grievance would seem a natural part of democratic process from any git-go, but something in the licensing of Kenya's business and political leadership seems to have stalled that, at least to this point, and the result would seem to be the existence of Kibera Slum, an inexcusable construction, and the off-the-hook child's play, Lord of the Flies and Clockwork Orange style, at fascism and murder that played out in Kenya last week.
2. Cocks, Tim. "Mutilated bodies found a week after Kenya massacre." Reuters, January 8, 2008.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
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