The year of the Ape Man
by David Benjamin
“I am as free as nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.”
— John Dryden, Conquest of Granada (1672)
MADISON,
Wis. — Lately, my know-it-all attitude has been getting me into
trouble. A high-school friend accused me of elitism for flaunting my
vocabulary and looking down my nose at Donald Trump’s less-than-erudite
fans.
Of course, right away, Tarzan came to mind.
The
imagery of the “noble savage” has been a staple of Western culture since
More, Milton and Montaigne. It’s been appropriated by social engineers,
Marxists, racists, outlaw bikers and NewAgers. It was trashed by Hobbes
and vilified by Dickens: “His virtues are a fable; his happiness is a
delusion; his nobility, nonsense.”
Traditionally, the noble
savage is brown, black, yellow, red — providing a sublime contrast to
the overly couth dandy who has lost touch not only with nature, but with
God and his own humanity. As Baron de Lahontan (an effete honky if ever
there was one), wrote, the noble savage “… looks with compassion on
poor civilized man — no courage, no strength, incapable of providing
himself with food and shelter: a degenerate, a moral cretin, a figure of
fun in his blue coat, his red hose, his black hat, his white plume and
his green ribands… For science and the arts are but the parents of
corruption. The Savage obeys the will of Nature, his kindly mother,
therefore he is happy. It is civilized folk who are the real
barbarians…”
Literature has long glorified the innocence,
resourcefulness, uncluttered intellect and rugged sex appeal of the
romantic primitive. Adam and Eve were our first noble savages, ruined by
the serpent-hung Tree of Knowledge. Voltaire, in Candide,
celebrated the insightful clarity of the unschooled ingénue. Kipling
gave us Mowgli. Fenimore Cooper created Natty Bumppo, whose woodsy
Mohican sidekick, Chingachgook, bestowed all the education Hawkeye would
ever need. In Moby Dick, a pallid and pusillanimous protagonist
learns life from Queequeg, a worldly-wise and racially exotic
harpoon-chucker who can’t read a lick.
Not to mention the simple but perspicacious Tonto turning to his kemo sabe and saying, “What do you mean ‘we,’ paleface?”
For
20th-century Americans, however, this ideal is neither aboriginal nor
alien. He’s Johnny Weismuller, the Olympic swimmer whom MGM cast as the
second cinema Tarzan (after the forgotten Elmo Lincoln).
Tarzan’s
author, Edgar Rice Burroughs, conceived him as a suave English gent
wearied by the pomp and pretense of high society. To cure his malaise,
he trades in tweeds for loincloth and moves to the heart of darkness,
where he might have languished forever as a pulp-fiction curiosity.
Hollywood, however — with a keener grasp than Burroughs of le bon sauvage
— stripped Tarzan’s Oxford veneer, reduced him to monosyllabic purity
and rendered him as a foundling Romulus raised by gorillas.
Hollywood’s
Tarzan transformation gave ordinary white folks, in a fiercely
segregated world, a noble savage who looks like them and sounds even
dumber. This flattering variation prevailed ’til the Tarzan franchise
lost Weismuller, sank into B-movie farce and lost its mojo. Since then,
no comparable icon has risen to take Tarzan’s place — ’til now.
Donald
Trump has turned the myth topsy-turvy. Before the Trump epiphany, the
sickly urbanite — stuffed with book-learning, lounging in his gazebo,
sipping sherry and snuffling up organic arugula — was white. Now,
suddenly, that yuppie snob stultified by civilization has emerged as a
darkskinned poseur. He’s mocha-colored, Harvard-cured, condescending,
politically correct and ludicrously out of touch with the silent and
suffering but nobly ignorant and rurally pure masses…
… of white guys.
Donald
Trump has cornered the market on romantic primitivism and roared —
without irony — at the top of his lungs: “I love the poorly educated!”
Trump has seen the savagery that infects men who’ve been displaced,
confused and enraged by 21st-century globalism, and he’s declared it
noble.
Rousseau’s “good wild man” is now the embittered
workingman who can’t earn a living wage in the digital, cybernetic and
multinational economy. Today, the noble savage is a jobless hardhat who
stands gazing at a vast mothballed steel mill the way a Sioux brave once
scowled forlornly at a great plain bereft of buffalo. The noble savage
today is a smalltown big-box stocker with a wallet full of food stamps,
shuffling past the Walmart-shuttered storefronts on Main Street. Like
the native plainsman, today’s noble savage is blessed with resources no
longer valued.
He was a warrior who, blindfolded, could assemble
an M-16 in two minutes. But he’s been discharged. He has a GED in a
Master’s-degree era. He’s a stand-up guy who, in a bygone paradise,
could split a rail in one blow, shoe a horse, dress a hog, deliver a
calf in a blizzard and shoot the feelers off a fly from a hundred yards.
And swing from tree to tree?
The
noble savage, ca. 2016, doesn’t get Jane. He doesn’t even get
introduced. It’s too cold to live in a tree. He can’t survive on bananas
and coconuts. And the natives don’t like him any more than he likes
them. Only Donald Trump —who needs the votes — thinks this chronic loser
is any nobler than the next slob in the mob.
The noble savage, ca. 2016, isn’t Tarzan, but he might be Blackhawk.
Pushed
westward by white civilization and denied the lands and game that had
sustained his tribe for eons, the great Indian general waged a
brilliant, futile war against a bungling but far more numerous U.S.
militia. After his defeat, Blackhawk consented to a “goodwill tour.” His
captors paraded him through Eastern cities, exhibiting him to gawking
crowds, petty dignitaries and bigoted plutocrats as the essential,
authentic noble savage. Everyone was magnanimous to Blackhawk, because
they knew — better, and sooner, than he — that he was already extinct.
If you ask Dickens, he never existed at all.
Saturday, July 23, 2016
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