AFTER SEEING ENDGAME THE MOVIE

Have just now finished seeing a film, Endgame, of South Africa in the time of the transfer of power from Botha to deKlerk. A kind of bio-pic with handheld camera, often with the feeling of seeing the visuals by way of surveillance cameras or somebody wearing a lapel-cam. Very much a feeling of you-are-there. Mandela in prison, Thabo Mbeki negotiates with negotiators from the government. It showed the threats, the near-misses, the valley of the shadow of death that Thabo Mbeki walked through, and everyone concerned in the movement walked through with him. Many didn't make it. It was similar to the American civil rights movement. Martin Luther King walked through the valley of the shadow of death and didn't make it. Lone gunman again, and again.  The film was acted well by good actors, directed five star and photographed the equal. I felt the immediacy of every scene filmed as though we're overhearing private conversations from both sides of the fence. The walls had ears was known everywhere we went. Very little went by unseen. Often it felt like seeing the scene through a surveillance camera in a tree or planted out of sight in a room. It gave a sense of danger from both sides. "If you'll stop your terrorism we can talk peace." "If you'll stop your police brutality we'll stop our terrorism." Negotiations were stuck throughout Botha's administration. He had a stroke and exited the story. DeKlerk came next and agreed to ANC's will, let Nelson Mandela go free to be swept into the president's office of South Africa. He was about as welcome to white South Africans as Obama is to white Americans. The slur-words are taking over. No danger of it there and no danger of it here. The propaganda of fear was thick in the air.

The film gave a sense that it was put together by an investigative reporter who spliced the scenes from surveillance videos into the story told, scene by scene. I was especially interested in its historical value, seeing visuals of what the news was telling and not telling in that time. I've seen several films, both drama and documentary, read of that period in South African history, the end of the apartheid system, freeing Nelson Mandela.. This one tells a serious story, like the others, though in such a visual presentation it gives a subliminal experience of how it feels to know you're being watched everywhere at all times. A spooky film in that way. This one, Endgame, I could watch again for the visuals without sound. I don't recall seeing anything like it. I'm glad I wasn't put here with Nelson Mandela's mission. He was a soul of deep wisdom. In the turn of the century, Time magazine made much of Man of the Century. It seemed to me Mandela did the most powerful deed by surviving 27 years of hard core prison as a political prisoner and a kafir; he ruled afterward a compassionate leader for the whole country. Of course, man of the century went to a white man, whose name is synonymous with knowledge, not a black man discredited by the press as a communist, that convenient word like terrorism, so easy to discredit somebody with. For Time magazine to name Mandela would have brought a heap of criticism from power circles and a change of staff. I was seeing Mandela in terms of democracy and the future of the whole continent of Africa as well as South Africa. From the American Empire's point of view, Africa is for exploitation only, not democracy. I have no argument with Einstein. After all, his mathematical discovery changed everything, like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That's remarkably significant. Power.

I believe I can say in truth that Nelson Mandela is the only public figure of any country, that I've known of, I have respected in my lifetime. Nobody in Europe. Nobody in Asia, Nobody in the Middle East. Only Nelson Mandela in Africa. I put my finger on Mandela for his true public service as opposed to self-service and service to power and money. People like him are not appreciated in circles of power and money. Alas, they serve the enemy of the power and money set, the rest of us, the pitchfork army. People  in the political world who actually serve the people run the risk of assassination. It often happens. Mandela anticipated every day his last, as did Mbeki. It was PW Botha to die of a stroke first, his death opening the door to democracy in South Africa. I'm recalling a reggae song from the Botha period by Bunny Wailer, President Botha is the mosquito who annihilate Africa...with the deadly bite spreads the disease of apartheid. Mandela became president, though white wealth maintained power. Like Obama the American black president is powerless at the table of white wealth, Mandela was too. In the end, only appearance and propaganda changed. I grew up in a world operated by a belief system that only white is all right, held to as jealously as there's only one way to the pearly gates. From earliest childhood I can recall having empathic feelings toward people of other races, the huge majority of people on earth, because the people of my world looked so far down on them. I was three when I stayed with my young mother not long out of high school in a vast trailer park at Camp Lejeune for the returning troops with wives able to visit them upon return from the Pacific war (an odd oxymoron). Two black women took care of house cleaning in the trailers. They were the first dark skinned people of my experience, including porters on the train who were friendly mysteries. These two women were attentive with the little kid and the kid loved seeing them. One night the shed they kept their cleaning equipment in burned down and I never saw them again.

I can remember mother and grandmother talking down about them like they were about the same as children and I was disappointed they didn't understand these were wonderful people. 1945 was a long time before civil rights consciousness. My parents' racism was polite, not vehement. A lot of white Southern kids and white kids all over America in that time were questioning the black people being kept down when they were good people. Pushed down into poverty, street crime pops up, a good public relations excuse to push them down further and round them up into prisons, the American version of concentration camps. Racism never made sense to me in any phase of my lifetime. In childhood I was taught to fall in line with the belief that black people were the bottom class of people, American untouchables. I didn't know any black kids until 1954, the seventh grade, when black kids were made to leave their schools and go to the white schools of the district they lived in. Black kids were scared and white kids were scared. Jocks and toughguy white kids threatened the black kids causing them to stay together in gangs for self-defense. Then, as gangs, they became aggressive and back and forth it went. The white nerds without jock protection would be bullied by the black gangs as well as the white jocks. The black kids not inclined to gangs had to go with them anyway for their own self-defense. All the parents were scared for their girls. Martin Luther King and forced integration did not end racism in America. Nelson Mandela could not end racism in South Africa. As things are going now, it looks like it will be a long time in centuries before racism is over. Things have a way of changing unpredictably like the wind.      

 

 

 

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NELSON MANDELA WAS HERE

I don't know what to say, but I have to say something. The day a celebrity dies is not necessarily something I feel sad about, remembering the time my aunt gave me hell up one side and down the other for not knowing Conway Twitty died that day. All I know about Conway Twitty is his singing voice. I made a mental note of it the day I heard Eudora Welty died, but didn't give anybody a lecture for not hearing about it. I turned the radio on BBC radio in the night and learned Nelson Mandela had died. That, I took note of, remembering first thing, when Time magazine declared Einstein the Man of the 20th Century, I felt they'd missed it. My own personal pick for the man of the 20th Century was Nelson Mandela. Yes, Einstein was a great physicist, and yes, he wrote enough about world peace to fill a thick book, but as man of the century, I feel like his greatest contribution was to give us a new word for genius: Einstein. He's an important man looked at historically. Einstein was also on the tame side of the fence. He didn't lead demonstrations and make white people anxious. He assisted white people in blowing up yellow people. Also, by the end of the century, Einstein's name had become a product, and Mandela's name only meant disturbing news, black people rising up. Memories of Custer's Last Stand. White people don't forgive such behavior. Since I suffer from Oppositional Defiance Disorder, Mandela's humanity is more important to me than his pigmentation. His color has no importance to me other than thinking it's beautiful. I would like to have seen him in person, just to see his actual skin tone. It is different from one color photograph to another due to lighting and film, and, in the digital age, manipulation.  

 

 

 

 

Nelson Mandela is the only celebrity I know of whose hand I wanted to shake, to honor him and to feel his energy. I know his hands were hard as rock, like a coal miner' hands and a hillbilly farmer's hands, people I respect. Mandela broke rocks into gravel with a sledgehammer every day for I don't know how many years. He spent 27 years in hard core prison for BLACK political prisoners, Robben Island, nearly all of it spent making little rocks out of big rocks with a hammer. South African white people hated the kafirs and oppressed them as our country does the Indians, as Australian white people do the Aborigines, as the Chinese do the Tibetans. Racism is not just an American thing. We are the people of the world. American white racism  crossed the ocean as English racism in particular. Racism has been a big issue all the way through the 20th Century all over the world, though in denial largely. It didn't appear to me that racism was dealt with in the American Civil Rights movement where the agenda  was legal rights. Television helped keep racism under the rug. It kinda looks like racism is up for  being dealt with in this time. Even television is declaring racism evil and coming down on racists like it's the Sin of the Year. Corporate board rooms allowed black people into commercials, movies and tv shows, but it didn't change racism. Calling racism evil, as they're doing now, just gives it the golden glow of taboo, gives it energy, enlivens it. Political correctness in the white middle class is mere boutique activism, a social checklist to go by for being thought cool. Black people all over the world live under the boot of white oppression at work, in government, in business, in the ghetto, in prison, at home. Colonialism lives.

 

 

I cannot help but respect a man who defied (Oppositional Defiance Disorder) the authority of South African institutional apartheid. Mandela was criticized in his retirement because in a few years he had not diminished poverty among the black people, etc., but South Africa is no longer under white rule, the troop carriers don't unleash a white firing squad on a black community shooting anybody running or standing still. He made the change possible and turned it over to his black brothers and sisters to make it work---it's what you wanted, here it is. When it comes to hopeless and helpless, I can take the feeling about as long as I can take breaking rocks with a hammer. One day would be more than enough for me. Mandela did it one day every day for a lot of years. He learned about hopelessness and about helplessness for a very long time, an eternity seen from inside that time. His story is the story of Job, the guy God turned over to the devil. I doubt Mandela had a hard time figuring out who the devil was. I expect, from words he is quoted to have said, he eventually found that devil in himself and became free within. Job's experience was his enlightenment, and Mandela's experience was his enlightenment. Not often do we see an enlightened man in political position, or in any kind of position. Not often do we see an enlightened man. His time in prison created situations for his wife, Winnie, that were more than she could handle. She became the representative of somebody she didn't know anymore.

 

 

 

 

My respect for Mandela is for what he went through. I respect all the other people who went through the same but didn't have the political support to come out of it a national hero. The others go home broken old men. My guess is Mandela went into it an advanced soul. I'm even suspecting a soul who came in with the purpose of breaking the bondage of South African apartheid, ready to buy it with a quarter century of making gravel. How he did as top dog in South African government doesn't concern me so much. I'm more interested in Mandela's character than his performance with political power, though from what I've seen he did as well as one man could do. Danny Glover played Mandela in a film made in the past I can't find at netflix. I remember one called Mandela that I can't find at netflix either. Morgan Freeman made a good version of Nelson Mandela in his movie Invictus. Actors presenting Mandela seem to focus their presentation on his character. His character is the most outstanding aspect of who he was. His character is why he was held in high regard around the world, especially in Africa where black people are ok, mostly. Had he not been tucked away in prison over those incendiary years of anti-apartheid activism, he might have been assassinated, might with a high likelihood of success. It's one of those situations that we want to call bad, that he spent 27 years in prison, a target for abuse. But, another way of seeing it is he needed the suffering for the fast lane to the enlightenment he needed to be the one to make the transition from white rule to black rule, a first step toward democracy, in his homeland. He put an end to the systematic apartheid abuse by the South African government with forgiveness.

 

 

 

 

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PAIN AND PLEASURE

morgan freeman as nelson mandela



Today's movie was Clint Eastwoods INVICTUS, a new one with Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon. The story begins with Nelson Mandela's release from 27 years prison at Robben Island, South Africa. I have paid attention to Mandela since the time he was in prison and it looked like he'd never be let out. I was impressed most when he became president of South Africa his refusal to let revenge get in motion when the black people became free to outnumber the whites in elections. He was mild mannered and toned down the popular will among the blacks to strike out and eliminate the whites. Mandela articulated the ridiculous in that approach and actually led the way for the integration of the races. Wise politician is an oxymoron, but that's what he was. He stabilized the country by example and inspiration. Alas, when he was out and Thabo Mbeke took his place was the beginning of political corruption and ineptitude. Mandela's purpose was to raise the people up and have South Africans working together instead of against each other. When the political machine people came in, that was the end of wise government in South Africa. Not much improvement for the black people has happened in Mandela's absence. Again, a founding father of genius to pass the nation to self-focused politicians, until in the American case Alice's Tea Party rises against a president who puts the nation first because he's the N-word, which word I'm sure is the password in Alice's Tea Party.



I used to have an issue with Clint Eastwood for making movies devoid of emotional experience. He must have seen it too, because that started to change from movie to movie. This one had emotional tugs all the way through, legitimately, not cheep Hollywood shots. There is the occasional obligatory American need to explain the obvious to be sure you don't miss it. It's a Hollywood truism that you must explain the obvious. In Hollywood they know very well about the American attention span, the level of American education that sinks in. In journalism courses it is taught to keep writing level down to the level of 4th grade comprehension. And they operate by cliches that work, like if it bleeds it leads. It's not like that's worse than any place else. It's no different in other countries. Like Ronald Reagan said justifying his regime at the end, "It could have been worse." Yeah. Eastwood's film had less than half a dozen of those American moments that say, in case you don't get it, here it is spelled out. Shakespeare did that all the time. I found every verbal enigma I came upon reading him was explained within a few lines. He made himself perfectly clear to his audiences that were largely illiterate but for the ruling class. He wrote to both. Hollywood does too.



I have to give this film 5 stars because of Morgan Freeman's rendering of Nelson Mandela that gave much insight into Mandela himself. Also because of Clint Eastwood's correction of his dearth of feeling in the films. Of course, he came out of the action genre into drama and they're different. The only emotion an action film plays to is fear. Other feelings distract. After UNFORGIVEN I quit watching Eastwood films because I found them consistently flat emotionally. MILLION DOLLAR BABY began to have some fairly strong emotion going on. By the time of this one, I find Eastwood cured. He has a good balance in his films now. I've never experienced a Clint Eastwood film until now that fully satisfies me as a worthwhile film. He named it after a poem he described "Victorian" that he passed to Matt Damon's character to study the poem that kept Mandela going through all the years of prison. It's title was INVICTUS, written by William Ernest Henley (1849-1902), English, from Gloucester. The poem has some powerful meaning, as did Mandela. You can find it online googling: invictus poem. Goes straight to it. This movie INVICTUS demonstrates that Eastwood has reached his potential he'd been working toward like on a staircase, one step at a time. Morgan Freeman was exactly right for Nelson Mandela. Freeman gave me glimpses of the silence in Nelson Mandela after 27 years of living in silence, nobody to speak to, only berated and knocked down.



Mandela, himself, made his prison cell into a monk's cell and came out of it a wise man. It's said that wisdom comes from suffering. The Buddha said this world is characterized by suffering. I take it to mean, then, that this world is the path to enlightenment, because it's all about suffering, our great teacher. I recall a time I was bent over with kidney stone pain for 40 hours. Came out of it with a little bit of wisdom I didn't go into it with. The 7 months of sorrow after Jr left the body taught me a very great deal too. It's like suffering drives us deeper into ourselves. I come out of it knowing myself a little better, a little better understanding. A bit of grace. The pain cleared my mind of its ongoing nigglings of memories, motivations, desires, worries in general. When the pain subsided, my mind came back. I hadn't realized how clear it had been through that time of pain. When mind came back, I wanted the pain again, but settled for mind. Didn't like the pain that much. When I see people with multiple piercings and tattoos I wonder if pain is a rush for them. There's enough pain going around in everyday life, I can't see paying somebody to help me feel pain. I wonder too, if pain is an affirmation of existence. It says: I exist. If so, an awful lot of people must question their own existence and need something to nail themselves to it. It couldn't possibly mean there isn't enough pain living in this world and we have to go out and buy some from time to time to feel existence. That's a little too complex for me.



A spiritual master named Upasni Maharaj recommended regarding pleasure as pain and pain as pleasure to help to hurry oneself along the Path. I've thought about that for years. I believe there is something to it, but I've never felt tempted the first time to try it. I can't quite get my mind around it. I suspect there might be something to it, like one of those things you can't foresee the benefit of. You have to try it on faith. On the other side, it's a deeper, more inclusive way of seeing. I have no inclination to martyr myself to pain because I have convinced myself it's pleasure. Maybe so, but I don't get it. I'm not one to go to S&M bars looking for somebody to beat me up so I can feel the pleasure of pain. The only way I can see that is twisted. I'd rather go on in ways I can believe a little bit and aren't so severely neurotic. I'm not one to sit cross-legged and practice little rituals. I think I prefer to face it straight on like Jr did. That's one of the aspects of who he was that I admired, even something I hope I learned and assimilated from his example.