Entebbe or not Entebbe

Entebbe or not Entebbe. That is the question. For me it was a no brainer. My wife, Nancy, thought otherwise. That is why I found myself tagging along like the tail on a comet, headed for Uganda’s Murchison Falls, Kibale Forest, Queen Elizabeth National Park, and ultimately, the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest to track gorillas.

Frankly, I was nervous. I mistrusted Uganda. This was the home of Idi Amin less than 28 years ago. A little more than a month ago Alice Lakwena, the warrior priestess who convinced her followers that she could protect them from bullets by anointing them with oil, died in a Kenyan refugee camp. But her spirit lives on in her cousin, Joseph Kony, head of the Lord's Rebellion Army. The LRA is still active in Northern Uganda where it has so far been responsible for the displacement of close to two million people, the deaths of tens of thousands and the abduction of 20,000 children, fodder, no doubt, for his army. In an interview Kony said that he was fighting for the Ten Commandments. One of those says, Thou shalt not kill.

The airport at Entebbe is different from most other airports. This is where the Israelis performed their daring raid on February 27, 1974 and freed 289 hostages, killing six hostage takers and 49 of Idi Amin's soldiers in the process. Of course, the raid did not take place in the new and bustling building that I walked through after my arrival on 21 February 2007. As I drove out of the airport I could see an old, decrepit building with an overgrown landing strip, much shorter than the one my plane had just landed on. This was the site of the raid on Entebbe, made into two Hollywood movies and an Israeli one. Across the road, on the left, was one of the two airplanes used in the raid. This one had the fake markings of the Ugandan air force painted on by the Israelis. The plane is a memorial that can't quite decide if it really wants to be. If I hadn't asked, we would have passed right by it. There isn't so much as a placard marking the spot. What would it be a memorial to? Maybe that's the problem.

Curtains of lake flies hung over the road. A flight stewardess had warned us about the hordes of mosquitoes hovering everywhere. Had these really been mosquitoes, Entebbe would have been a perfect surrogate for one of Dante's circles of hell. The flies were certainly the size of mosquitoes. They even looked a bit like mosquitoes. But they were harmful to no one, churning away in the air looking for nothing other than a mate. They struck me as a sad lot, rising from the lake's environs, frantically shifting in the air like miniature schools of fish, mating and then dying, all in the course of one day. Does it seem longer to them? Are they exhausted after all that seeking and rutting? Are they just as glad the end is near? And what is the point of nature's joke: packing a lifetime into a single sunrise and sunset?

The Earth is a peculiar place.

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Rituals and Resources on Easter Island

When the Dutch explorer, Jakob Roggeveen, came to Easter Island in 1722 he observed—that is before his men gunned down a dozen of them—the islanders lighting fires in front of the Moais. They were kneeling before the figures like modern day monks clasping their palms together before the Buddha. It was the Roggeveen encounter that led a 52 year old sprightly islander to row out to meet Captain Cook a quarter of a century later when his ship moored off Ranga Hoa and ask: Have you come to kill us?

That question reported in Cook’s diaries sticks in my memory. It is so straightforward, so to the point. Its implication is: We recognize that you are willing and able to kill us. We merely want to know what to expect. This is a question one might put to a god; for example, to the god who asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, or to the god who went Abraham one better and actually sacrificed his only son. Cook had the good graces to say no.

The downfall of Moai worship coincided with the rise of the Birdman cult whose central ritual involved retrieving the first egg laid by the Sooty Tern, a migratory bird that returned to Motonui every summer in September. Motonui is a tiny island several hundred yards offshore. Several hopu manu—those chosen to take part in the ritual—prepared for the competition by retreating into hand-made windowless chambers, so small a five-foot hopu manu couldn’t stand up in one. After weeks of isolation, at the designated time, the hopu manu climbed down the steep sides of the Rano Kao volcano, swam out to Motonui, waited for the birds to lay, grabbed an egg and tried to return to Easter Island without breaking it. The first one back did not become the Birdman of the year. He was merely the agent of the real Birdman. The real Birdman would then go into isolation for an entire year. His spouse could not visit him for 5 months. He could not bathe during that entire time and during that time he was covered in white paint, his head shaved and his finger and toenails uncut.

Whatever the significance of this complicated rite, it supplanted the Moai cult for a time only to die itself. The last race for the Sooty Tern egg was in 1862.

I think the reason for all these rituals, from Moai to Birdman to our own, is that for most people life is a crushing deprivation. The resources one commands are never enough. Deprived of real income, rituals are a way for people to acquire a different kind of income, psychic income. It is not surprising to me that as the resources on Easter Island diminished, one set of rituals, which had failed them, gave way to another set of rituals, which also failed them. I think resources and rituals are, in general, inversely proportional: the fewer a nation’s resources, the more influential its rituals. In the United States today, for example, I credit the rise of the religious right (pun intended) with the fact that median income levels have essentially been stagnant for the last quarter of a century, this during a period when the migration of wealth to the top 2% of our society has been unprecedented.

Perhaps one doesn’t have to go halfway around the world to experience the decline of Easter Island.

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The Ghosts of Easter Island

In his book, Collapse, Jared Diamond wrote of the mountain from which Easter Island’s Moai were sculpted, “No other site that I have visited made such a ghostly impression on me as Rano Raraku.” Diamond felt as if he had entered a factory “all of whose workers had suddenly quit for mysterious reasons.” The sense of abandonment doesn’t only hang over Rano Raraku. At Hanga Tee o Vaihu, just a few miles away, a statue lies completely intact, as if it, too, had suddenly been abandoned when something more important came along.

Easter Island is the world’s greatest sculpture garden, the work not of a single artist, or even a band of artists, but the work of generations, an entire people. What a pity that it is on the most remote inhabited island on the planet. On the other hand, that is its special appeal. Whatever the message of the Moai, it has to be whispered. Like ghosted notes in music. The world is too far away to hear.

What is the message? Like all oracular messages, it is ambiguous. The Moai stand erect, unbending, a few looking out to sea, but most, their backs to the world, looking island-ward. They are harbingers of order. Things are under control. Don’t worry. Everything is in good hands.

Then there is the chaos. Signs of ancient disruption are everywhere. At Hanga Tee o Vaihu, seven statues have been toppled, rocked forward so that their topknots lay strewn about like random boulders. To add insult to injury, blocks of the ahu, the platforms on which they stood, were strategically placed so that when a statue was toppled, it would be decapitated as well. How angry must one have been to decapitate a statue? Had the Moai failed their people? Chaos rolled in like a sea fog.

That is what is at the heart of my reaction to Easter Island. Amid all this natural beauty, this ceaseless sea, this eternal blue sky, these rolling green hills, as beautiful without their palms as they must have been with them, amid all this paradise, there are quiet signs of chaos, of riot, of violence, of disillusionment, of desperation, of despair, ultimately of resignation. As Dostoyevsky’s novels attest, humanity is capable of the greatest heights and the greatest depths. That is the lesson of Easter Island.

An archaeologist told me that Easter Island made him sad. He didn’t know why. It just did. I asked his colleague if Easter Island had the same effect on her. She said no. When she was back home in Chile, she felt nostalgia for the island. She missed the sound of the sea’s drumbeat against the shore. But when she was on Easter Island, she missed the noise of the city. She thinks of place in terms of its sounds. She told me that one day, when she was walking with her fellow researchers in the center of the island, suddenly, as if on command, everyone fell silent. They were listening to the absence of sound. That, she said, was the sound of the people who had lived there, the ones who raised the Moais. She told me that they all had this uncanny feeling of walking amid a crowd of ghosts, just like Jared Diamond. Diamond and the island’s researchers are right. Ghosts are everywhere: the ghosts of the people who raised the Moais, the ghosts of the trees that once covered the hills and the ghosts of the Moais that have yet to be restored, the ones that lie face down in the earth like prisoners of war.

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Easter Island

Our plane, a Boeing 676, lands on the longest runway in Polynesia. It happens to be on Easter Island, one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world. The runway was extended by the United States in 1986 to accommodate the space shuttle in case of an emergency. The shuttle has never used it.

People are always going to the highest this, the lowest that, the farthest other, impelled, perhaps, by a grass is always greener mentality. That is not why people come to Easter Island now. They come to see the Moai, those 70 ton plus monsters that the island’s ancestors ripped from the sides of the volcano, Rano Raraku, the way God ripped Eve from the side of Adam. These massive stone statues stand along the coastline with their backs to the sea as if they were ignoring the world around them. Staring impassively inward, the Moai are why Easter Island is the world’s largest work of public art, not a small achievement for a race of people who lived and may even have died doing it.

The island is a Rorschach test. Visitors project onto it what they need to see. Optimists see Easter Island as an example of resilience. The island is, after all, returning to life. There are now 4,000 people living on it, up from the 111of 1877. These people co-exist with 3,000 cows and 2,000 horses. Downtown Hanga Roa has several bars and our hotel will be torn down in April to be replaced by a modern one. On some days 5,000 passengers from visiting cruise ships descend like locust. Like contemporary Italy, where one out of four jobs is in the tourist trade thanks to the magnificent artists of the Italian renaissance of 500 years ago, so, too, will modern Easter Island continue to live and even thrive off the creations of its artists 500 years ago.

So speak the optimists.

Who are the pessimists? Jared Diamond is one. In his book, Collapse, he sees in Easter Island a parable of Mother Earth. Like Easter Island our planet is a precarious eco-system that will soon be unable to sustain its 6.3 billion and still growing population. We are threatened by climatic change in the form of global warming, by a disintegrating ozone layer as a result of manmade hydrocarbons, by the loss of our major source of energy in the form of oil. Diamond sees in this all the elements of imminent collapse, just as Easter Island collapsed by the 18th century when all the trees had vanished. The world has become a place where cowboys fight in the arroyo while the dam has burst. It is only a matter of time before the floodwaters are upon us.

For Diamond Easter Island was a culture so intent on building Moai that it was oblivious to the destruction the enterprise was wreaking—cutting down trees to manage and move the statues until there were no trees left. The population dwindled from thousands in the 16th century to 111 in the 19th. For Diamond Easter Island is a warning sign, a fire alarm, a railroad-crossing bell. He warns us to take its lesson to heart, to wake up before it is too late.

I ran across an article in Science recently that offered another account of the deforestation of Easter Island. In a word it was rats. The islanders brought the rats and the rats ate the seeds that made the trees. After awhile, there were 20 million rats and no seeds. That’s where all the trees went. I prefer this hypothesis. It is the most elegant of the two. But does that mean Diamond’s pessimism is uncalled for?

Depends on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist.

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