The best works of art strike you the wrong way…and maybe not
in the way that the artist intended.
I had that feeling reading Douglas Preston’s Lost
City of the Monkey God (hereinafter LCMG).
LCMG is a purpose-built celebration of archaeology,
technology, and adventure in the detection and partial exploration of some
ruins in the jungle in Honduras. But as
the book plays out, the whole thing plays out as a rather creepy calculated geopolitical
operation.
The basic adventure premise—buncha white folk appropriate a
region and its history thanks to their superior capabilities in exploration,
interpretation, and conservation—is pretty much de trop in the post Edward Said/Orientalism
era. And the book suffers from the “gee
whiz another benighted realm conquered by the forces of civilization”
cheerleading.
Add to that the whole milsec overlay a.k.a. “flabby
civilians must rely on the hard men of the military to keep them safe” which
starts with the entire foray into the jungle getting put under the command of
some ex-SAS types, whose legacy of mad survival skillz probably goes back to doing
the dirty during the Malay insurgency.
Beyond the “civilization would not survive without the
soldiers” vibe I picked up, the key technology that made the mission possible—lidar—is
a core military capability.
Lidar is basically radar using lasers instead of
microwaves. Add high precision, military
grade GPS and some fancy number crunching to the lidar, it turns out the jungle
surface below the canopy can be imaged.
Lidar provided the imagery that demonstrated that there was a big,
ancient civilization thing beneath the jungle canopy in Honduras.
Lidar works great in dry, sandy spots like the Middle East,
where I assume its ability to detect the camps of hostiles, IEDs, and maybe
hostiles itself is a valued asset; well, turns out it works satisfactorily in
jungle environments too. So if this
breakthrough occurred thanks to the LCMG operation, I guess we can thank “Big
Archaeology” for the enhanced capability to waste America’s enemies in jungle battlefields
as well.
The “people in peril” plot hook for LCMG is that several
members of the expedition, including the author, Douglas Preston, came down
with a nasty parasite, leishmania, carried
by mammalian vectors & transmitted to humans via sand flies, which required
treatment with experimental drugs at the National Institutes of Health.
Preston got access to the NIH parasitology lab where “leish”
is studied, and penned this passage:
Inside was an
off-putting sight: two anesthetized mice lying belly up, paws in the air,
twitching. They were completely covered
with feeding sand flies, whose tiny guts were expanding into bright red berries
of blood…Later these sand flies would be infected artificially, a complicated
process. A delicate, hand-blown, tiny
glass bottle has a piece of raw chicken skin stretched over it like a
drumhead. This skin is moistened with
mouse blood to fool the flies into thinking it is mammalian skin. The liquid inside the bottle is also mouse
blood, seeded with the parasite…Once a sand fly is infected, the lab workers must
coax it into biting a live mouse…At the end of my tour, a lab assistant brought
out two bottles of live leishmanial parasites for me to look at under the
microscope…As I focused the eyepieces, the parasites sprang into view,
thousands of them in ceaseless motion...
Since I’ve been raised on a diet of Alien movies, I suppose I’m excessively sensitive to the feeling
that Preston had gained access to America’s premier bioweapons lab, where
rest-of-world biothreats are appropriated in the best imperial fashion for study,
neutralization, and exploitation, and to make sure they don’t interfere with
the national mission of doing stuff anywhere and everywhere.
By this point in the book I’m thinking, golly, this
expedition has a sh*tload of stroke. It
gets a planeful of classified lidar equipment to run the survey and when things
go off the rails for members of the team, disease-wise, they’re in tight with
the NIH.
Made me think about some other things, like how this book is
basically a handjob for the current right wing regime that deposed Honduran
president Zelaya in 2009.
The post-coup outfit clearly regards the “City of the Monkey
God” as an opportunity to burnish the regime’s credential as good guys, and the
president and military of Honduras are all over the book and described in the
most glowing terms as dedicated to the protection and conservation of this
snake-filled hellhole.
Preston also refers to the controversy that surrounded the
search for the ruins, especially carping by Zelaya-era archaeologists and their
sympathizers in the United States, that the expedition was imperial
bullsh*t. Hard to argue that lidar didn’t
turn up a significant archaeological find; also hard to argue that the whole
thing doesn’t have the flavor of a Yanqui
military PR romp through Honduras to enhance the legitimacy of the current
ruling outfit.
I began to wonder if there was a US political angle in the
expedition, which sure enough popped up when I googled Bill Benenson.
Bill Benenson’s role in the book is primarily that of
good-hearted filmmaker who somehow comes up with the tons of money and access
needed to transform a quixotic 25 year search for the lost city by Steve Elkins
into a big-tech success story.
Well, turns out Bill Benenson prefers to think of himself as
a filmmaker, but he’s also the scion of a New York City real estate empire that
one could characterize as anti-Trumpian: low profile, successful, and hard-core
Democratic.
The family’s total worth, split between Bill Benenson and
two other brothers, is probably around $200 billion, a modest enough figure but
sufficient to put the family on the Forbes 400 list. One of the other brothers, Lawrence, is on the advisory board of Patriotic
Millionaires, a non-profit whose ringing mission statement pretty much
encapsulates the premises of oligarchy a la Democrat:
The Patriotic Millionaires is a group of high-net
worth Americans who are committed to building a more prosperous, stable and
inclusive nation. The Patriotic Millionaires’ goal is to create an overwhelming
public demand - a true mandate - for economic policies that serve regular
Americans and political process policies that ensure everyone participates
fully and equally in our democracy.
It would, of course, be a funny joke if billionaires were
exempt from the leveling policies the group proposes for mere millionaires. The chair of Patriotic Millionaires, Morris
Pearl, who was managing director of BlackRock, has rather coyly
declined to state his net worth, only remarking he and his wife would be
able to “live well” off their investments.
Anyway…
Bill Benenson and his wife are hardcore do-gooders in the
conservation NGO way and also in the political way. They were not only Clinton bundlers during
her presidential campaign; they also donated to the Clinton Foundation in the
100-250K range. And thanks to google, I
acquired this gem, in which Nancy Pelosi characterizes
one of Benenson’s other filmmaking endeavors, Beasts of No Nation, when it was screened at the White House with
Benenson in attendance:
In Leader Pelosi’s
words, “This is very special, the imprimatur of the Obama Administration is on
this work of art, which is of course a statement of challenge to the
conscience of all of us…”
The interesting question is, did Bill Benenson (and the US
government) (and US globalist friendly media—Preston himself writes for the New Yorker which, under David Remnick,
proudly flies its colors as a globalist rag and I actually laughed out loud
when I read Preston’s account of how the founder of the New York Review of
Books flew down to Honduras just to get a gander at this archaeological
breakthrough; Why not Paris Review? I
thought)…
…get behind the LCMG project to try and burnish the
reputation of the new Honduran government (and Hillary Clinton, who was
burdened politically among the lefties by her role in sh*tcanning the old
Honduran government), and demonstrate the contributions to science and
conservation and civilization (and in the process, empire) that could be made
by enlightened capitalists and their cultured factotums working that whole
glorious public/private partnership thing to advance the principled
international order and, at the same time, secure the fortunes of a regime of pro-American sh*theels in
Central America?
That question might make for an interesting book. But that book isn’t LCMG…at least not
advertently.
