Tomgram: Adam Hochschild, Letting Tarzan Swing Through History
By Adam Hochschild
Posted on July 19, 2016, Printed on July 19, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176167/ ;
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Even TD knows when its beat. Thursday is
clearly a media day reserved for pure Trumpery. Theres no point in fighting
it, so this site is taking it off. The next post will be on Sunday, July
24th. Tom]
At almost 72, I recently went to The Legend of Tarzan, the IMAX version,
with a screen so big I almost stepped inside it and a soundscape so
all-enveloping that my already pathetic hearing might have been blown away
for good. Still, however immersive the experience was meant to be, I
found it so much less thrilling than the 3-D of my childhood. Ill never
forget watching Fort Ti in 1953 at age nine and hitting the floor the moment
the first flaming arrow headed directly for me.
As for Tarzan, what were they thinking in Hollywood? I watched bemused as
the Ape Man flexed his creaking joints, swung from vine to vine, and fought
all manner of friend and foe in an effort to be up-to-date. If you want to
see a white savior film thats more of our moment, check out The Free State
of Jones, set in the jungles of southern Mississippi in the Civil War era,
with plenty of Tarzan-style vines to go around. All I can say is that, as
far as I was concerned, only the animated great apes -- Tarzans buddies and
rivals -- showed a spark of real life.
Still, I wouldnt have missed the film for the world. After all, its the
first action movie that -- as youll see from TomDispatch regular Adam
Hochschilds piece today -- has ever based itself in any way on a book I
edited, in this case his classic King Leopolds Ghost: A Story of Greed,
Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. As a result, I left the theater
filled with wild fantasies. (Even editors can dream, can't they?) I began
to imagine Who Rules the World?, Noam Chomskys latest book, absorbed into a
future X-Men: Apocalypse America. Or the late Chalmers Johnsons Dismantling
the Empire as the basis for the next Jason Bourne romp. Or Ann Joness They
Were Soldiers at the grim heart of American Sniper: The Next Generation.
Or, in Tarzan-style, Andrew Bacevichs writing on Americas
twenty-first-century Middle Eastern wars as part of a reboot of Lawrence of
Arabia -- perhaps King David of Iraq: The Surge to Nowhere.
Now, let me dream on while you read about Adam Hochschilds encounter with
what might be thought of as the latest version of Planet of the Apes. Tom
Me Tarzan, You Adam
How I Met the Ghosts of My Own Work in a Local Multiplex
By Adam Hochschild
Some time ago I wrote a book about one of the great crimes of the last 150
years: the conquest and exploitation of the Congo by King Leopold II of
Belgium. When King Leopolds Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in
Colonial Africa was published, I thought I had found all the major
characters in that brutal patch of history. But a few weeks ago I realized
that I had left one out: Tarzan.
Let me explain. Although a documentary film based on my book did appear, I
often imagined what Hollywood might do with such a story. It would, of
course, have featured the avaricious King Leopold, who imposed a slave labor
system on his colony to extract its vast wealth in ivory and wild rubber,
with millions dying in the process. And it would surely have included the
remarkable array of heroic figures who resisted or exposed his misdeeds.
Among them were African rebel leaders like Chief Mulume Niama, who fought to
the death trying to preserve the independence of his Sanga people; an
Irishman, Roger Casement, whose exposure to the Congo made him realize that
his own country was an exploited colony and who was later hanged by the
British; two black Americans who courageously managed to get information to
the outside world; and the Nigerian-born Hezekiah Andrew Shanu, a small
businessman who secretly leaked documents to a British journalist and was
hounded to death for doing so. Into the middle of this horror show,
traveling up the Congo River as a steamboat officer in training, came a
young seaman profoundly shocked by what he saw. When he finally got his
impressions onto the page, he would produce the most widely read short novel
in English, Heart of Darkness.
How could all of this not make a great film?
I found myself thinking about how to structure it and which actors might
play what roles. Perhaps the filmmakers would offer me a bit part. At the
very least, they would undoubtedly seek my advice. And so I pictured myself
on location with the cast, a voice for good politics and historical
accuracy, correcting a detail here, adding another there, making sure the
film didnt stint in evoking the full brutality of that era. The movie, I
was certain, would make viewers in multiplexes across the world realize at
last that colonialism in Africa deserved to be ranked with Nazism and Soviet
communism as one of the great totalitarian systems of modern times.
In case you hadnt noticed, that film has yet to be made. And so imagine my
surprise, when, a few weeks ago, in a theater in a giant mall, I encountered
two characters I had written about in King Leopolds Ghost. And who was
onscreen with them? A veteran of nearly a century of movies -- silent and
talking, in black and white as well as color, animated as well as live
action (not to speak of TV shows and video games): Tarzan.
The Legend of Tarzan, an attempt to jumpstart that ancient, creaking
franchise for the twenty-first century, has made the most modest of bows to
changing times by inserting a little more politics and history than dozens
of the ape mans previous adventures found necessary. It starts by informing
us that, at the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, the European powers began
dividing up the colonial spoils of Africa, and that King Leopold II now
holds the Congo as his privately owned colony.
Tarzan, however, is no longer in the jungle where he was born and where,
after his parents early deaths, he was raised by apes. Instead, married to
Jane, he has taken over his ancestral title, Lord Greystoke, and has
occupied his palatial manor in England. (Somewhere along the line he
evidently took a crash course that brought him from Me Tarzan, you Jane to
the manners and speech of a proper earl.)
But you wont be surprised to learn that Africa needs him badly. Theres a
diamond scandal, a slave labor system, and other skullduggery afoot in
Leopolds Congo. A bold, sassy black American, George Washington Williams,
persuades him to head back to the continent to investigate, and comes along
as his sidekick. The villain of the story, Leopolds top dog in the Congo,
scheming to steal those African diamonds, is Belgian Captain Léon Rom, who
promptly kidnaps Tarzan and Jane. And from there the plot only thickens,
even if it never deepens. Gorillas and crocodiles, cliff-leaping, heroic
rescues, battles with man and beast abound, and in the movies grand finale,
Tarzan uses his friends, the lions, to mobilize thousands of wildebeest to
storm out of the jungle and wreak havoc on the colonys capital, Boma.
With Jane watching admiringly, Tarzan and Williams then sink the steamboat
on which the evil Rom is trying to spirit the diamonds away, while thousands
of Africans lining the hills wave their spears and cheer their white savior.
Tarzan and Jane soon have a baby, and seem destined to live happily ever
after -- at least until The Legend of Tarzan II comes along.
History Provides the Characters, Tarzan the Vines
Both Williams and Rom were, in fact, perfectly real people and, although I
wasnt the first to notice them, its clear enough where Hollywoods
scriptwriters found them. Theres even a photo of Alexander Skarsgård, the
muscular Swede who plays Tarzan, with a copy of King Leopolds Ghost in
hand. Samuel L. Jackson, who plays Williams with considerable brio, has told
the press that the director, David Yates, sent him the book in preparation
for his role.
A version of Batman in Africa was not quite the film I previewed so many
times in my fantasies. Yet I have to admit that, despite the context, it
was strangely satisfying to see those two historical figures brought more or
less to life onscreen, even if to prop up the vine swinger created by
novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs and played most famously by Johnny
Weissmuller. Williams, in particular, was a remarkable man. An American
Civil War veteran, lawyer, journalist, historian, Baptist minister, and the
first black member of the Ohio state legislature, he went to Africa
expecting to find, in the benevolent colony that King Leopold II advertised
to the world, a place where his fellow black Americans could get the skilled
jobs denied them at home. Instead he discovered what he called the Siberia
of the African Continent -- a hellhole of racism, land theft, and a
spreading slave labor system enforced by the whip, gun, and chains.
From the Congo, he wrote an extraordinary open letter to Leopold,
published in European and American newspapers and quoted briefly at the end
of the movie. It was the first comprehensive exposé of a colony that would
soon become the subject of a worldwide human rights campaign. Sadly, he died
of tuberculosis on his way home from Africa before he could write the Congo
book for which he had gathered so much material. As New York Times film
critic Manohla Dargis observed, Williams deserves a grand cinematic
adventure of his own.
By contrast, in real life as in the film (where he is played with panache by
Christoph Waltz), Léon Rom was a consummate villain. An officer in the
private army Leopold used to control the territory, Rom is elevated onscreen
to a position vastly more important than any he ever held. Nonetheless, he
was an appropriate choice to represent that ruthless regime. A British
explorer once observed the severed heads of 21 Africans placed as a border
around the garden of Roms house. He also kept a gallows permanently erected
in front of the nearby headquarters from which he directed the post of
Stanley Falls. Rom appears to have crossed paths briefly with Joseph Conrad
and to have been one of the models for Mr. Kurtz, the head-collecting
central figure of Heart of Darkness.
The Legend of Tarzan is essentially a superhero movie, Spiderman in Africa
(even if you know that the footage of African landscapes was blended by
computer with actors on a sound stage in England). Skarsgård (or his double
or his electronic avatar) swoops through the jungle on hanging vines in
classic Tarzan style. Also classic, alas, is the making of yet another movie
about Africa whose hero and heroine are white. No Africans speak more than a
few lines and, when they do, its usually to voice praise or friendship for
Tarzan or Jane. From The African Queen to Out of Africa, thats nothing new
for Hollywood.
Nonetheless, there are, at odd moments, a few authentic touches of the real
Congo: the railway cars of elephant tusks bound for the coast and shipment
to Europe (the first great natural resource to be plundered); Leopolds
private army, the much-hated Force Publique; and African slave laborers in
chains -- Tarzan frees them, of course.
While some small details are reasonably accurate, from the design of a
steamboat to the fact that white Congo officials like Rom indeed did favor
white suits, you wont be shocked to learn that the film takes liberties
with history. Of course, all novels and films do that, but The Legend of
Tarzan does so in a curious way: it brings Leopolds rapacious regime to a
spectacular halt in 1890, the year in which its set -- thank you, Tarzan!
That, however, was the moment when the worst of the horror the king had
unleashed was just getting underway.
It was in 1890 that workers started constructing a railroad around the long
stretch of rapids near the Congo Rivers mouth; Joseph Conrad sailed to
Africa on the ship that carried the first batch of rails and ties. Eight
years later, that vast construction project, now finished, would accelerate
the transport of soldiers, arms, disassembled steamboats, and other supplies
that would turn much of the inland territorys population into slave
laborers. Leopold was by then hungry for another natural resource: rubber.
Millions of Congolese would die to satisfy his lust for wealth.
Tarzan in Vietnam
Heres the good news: I think Im finally getting the hang of
Hollywood-style filmmaking. Tarzans remarkable foresight in vanquishing the
Belgian evildoers before the worst of Leopolds reign of terror opens the
door for his future films, which Ive started to plan -- and this time, on
the film set, I expect one of those canvas-backed chairs with my name on it.
Naturally, our hero wouldnt stop historical catastrophes before they begin
theres no drama in that -- but always in their early stages.
For example, I just published a book about the Spanish Civil War, another
perfect place and time for Tarzan to work his wonders. In the fall of 1936,
he could swing his way through the plane and acacia trees of Madrids grand
boulevards to mobilize the animals in that citys zoo and deal a stunning
defeat to Generalissimo Francisco Francos attacking Nationalist troops.
Sent fleeing at that early moment, Francos soldiers would, of course, lose
the war, leaving the Spanish Republic triumphant and the Generalissimos
long, grim dictatorship excised from history.
In World War II, soon after Hitler and Stalin had divided Eastern Europe
between them, Tarzan could have a twofer if he stormed down from the
Carpathian mountains in late 1939, leading a vast pack of that regions
legendary wolves. He could deal smashing blows to both armies, and then,
just as he freed slaves in the Congo, throw open the gates of concentration
camps in both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. And why stop there? If,
after all this, the Japanese still had the temerity to attack Pearl Harbor,
Tarzan could surely mobilize the dolphins, sharks, and whales of the Pacific
Ocean to cripple the Japanese fleet as easily as he sunk Léon Roms
steamboat in a Congo harbor.
In Vietnam -- if Tarzan made it there before the defoliant Agent Orange
denuded its jungles -- there would be vines aplenty to swing from and water
buffalo he could enlist to help rout the foreign armies, first French, then
American, before they got a foothold in the country.
Some more recent wartime interventions might, however, be problematic. In
whose favor, for example, should he intervene in Iraq in 2003? Saddam
Hussein or the invading troops of George W. Bush? Far better to unleash him
on targets closer to home: Wall Street bankers, hedge-fund managers, select
Supreme Court justices, a certain New York real estate mogul. And how about
global warming? Around the world, coal-fired power plants, fracking rigs,
and tar sands mining pits await destruction by Tarzan and his thundering
herd of elephants.
If The Legend of Tarzan turns out to have the usual set of sequels, take
note, David Yates: since you obviously took some characters and events from
my book for the first installment, Im expecting you to come to me for more
ideas. All I ask in return is that Tarzan teach me to swing from the nearest
vines in any studio of your choice, and let me pick the next battle to win.
Adam Hochschild, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of eight books, most
recently Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939,
and teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California,
Berkeley.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Next Time Theyll Come to Count the Dead, and
Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Adam Hochschild
© 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176167
Tomgram: Adam Hochschild, Letting Tarzan Swing Through History
By Adam Hochschild
Posted on July 19, 2016, Printed on July 19, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176167/ ;
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Even TD knows when its beat. Thursday is
clearly a media day reserved for pure Trumpery. Theres no point in fighting
it, so this site is taking it off. The next post will be on Sunday, July
24th. Tom]
At almost 72, I recently went to The Legend of Tarzan, the IMAX version,
with a screen so big I almost stepped inside it and a soundscape so
all-enveloping that my already pathetic hearing might have been blown away
for good. Still, however immersive the experience was meant to be, I found
it so much less thrilling than the 3-D of my childhood. Ill never forget
watching Fort Ti in 1953 at age nine and hitting the floor the moment the
first flaming arrow headed directly for me.
As for Tarzan, what were they thinking in Hollywood? I watched bemused as
the Ape Man flexed his creaking joints, swung from vine to vine, and fought
all manner of friend and foe in an effort to be up-to-date. If you want to
see a white savior film thats more of our moment, check out The Free State
of Jones, set in the jungles of southern Mississippi in the Civil War era,
with plenty of Tarzan-style vines to go around. All I can say is that, as
far as I was concerned, only the animated great apes -- Tarzans buddies and
rivals -- showed a spark of real life.
Still, I wouldnt have missed the film for the world. After all, its the
first action movie that -- as youll see from TomDispatch regular Adam
Hochschilds piece today -- has ever based itself in any way on a book I
edited, in this case his classic King Leopolds Ghost: A Story of Greed,
Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. As a result, I left the theater
filled with wild fantasies. (Even editors can dream, can't they?) I began to
imagine Who Rules the World?, Noam Chomskys latest book, absorbed into a
future X-Men: Apocalypse America. Or the late Chalmers Johnsons Dismantling
the Empire as the basis for the next Jason Bourne romp. Or Ann Joness They
Were Soldiers at the grim heart of American Sniper: The Next Generation. Or,
in Tarzan-style, Andrew Bacevichs writing on Americas twenty-first-century
Middle Eastern wars as part of a reboot of Lawrence of Arabia -- perhaps
King David of Iraq: The Surge to Nowhere.
Now, let me dream on while you read about Adam Hochschilds encounter with
what might be thought of as the latest version of Planet of the Apes. Tom
Me Tarzan, You Adam
How I Met the Ghosts of My Own Work in a Local Multiplex
By Adam Hochschild
Some time ago I wrote a book about one of the great crimes of the last 150
years: the conquest and exploitation of the Congo by King Leopold II of
Belgium. When King Leopolds Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in
Colonial Africa was published, I thought I had found all the major
characters in that brutal patch of history. But a few weeks ago I realized
that I had left one out: Tarzan.
Let me explain. Although a documentary film based on my book did appear, I
often imagined what Hollywood might do with such a story. It would, of
course, have featured the avaricious King Leopold, who imposed a slave labor
system on his colony to extract its vast wealth in ivory and wild rubber,
with millions dying in the process. And it would surely have included the
remarkable array of heroic figures who resisted or exposed his misdeeds.
Among them were African rebel leaders like Chief Mulume Niama, who fought to
the death trying to preserve the independence of his Sanga people; an
Irishman, Roger Casement, whose exposure to the Congo made him realize that
his own country was an exploited colony and who was later hanged by the
British; two black Americans who courageously managed to get information to
the outside world; and the Nigerian-born Hezekiah Andrew Shanu, a small
businessman who secretly leaked documents to a British journalist and was
hounded to death for doing so. Into the middle of this horror show,
traveling up the Congo River as a steamboat officer in training, came a
young seaman profoundly shocked by what he saw. When he finally got his
impressions onto the page, he would produce the most widely read short novel
in English, Heart of Darkness.
How could all of this not make a great film?
I found myself thinking about how to structure it and which actors might
play what roles. Perhaps the filmmakers would offer me a bit part. At the
very least, they would undoubtedly seek my advice. And so I pictured myself
on location with the cast, a voice for good politics and historical
accuracy, correcting a detail here, adding another there, making sure the
film didnt stint in evoking the full brutality of that era. The movie, I
was certain, would make viewers in multiplexes across the world realize at
last that colonialism in Africa deserved to be ranked with Nazism and Soviet
communism as one of the great totalitarian systems of modern times.
In case you hadnt noticed, that film has yet to be made. And so imagine my
surprise, when, a few weeks ago, in a theater in a giant mall, I encountered
two characters I had written about in King Leopolds Ghost. And who was
onscreen with them? A veteran of nearly a century of movies -- silent and
talking, in black and white as well as color, animated as well as live
action (not to speak of TV shows and video games): Tarzan.
The Legend of Tarzan, an attempt to jumpstart that ancient, creaking
franchise for the twenty-first century, has made the most modest of bows to
changing times by inserting a little more politics and history than dozens
of the ape mans previous adventures found necessary. It starts by informing
us that, at the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, the European powers began
dividing up the colonial spoils of Africa, and that King Leopold II now
holds the Congo as his privately owned colony.
Tarzan, however, is no longer in the jungle where he was born and where,
after his parents early deaths, he was raised by apes. Instead, married to
Jane, he has taken over his ancestral title, Lord Greystoke, and has
occupied his palatial manor in England. (Somewhere along the line he
evidently took a crash course that brought him from Me Tarzan, you Jane to
the manners and speech of a proper earl.)
But you wont be surprised to learn that Africa needs him badly. Theres a
diamond scandal, a slave labor system, and other skullduggery afoot in
Leopolds Congo. A bold, sassy black American, George Washington Williams,
persuades him to head back to the continent to investigate, and comes along
as his sidekick. The villain of the story, Leopolds top dog in the Congo,
scheming to steal those African diamonds, is Belgian Captain Léon Rom, who
promptly kidnaps Tarzan and Jane. And from there the plot only thickens,
even if it never deepens. Gorillas and crocodiles, cliff-leaping, heroic
rescues, battles with man and beast abound, and in the movies grand finale,
Tarzan uses his friends, the lions, to mobilize thousands of wildebeest to
storm out of the jungle and wreak havoc on the colonys capital, Boma.
With Jane watching admiringly, Tarzan and Williams then sink the steamboat
on which the evil Rom is trying to spirit the diamonds away, while thousands
of Africans lining the hills wave their spears and cheer their white savior.
Tarzan and Jane soon have a baby, and seem destined to live happily ever
after -- at least until The Legend of Tarzan II comes along.
History Provides the Characters, Tarzan the Vines
Both Williams and Rom were, in fact, perfectly real people and, although I
wasnt the first to notice them, its clear enough where Hollywoods
scriptwriters found them. Theres even a photo of Alexander Skarsgård, the
muscular Swede who plays Tarzan, with a copy of King Leopolds Ghost in
hand. Samuel L. Jackson, who plays Williams with considerable brio, has told
the press that the director, David Yates, sent him the book in preparation
for his role.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0547973187/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0547973187/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20A version
of Batman in Africa was not quite the film I previewed so many times in my
fantasies. Yet I have to admit that, despite the context, it was strangely
satisfying to see those two historical figures brought more or less to life
onscreen, even if to prop up the vine swinger created by novelist Edgar Rice
Burroughs and played most famously by Johnny Weissmuller. Williams, in
particular, was a remarkable man. An American Civil War veteran, lawyer,
journalist, historian, Baptist minister, and the first black member of the
Ohio state legislature, he went to Africa expecting to find, in the
benevolent colony that King Leopold II advertised to the world, a place
where his fellow black Americans could get the skilled jobs denied them at
home. Instead he discovered what he called the Siberia of the African
Continent -- a hellhole of racism, land theft, and a spreading slave labor
system enforced by the whip, gun, and chains.
From the Congo, he wrote an extraordinary open letter to Leopold,
published in European and American newspapers and quoted briefly at the end
of the movie. It was the first comprehensive exposé of a colony that would
soon become the subject of a worldwide human rights campaign. Sadly, he died
of tuberculosis on his way home from Africa before he could write the Congo
book for which he had gathered so much material. As New York Times film
critic Manohla Dargis observed, Williams deserves a grand cinematic
adventure of his own.
By contrast, in real life as in the film (where he is played with panache by
Christoph Waltz), Léon Rom was a consummate villain. An officer in the
private army Leopold used to control the territory, Rom is elevated onscreen
to a position vastly more important than any he ever held. Nonetheless, he
was an appropriate choice to represent that ruthless regime. A British
explorer once observed the severed heads of 21 Africans placed as a border
around the garden of Roms house. He also kept a gallows permanently erected
in front of the nearby headquarters from which he directed the post of
Stanley Falls. Rom appears to have crossed paths briefly with Joseph Conrad
and to have been one of the models for Mr. Kurtz, the head-collecting
central figure of Heart of Darkness.
The Legend of Tarzan is essentially a superhero movie, Spiderman in Africa
(even if you know that the footage of African landscapes was blended by
computer with actors on a sound stage in England). Skarsgård (or his double
or his electronic avatar) swoops through the jungle on hanging vines in
classic Tarzan style. Also classic, alas, is the making of yet another movie
about Africa whose hero and heroine are white. No Africans speak more than a
few lines and, when they do, its usually to voice praise or friendship for
Tarzan or Jane. From The African Queen to Out of Africa, thats nothing new
for Hollywood.
Nonetheless, there are, at odd moments, a few authentic touches of the real
Congo: the railway cars of elephant tusks bound for the coast and shipment
to Europe (the first great natural resource to be plundered); Leopolds
private army, the much-hated Force Publique; and African slave laborers in
chains -- Tarzan frees them, of course.
While some small details are reasonably accurate, from the design of a
steamboat to the fact that white Congo officials like Rom indeed did favor
white suits, you wont be shocked to learn that the film takes liberties
with history. Of course, all novels and films do that, but The Legend of
Tarzan does so in a curious way: it brings Leopolds rapacious regime to a
spectacular halt in 1890, the year in which its set -- thank you, Tarzan!
That, however, was the moment when the worst of the horror the king had
unleashed was just getting underway.
It was in 1890 that workers started constructing a railroad around the long
stretch of rapids near the Congo Rivers mouth; Joseph Conrad sailed to
Africa on the ship that carried the first batch of rails and ties. Eight
years later, that vast construction project, now finished, would accelerate
the transport of soldiers, arms, disassembled steamboats, and other supplies
that would turn much of the inland territorys population into slave
laborers. Leopold was by then hungry for another natural resource: rubber.
Millions of Congolese would die to satisfy his lust for wealth.
Tarzan in Vietnam
Heres the good news: I think Im finally getting the hang of
Hollywood-style filmmaking. Tarzans remarkable foresight in vanquishing the
Belgian evildoers before the worst of Leopolds reign of terror opens the
door for his future films, which Ive started to plan -- and this time, on
the film set, I expect one of those canvas-backed chairs with my name on it.
Naturally, our hero wouldnt stop historical catastrophes before they begin
theres no drama in that -- but always in their early stages.
For example, I just published a book about the Spanish Civil War, another
perfect place and time for Tarzan to work his wonders. In the fall of 1936,
he could swing his way through the plane and acacia trees of Madrids grand
boulevards to mobilize the animals in that citys zoo and deal a stunning
defeat to Generalissimo Francisco Francos attacking Nationalist troops.
Sent fleeing at that early moment, Francos soldiers would, of course, lose
the war, leaving the Spanish Republic triumphant and the Generalissimos
long, grim dictatorship excised from history.
In World War II, soon after Hitler and Stalin had divided Eastern Europe
between them, Tarzan could have a twofer if he stormed down from the
Carpathian mountains in late 1939, leading a vast pack of that regions
legendary wolves. He could deal smashing blows to both armies, and then,
just as he freed slaves in the Congo, throw open the gates of concentration
camps in both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. And why stop there? If,
after all this, the Japanese still had the temerity to attack Pearl Harbor,
Tarzan could surely mobilize the dolphins, sharks, and whales of the Pacific
Ocean to cripple the Japanese fleet as easily as he sunk Léon Roms
steamboat in a Congo harbor.
In Vietnam -- if Tarzan made it there before the defoliant Agent Orange
denuded its jungles -- there would be vines aplenty to swing from and water
buffalo he could enlist to help rout the foreign armies, first French, then
American, before they got a foothold in the country.
Some more recent wartime interventions might, however, be problematic. In
whose favor, for example, should he intervene in Iraq in 2003? Saddam
Hussein or the invading troops of George W. Bush? Far better to unleash him
on targets closer to home: Wall Street bankers, hedge-fund managers, select
Supreme Court justices, a certain New York real estate mogul. And how about
global warming? Around the world, coal-fired power plants, fracking rigs,
and tar sands mining pits await destruction by Tarzan and his thundering
herd of elephants.
If The Legend of Tarzan turns out to have the usual set of sequels, take
note, David Yates: since you obviously took some characters and events from
my book for the first installment, Im expecting you to come to me for more
ideas. All I ask in return is that Tarzan teach me to swing from the nearest
vines in any studio of your choice, and let me pick the next battle to win.
Adam Hochschild, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of eight books, most
recently Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939,
and teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California,
Berkeley.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Next Time Theyll Come to Count the Dead, and
Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Adam Hochschild
© 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176167
