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Unsurprising paths of violence

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Tonight the President goes on TV to say he’ll do - after much hype, phony suspense, and no final surprise - just what General David Petraeus has recommended. Maintain the so-call Iraq “surge” till next spring and then start reducing troop numbers to the pre-"surge" level – which would have had to happen anyway, given the US military’s already tightly-stretched capacity. And meanwhile a long haul gets longer.

No surprises, then.

A novelist friend of mine once mused that a world without surprises would not be the placid place she might be hoping for, but an unbearably bleak world.

Tomorrow, in theaters across the nation movie-goers get a powerfully bleak vision of retribution combined with “pre-emptive warfare”, conducted - not across the globe like the Bush Administration has attempted it - but in the streets and subways of New York City. It’s the new Jodie Foster film, directed by Neil Jordan, which is titled provocatively and questionably The Brave One.

It carries some echoes of the 1970s horrific revenge-flick Death Wish (nay, horrific revenge series), starring Charles Bronson and directed by Michael Winner. But here it's a female avenger, as played by Foster (above left). She's a low-key public radio essayist who is savagely beaten by a Central Park gang, while her fiance is murdered. Once she's out of hospital she buys a gun, goes seeking the murderers, kills them, but on the way kills several - too many - others as as well. As I say ... no surprises.

At a pre-release screening Neil Jordan told me he had never seen Death Wish. (And was glad when viewers told him there were significant differences between his and Winner's movies: "so maybe I won't end up writing restaurant reviews". For Winner has since become a food critic for the once-reputable Sunday Times in London - only to have recently eaten an infected oyster which led to one of his legs almost being amputated.)

Jordan was more interested in the internal disintegration of his avenger's character – she becomes “more and more of a monster”, he said – and equally in the effect she has on an NYPD detective, played sure-handedly by Terrence Howard. “He gives up his moral probity, his whole moral universe” said Jordan.

I recalled the director’s much earlier effort, Angel, set in Northern Ireland’s recent violent past, where a young man is impelled by revenge for the terrorist bombing death of a girl. Jordan agreed both films demonstrate the corrosive nature of vindictive justice: “We are all capable of responding to a monstrous act by becoming monsters ourselves, and we would - if it weren’t for the rules, conventions and values of a healthy society. 'Angel' was set in a time of the Troubles. Maybe we’re in a troubled time now too.”

FOR A FORTHCOMING RADIO PROGRAM, I HAPPENED TO INTERVIEW South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu (above right) the morning after I saw the Foster-Jordan film. Tutu makes a point of constantly promoting the significantly different concept of “restorative” justice.

The Archbishop Emeritus is know now world-wide not just for his valiant opposition to apartheid (for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize) but for more recently presiding, at Nelson Mandela’s request, over the agonizing but finally and generally salutary process of their country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And he was in New York for a non-coincidentally timed September the Eleventh conference on reconciliation.

He sharply dismissed the suggestion from many commentators that I repeated to him, that South Africa’s formula for dealing with appallingly vicious wrongs (not by avenging them but by airing them fully and requiring public repentance for them) might work as a paradigm for other societies. Every time, he said, the wrongs have to be addressed on an “ad hoc” basis: “It must be specially designed for a country”. But he also affirmed “there are certain principles that you would say might be of universal application. Almost everyone who has suffered is not so desperate for revenge, actually. And most want to be able to tell their story. And when perpetrators admit things, it’s far more healing.”

Even on Iraq, Tutu expressed some hope that reconciliation – that precious commodity for which the Bush “surge” is trying to buy time – might still be possible, even though it won’t happen “as long as there is an atrocity and then a reprisal – that will go on and on and on. Ultimately the only way they are going to have stability is when they sit down together, acknowledging what they have done to one another and looking for ways of seeing the anguish and the pain of others.”

WE DISCUSSED ONE SURPRISE - OF A SICKENING KIND. Over the past few weeks, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has hit out at a fellow churchman of Tutu's (albeit a Catholic, not Anglican like Tutu) who has been spearheading protest against Mugabe’s destructive megalomania.

The country’s state-run media, notably The Herald newspaper in the capital, Harare, The Chronicle in the western town of Bulawayo, and the nationwide Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation, have accused Archbishop Pius Ncube of adultery.

Compromising pictures apparently showing the Archbishop naked with a woman have been made available to journalists by the Bulawayo sheriff’s office.

Ncube this week tendered his resignation to Pope Benedict, so that he can fight the accusation “as an individual and not as the leader of the Catholic Church in Zimbabwe”. To some the case recalls the authorities’ efforts in 2003 to entrap opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai into making treasonous statements, when a judge ruled that the evidentiary police video had been doctored.

Mugabe has a truly vengeful record with churchmen, once calling Tutu “an embittered, evil little bishop”.

For his part Tutu wearily told me that Mugabe is “someone I used to have a very high regard for … It’s an inexplicable aberration what has taken place, an almost perverse determination to destroy his own county”.