Last month the world was astounded by photographs, taken in the Amazon, showing one of the last tribes of uncontacted indigenous people, according to reports at the time. News agencies were quickly setting their presses ablaze with the news, the Casually Racist Victorian Antiquarian Times running the headline “Tribe Of Savages, Unconverted And Unsullied, Found: Fear Of Flying Machine Proves The Need For Our Intervention”.
At least that’s the kind of headline one would expect to have read considering the current reaction to the revelation that, far from lost, the tribe’s existence had been known about since 1910, and that the photographer, one José Carlos Meirelles — working for the Brazilian Indian Protection Agency — deliberately flew out to terrify them with his flying, mechanical dragon photograph them to lend credence to the thinking that the “policy of no contact and protection was working.”
The outrage over this seems to me to be, perhaps, misplaced. I could find few articles from major news agencies claiming that a lost tribe had been discovered. An MSN article even quotes Jose Carlos dos Reis Meirelles, head of the Brazilian government’s National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), as saying
We have been watching this isolated indigenous community for at least 20 years. The idea in revealing the photos was to raise the alarm over the risk threatening them.
Anthropologists have known about the group for some 20 years but released the images now to call attention to fast-encroaching development near the Indians’ home in the dense jungles near Peru.
So, yes, 20 years is not the same as the now revealed 98, however, the fact still remains that the Brazillian government knew of this tribe and did not claim to have just discovered them at the time the photos were taken. There also seems to be some anger over the fact that by flying over this village and photographing them, Meirelles has in fact contacted them in the process. This I can understand, but I have a feeling that, having been recorded as early as 1910, chances are they have been contacted previously, though most likely sans airplane. Anyone care to enlighten me as to why people are so up in arms about this?
As this ad from 1944 so astutely points out, there was a halcyon era when a man whose domestic servant wife presented him with a less than satisfactory meal, could lay into her with his ring hand with zeal of a bare-knuckle prize fighter at a Clown Punching club. Those days are gone, however, and the young people with their absurd, namby-pamby, “feminist” ideas have cast a bad light on what is now known as “domestic abuse” but was once more commonly known as “constructive corporal criticism” (CCC).
Indeed, in the absence of physical punishment husbands are left with few ways to voice their displeasure with the culinary talents of their private cooks wives. As Heinz is well aware, boredom expressed through yawning — or, perhaps, terrible halitosis; the illustration leaves room for either — is, at the current juncture, one of the few, fool-proof means to impress upon these women that their dishes are not up to par. Never mind the fact that one would assume that these women wouldn’t have to be reminded of the fact that their husbands did them a favor by marrying them in the first place, providing them with money and a home, allowing them to birth and rear their children, thereby saving them from a sad, empty life as a common prostitute or a frigid, spinster librarian.
So it’s a good fucking thing for them that the happy Heinz Chef is there to save their asses with his delicious soups, for how else would these “sensitive souls” be able to deal with ignominy of a man struck dumb with ennui at dinnertime. It’s almost too painful to imagine.
It’s comforting in a way to know that one’s paranoid theories of powerful men bartering with the lives of millions of people as if they were human Pokemon are, in some ways, not so paranoid after all. Documents recently released by the State Department’s historical office detail a particularly enlightening conversation between Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong and US Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger:
“You know, China is a very poor country,” Mao said. “We don’t have much. What we have in excess is women. So if you want them we can give a few of those to you, some tens of thousands.”
Mao circled back to the offer a few minutes later. “Do you want our Chinese women?” he asked. “We can give you 10 million.”
Kissinger noted Mao was “improving his offer,” and the chairman is on record then saying, “We have too many women … They give birth to children and our children are too many.”
“It is such a novel proposition,” Kissinger replied. “We will have to study it.”
Novel indeed, Henry. Certainly it can be argued that Kissinger’s stance on Cambodia during the Vietnam War puts the man in a light that may be less than flattering but I think everyone can agree that this shows full well the depths of the man’s depravity. I mean what kind of animal turns down an offer to supply the citizens of his country with Chinese women.
Meet Corey Delaney, 16 of Melbourne, Australia and his “famous” glasses. Corey is being interviewed by a stern, buxom blond because he threw a party while his parents were on vacation, and when young Master Delaney throws a party, sometimes it involves over five hundred people and requires the attention of thirty police officers, a police helicopter, and the police dog squad. The raucous party goers caused an estimated twenty thousand dollars in damage which Corey or, more likely, Mr. and Mrs. Delaney may have to pay for.
Corey, for his part and to the frustration of the aforementioned buxom anchorwoman, seems unrepentant, and really, why should he? Shirtless, so as to better show off his single, pierced nipple, wearing a hat that he may have taken from a preteen girl or a mentally retarded woman, and glasses which are, as mentioned earlier, “famous” he has his whole life ahead of him. The world is his drunken oyster.
It makes me glad then, dear readers, that I do not live in a country, colonized by murderers, rapists, and thieves, that would produce a jackass of Corey Delaney’s caliber and instead live in a country, colonized by religious zealots who wanted to outlaw Christmas and which has never, ever, afforded people the liberty of such spectacular idiocy.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
