Rachel - Naipaul, 2/7

On page 185, Naipaul writes about the President, or "the Big Man," who incarnates the ideal of "masculine" political power:

"But now there remained a link with him [The President]: the sense of his power as a personal thing, to which we were all attached with strings, which he might pull or let dangle.  That was something I had never felt before. "  There is an almost patriarchal flavor to this text.  The Big Man (phallic choice of words, by the way) exerts his perceived importance on the general populous, while still claiming to care for the common man.


This underlines his desire to bring (Uganda?  Where are we now??) back to "African democracy and socialism."   He uses his mother's alleged job as a hotel maid to justify the purity of this claim.  Eventually he even disposes the Youth Guard, "[stripping] them of power and jobs," leaving them "humiliated and anguished men of the region."


But how does a humiliated and anguished man" act?  Naipaul writes that the Youth Guard react by treating the people they were supposed to police in a cruel, resentful manner, which is revealed on page 212.  But what does this say in the bigger context of the book?  I'm not sure, but if Fundamentals of Cognitive Psych at Lang taught me anything, it's that insecure men usually need to compensate.  (By bullying their kids, beating their wives...or, as George Carlin, Patron Saint of the New School, once said: "That's what all that asshole jock bullshit is all about.  That's what all that adolescent, macho, male posturing and strutting in bars and locker rooms is all about - it's called DICK FEAR...they have to compete with one another to feel better about themselves, and since war is the ultimate competition, basically men are killing each other in order to improve their self esteem."


Since the political landscape of the book is getting progressively more unstable...I would not be surprised.