The Amazonian Blues

It's definitely the most memorable photograph of the week. However, in between all the nonsense being spouted on the news about "Lost Worlds" and all the living Oompa-Loompa jokes, the photo made me feel very sad.

Firstly, these people are now completely fucked. Now that they have been outed you can almost guarantee that there is some stupid TV producer somewhere who is saying: "Hey, let's lead a documentary team in to meet them! It'll be the scoop of the century!".

The organisation that took the photos claimed that they did it because they wanted to show that these people were losing their habitat to loggers, unfortunately loggers might become the least of their problems now. There will well meaning but ultimately destructive eco-tourist groups and let's not forget those Christian missionaries who will no doubt be having nightmares about the Lucifer colored body paint.

The second thing that made me sad is just stupid but still....

The photo with them aiming bows and arrows at the plane more or less confirms the permanent place that violence has in the human psyche. It is of course idealistic and complete madness for me to assume otherwise, but somehow I liked to pretend to myself that if I somehow lived in a bubble away from other human contact then I would not need weapons and we would all live at one with nature.

A stupid assumption of course, since I would starve to death very quickly or get killed by something.

It still made me feel a bit sad though and it made me think of the scene in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: Space Odyssey" where the the fore-runner of man starts clubbing the skulls. Violence is a natural survival instinct and occurs in evolution whether we like it or not. It has to.



Evolution has been very much on my mind lately as I am reading Kurt Vonnegut's "Galapagos". A great book that really makes you look differently about, not only, how we evolved as a species but also how we evolved a lot of our social rules and regulations as well.

Vonnegut really turns your perceptions of society upside down, and in a way that allows you to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. I wish there were more people on the planet like him, it would make it a much nicer place to live. So it goes......