JACKIE CHAN PROMOTES PEACE!

-Truthwerks Broadcasting-

Morris Quince, spokesman for the UN Tribal Peoples Group, reports from the latest meeting
'The preservation of these unique and ancient cultures is of course our sole aim and preoccupation. We have talked long into the afternoon. These are not easy questions to address. The coexistence of the ancient and the modern is a tremendously difficult balancing act. There are numerous practicalities we would be naifs and fools to overlook. If, for example, tribal land happens to be also, the site of valuable mineral wealth, well.... We must be pragmatic. We advocate the integration of the tribesman into the safari park format. The tribesman must be profitable, must be productive if he is to justify his place int he modern world. He must not be mollycoddled nor patronised. Within the safari park format, hunting, under agreed quotas, the animals confined there, staging dances and rituals at times to be agreed upon, with audiences of paying visitors, he can preserve his ancient and noble culture and still meet the demands of the modern world.'

This hodgepodge of vanquished tribes convened on condemned land.... the site of an old gasworks with toxins eating into the soil, where rusted twisted metal protrudes from among the bricks and rubble and broken glass glints in sunshine. Animals wander confusedly in this alien environment, struggling to improvise an ecosystem. Lions, elephants and kangaroos, macaws, cockatoos, gaudy birds of paradise....
Palm trees struggle in the hard dirt. The tribesmen whittle at arrow heads, struggle to learn their lines, the lineaments of foreign histories, myths that don't belong to them, learn the steps of dances far lewder and more lascivious than anything their ancestors would have recognised.
Earnest anthropologists attend meetings with the tribal leaders, accompanied by the safari park owners, Morris Quince and other prominent members of the UN Tribal Peoples Unit.
"Yes, we realise you come from different tribes, that's why we've worked so hard to come up with a kind of generalised vision of your culture and what it represents. the common aspects... spears, hunting, dances.... we've taken the best elements from your respective traditions and made them accessible to our target audience. Look, this way you can retain your independence, we're not asking you to integrate in Western Society. We're trying to preserve the things which make you unique"
Quince sounds terribly exasperated....
"The ingratitude is astounding" he says to one of the entrepreneurs funding the project over drinks later on that evening
"Sometimes I wonder whether it's worth it at all"
"Imagine saying they don't want drums! How can you have a tribal dance show without drums? People expect drums"
A wildebeest kicks at the dust dispiritedly.