The year of the Ape Man

The year of the Ape Man
by David Benjamin

“I am as free as nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.”
— John Dryden, Conquest of Granada (1672)

MADISON, Wis. — Lately, my know-it-all attitude has been getting me into trouble. A high-school friend accused me of elitism for flaunting my vocabulary and looking down my nose at Donald Trump’s less-than-erudite fans.

Of course, right away, Tarzan came to mind.

The imagery of the “noble savage” has been a staple of Western culture since More, Milton and Montaigne. It’s been appropriated by social engineers, Marxists, racists, outlaw bikers and NewAgers. It was trashed by Hobbes and vilified by Dickens: “His virtues are a fable; his happiness is a delusion; his nobility, nonsense.”

Traditionally, the noble savage is brown, black, yellow, red — providing a sublime contrast to the overly couth dandy who has lost touch not only with nature, but with God and his own humanity. As Baron de Lahontan (an effete honky if ever there was one), wrote, the noble savage “… looks with compassion on poor civilized man — no courage, no strength, incapable of providing himself with food and shelter: a degenerate, a moral cretin, a figure of fun in his blue coat, his red hose, his black hat, his white plume and his green ribands… For science and the arts are but the parents of corruption. The Savage obeys the will of Nature, his kindly mother, therefore he is happy. It is civilized folk who are the real barbarians…”

Literature has long glorified the innocence, resourcefulness, uncluttered intellect and rugged sex appeal of the romantic primitive. Adam and Eve were our first noble savages, ruined by the serpent-hung Tree of Knowledge. Voltaire, in Candide, celebrated the insightful clarity of the unschooled ingénue. Kipling gave us Mowgli. Fenimore Cooper created Natty Bumppo, whose woodsy Mohican sidekick, Chingachgook, bestowed all the education Hawkeye would ever need. In Moby Dick, a pallid and pusillanimous protagonist learns life from Queequeg, a worldly-wise and racially exotic harpoon-chucker who can’t read a lick.

Not to mention the simple but perspicacious Tonto turning to his kemo sabe and saying, “What do you mean ‘we,’ paleface?”

For 20th-century Americans, however, this ideal is neither aboriginal nor alien. He’s Johnny Weismuller, the Olympic swimmer whom MGM cast as the second cinema Tarzan (after the forgotten Elmo Lincoln).

Tarzan’s author, Edgar Rice Burroughs, conceived him as a suave English gent wearied by the pomp and pretense of high society. To cure his malaise, he trades in tweeds for loincloth and moves to the heart of darkness, where he might have languished forever as a pulp-fiction curiosity. Hollywood, however — with a keener grasp than Burroughs of le bon sauvage — stripped Tarzan’s Oxford veneer, reduced him to monosyllabic purity and rendered him as a foundling Romulus raised by gorillas.

Hollywood’s Tarzan transformation gave ordinary white folks, in a fiercely segregated world, a noble savage who looks like them and sounds even dumber. This flattering variation prevailed ’til the Tarzan franchise lost Weismuller, sank into B-movie farce and lost its mojo. Since then, no comparable icon has risen to take Tarzan’s place — ’til now.

Donald Trump has turned the myth topsy-turvy. Before the Trump epiphany, the sickly urbanite — stuffed with book-learning, lounging in his gazebo, sipping sherry and snuffling up organic arugula — was white. Now, suddenly, that yuppie snob stultified by civilization has emerged as a darkskinned poseur. He’s mocha-colored, Harvard-cured, condescending, politically correct and ludicrously out of touch with the silent and suffering but nobly ignorant and rurally pure masses…

… of white guys.

Donald Trump has cornered the market on romantic primitivism and roared — without irony — at the top of his lungs: “I love the poorly educated!” Trump has seen the savagery that infects men who’ve been displaced, confused and enraged by 21st-century globalism, and he’s declared it noble.

Rousseau’s “good wild man” is now the embittered workingman who can’t earn a living wage in the digital, cybernetic and multinational economy. Today, the noble savage is a jobless hardhat who stands gazing at a vast mothballed steel mill the way a Sioux brave once scowled forlornly at a great plain bereft of buffalo. The noble savage today is a smalltown big-box stocker with a wallet full of food stamps, shuffling past the Walmart-shuttered storefronts on Main Street. Like the native plainsman, today’s noble savage is blessed with resources no longer valued.

He was a warrior who, blindfolded, could assemble an M-16 in two minutes. But he’s been discharged. He has a GED in a Master’s-degree era. He’s a stand-up guy who, in a bygone paradise, could split a rail in one blow, shoe a horse, dress a hog, deliver a calf in a blizzard and shoot the feelers off a fly from a hundred yards.

And swing from tree to tree?

The noble savage, ca. 2016, doesn’t get Jane. He doesn’t even get introduced. It’s too cold to live in a tree. He can’t survive on bananas and coconuts. And the natives don’t like him any more than he likes them. Only Donald Trump —who needs the votes — thinks this chronic loser is any nobler than the next slob in the mob.

The noble savage, ca. 2016, isn’t Tarzan, but he might be Blackhawk.

Pushed westward by white civilization and denied the lands and game that had sustained his tribe for eons, the great Indian general waged a brilliant, futile war against a bungling but far more numerous U.S. militia. After his defeat, Blackhawk consented to a “goodwill tour.” His captors paraded him through Eastern cities, exhibiting him to gawking crowds, petty dignitaries and bigoted plutocrats as the essential, authentic noble savage. Everyone was magnanimous to Blackhawk, because they knew — better, and sooner, than he — that he was already extinct.

If you ask Dickens, he never existed at all.