Tarzan

I wonder what happened to Tarzan, white dude running around the African savannas and jungles wearing a loin cloth, chatting with his animal pals, swinging from vines and wrestling crocodiles in the river. This all seemed perfectly reasonable when I was six years old.

Today, we are more keenly aware of the real problems that confront Africa and its diverse array of nations. Romanticized Victorian notions about "The Dark Continent" have been all but overwritten by decades of photojournalism and television coverage, some of it quite morbid. A charging elephant may have seemed like the ultimate threat to a Tarzan fan in the Twentieth Century. Who then could have imagined the grim realities of famine, drought, civil and religious warfare, high tech poaching, malaria, AIDS, terrorism, and genocide, troubles that even schoolchildren understand today. 

A world where information flows so freely is a frightening place, perhaps too frightening even for brave, heroic, Tarzan. Still, it's better to recognize the truth.

Copyright © 2015 Daniel R. South 

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