April 13, 2006

By Dr. Wes Browning

I have always been obsessed with a certain something or class of things for which I have never found a suitable name. Depending on my mood I call it, or them, the Exceptions, or the Weird, or the Fey. “They” are everywhere, they’re Strange, and I like them.

You’d think that a simple taste for the occasional Peculiar would just get me deemed Peculiar myself, but I’ve found out the hard way many times in my life that being a weirdnessphile can actually get you classed as evil in some circles.

It’s a fundamental principle of stupidology, which is to say the science of human stupidity. Humans are SO stupid, these scientists have learned, that when they don’t know what a thing is, they often reflexively assign negative qualities to it, partly out of fear of the object and partly out of fear of what the object may reveal about themselves. “Don’t listen to the stranger, he lies about me.”

Let’s say, for example, that you are an afficionado of the works of Pee Wee Herman. Be careful who you mention your fascination to, or they may be making the sign of the cross and trying to round up a posse to help drag you behind a donkey to the county line and leave you to Fife. You will be most in danger from burly churchgoing men who claim to never touch themselves.

I mention Pee Wee Herman only for the sake of definiteness. Really, definiteness is alien to my subject. It’s the ignorance you have about the truly Weird which makes it so. It has to be not just any ignorance but a special kind of ignorance.

Think of the movie Alien. It simply wouldn’t have been so scary if they’d trotted the monster out for you to get a good look at her in a bright light in the first scene. She’d have still been a magnificent threat, but she wouldn’t have inspired terror.

“ So Wes, what does all this have to do with all the usual stuff you dribble on about weekly?” Well, consider another example. The example that inspired me to write today is the example of a man known as Malua, the Wild Man of Samoa.

Archaeologist Joseph Kennedy (not JFK’s dad) discovered the grave of a man named Malua in an old cemetery near Pago Pago, Western Samoa. Because the name looks like it might be Samoan, and because Samoans didn’t usually bury their own people in cemeteries, Kennedy researched archives to find out who the grave’s occupant had been.

What he discovered was that Malua had been born in the 1800s in the Solomon Islands. He was Melanesian, not Samoan. He somehow ended up as a laborer, possibly against his will, in Eastern Samoa. He and a few fellow “employees” escaped Eastern Samoa by raft to Western Samoa, where they fled to the hills and lived off the land sometime around 1880.

Eventually Malua’s companions were captured or died, leaving Malua to a solitary existence in the hills of the island of Tutuila. He was rarely seen by the Samoan natives, except in fleeting glimpses. From one captive, the Samoans learned Malua was a Solomon Islander, but beyond that they knew nothing about him or how he survived.

So it became possible to hang all sorts of fictions on Malua about how Malua lived. If a pig or chicken went missing, Malua ate them, probably alive. When some people disappeared, it was assumed they too were eaten by Malua. He became known as the fearful Wild Man of Samoa. Protect your children!

Eventually, in 1923, Malua was captured. Once the Samoans could see him as a harmless, white-haired, bearded old man they took him in as a friend, and he lived happily ever after, until he died three months later of pneumonia, given to him by his new buddies.

The moral: You have less reason to be afraid of homeless people than they have of you. n