Machine Gun Preacher, A Movie

            This is a “based on true events” film about very real and very, very unpleasant goings-on in a part of the world that works in a way most of us, even if we have read a little about it cannot begin to comprehend. 

            It is the story of how a low life drug taking, hard fighting gang member and total waster turns into one of the good guys.

            Released from prison Sam returns to his long suffering wife who, in his absence has discovered Christ. Initially cynical, as you would expect, Sam begins to embrace the teachings of the church. After hearing a sermon from a visiting missionary, he decides to visit Africa. 

            The mutation from feral crackhead to evangelist feels, I think a little simplistic, a little, well, a little unlikely, but that’s movies for you. Fully exploring such an enormous metamorphosis would need far more analysis than is possible in this medium. The point though, is that one way or another, to a lesser or greater extent that is what happened.

            We have all seen news footage from the darker parts of Africa, and maybe skimmed a newspaper article or two so in the back of our minds we all know whole populations are being slaughtered…. and worse. This is a film about one man who got off his butt and did something about it, for real. A man who went to battle for the children of Sudan, the orphaned, starving, beaten victims of a world whose brutality is beyond our worst nightmares, suffering on a greater scale than earthquakes and volcanoes and floods have ever produced, a world with no law and no decency, a world of unspeakable horror and endless screaming pain, a world without hope or kindness. Sitting here in a comfortable flat on the South coast of England, with food in the kitchen, and a whole town of supermarkets, clothes shops chemists and surgeries within a ten minute walk, how can I ever understand such a place? How can I truly know what it is like to watch my mother being raped, my family tortured and butchered, to live without food or medicine or clean water, to be rounded up and traded like cattle, and all before I am 10 years old.

            Sam was a product of the “underclass” of American society, a career prisoner always searching for his next fix, his life steeped in violence and seemingly without hope. Sam’s destiny was sliding toward overdose or another junkie’s switchblade. A mortuary slab seemed inevitable.

            There are numerous moments in the film, moments that pull at the heartstrings and go some small way to showing us the horrors visited upon the innocents of a far off land. While surveying the site for his orphanage a landmine explodes. Sam rushes off to discover and scoop up in his arms the corpse of a child, a corpse with its legs blown off. Or the boy who won’t speak. Eventually he tells his story, of how the rebels forced him to club his mother to death to prevent him and his brother from being killed. Or the moment Sam pulls back the tarpaulin on a truck to discover a sea of enslaved children…. the moments pile up.

            It would be very easy to write something tabloidy like, “Good is measured by deed and result, not by intention and theory. Extreme situations need extreme solutions. The people of the Sudan did not need another doctor or another truck of rice, they needed hope, and actions, they needed a hero. Gun toting Sam Childers, was such a man, the white preacher who was as at home gunning down child killers as he was building a house. Fuelled by rage, empowered by his abilities with hammer, an MK47 and his strengths of persuasion Sam becomes a legend, leaving in his wake a trail of dead rebels, a new orphanage and bucketfuls of hope”.

            Somehow it doesn’t feel that simple, Sam’s life and work and the film raise some disquieting questions about the morality of doing Gods work with bullets but surely Africa needs such men, just as it needs the armies of aid workers. The rebel generals will not be stilled by prayer and compassion alone. They need to be broken apart and to fear retaliation just as those they terrorise live every waking moment wondering if it will be their last. Diversity, nature’s greatest trick, is a lesson to us all. We need bad good men, just as much as we need good, good men.
 

Bread

             For reasons too trivial to explain, I happened upon this in Wikipedia:

            “Bread can be served at any temperature; once baked, it can subsequently be toasted. It is most commonly eaten with the hands, either by itself or as a carrier for other foods. Bread can be dipped into liquids such as gravy, olive oil, or soup; it can be topped with various sweet and savoury spreads, or used to make sandwiches containing myriad varieties of meats, cheeses, vegetables, and condiments.”

            I thought I would submit an entry of my own to the ‘pedia thereby helping in their global quest for disambiguity.

 “The bleeding obvious". This entry requires no further clarification.

             Am I alone here or does the proliferation of this sort of thing mean we are heading somewhere we don’t really want to go? How we will ever get to the important stuff if on the way we have to plough through mega-reams of such inanity?

            But, it did get me to thinking about bread. For eighteen months, my wife and I lived in rural Thailand. There was a bakery in town, but their small Colgate white downy loaves didn’t make the fifteen-minute journey from counter to dining table without turning stale. We went native and stuck to rice.

            Vietnam though is a different kettle of dough. Thailand has never been invaded, Vietnam has. One of the legacies of around 85 years of French occupation is bread. Good stuff it is too, pedalled from bicycles and sold in proper shops together with cabinets of tempting patisseries. I do wonder though, if the Vietnamese would swop this bread legacy for a history free from imperial French rule.

            Wikipedia redeems itself by telling us that: “Germany has the largest variety of breads worldwide and it is estimated that there are more than 16,000 local bakeries. Germans are worldwide the biggest consumers (per capita) of bread.” Until I read that, I thought the French had that honour, but it does explain the Germans we saw in France at the bakery window of a local supermarket, long before official opening time, somehow buying armfuls of baguettes.

           We have spent one-half of the last two years in rural France, eating our fair share of this food staple and baker’s daughter Liz can explain exactly what has gone amiss in a bake when a loaf fails to deliver its expected crispness. Last year in Brittany the bread sold in the campsite shop was so bad we travelled every day the 5 mile round trip to the local village. Over the months we daily, except for Black Wednesdays’ their day off, were customers of Christoph and Chantelle, “Boulangeries Artisanales”. The shop was never empty, and we never had the chance for a proper conversation, partly because they were too busy and partly because my French was not up to the sort of rapid-fire conversation that sort of environment demanded. We did learn over the weeks though, that as you would expect, they work long days, that they loved their craft, but probably wouldn’t have carried on after a lottery jackpot, that they were the centre of the village, and probably knew quite a lot more about the population than some would have liked.

            Standing in a checkout queue in a French supermarket the morning after arriving for a holiday, the nearby village still to be investigated, we had bread in the trolley. A local struck up a conversation with us, in English. Please read the next sentence, in a heavy and passionate French accent. He said “why are you buying zat from ear, tzer are good bakers in ze ville-arge?” A Frenchman outraged at a tourist buying mass produced bread. For a few moments the universe seemed in balance.  Bread is more important in France than beer. The evidence is in my view incontrovertible. Go to beer seller’s school in England and you learn that dispensing say Heinlein in a Stella glass will not only have the red spectacled marketing men spinning in their wine bars but is also illegal. It is a contravention of trading standards law. I don’t know if any one has ever been prosecuted though, but would hope our civil servants are concentrating on greater evils. However, go into any French bar outside of the expensive tourist areas, order a Kronenbourg and the logo decorating your glass could be for lemonade or even hot chocolate. By contrast, go into any bakery and order, as we usually did, various types of baguette, and each will be sheathed in its own special paper bag extolling the virtues of that particular bread, the baker, the miller, the farmer and even the French bread laws.

            The ancient laws governing the manufacture of bread in France date back to 1993. They set out rigorous standards with phrases like “Breads sold under the category of "pain au levain" must be made from a starter as defined by Article 4, and must have a potential maximum pH of 4.3 and an acidity of at least 900 parts per million.” The decree also forbids the addition of preservatives. Thus, is excellence preserved together with a way of life, bakers bake twice a day, every village has at least one boulangerie and citizens can be seen scurrying about with bags full of baguettes, exchanging gossip and checking up on old Madame Fournier when she hasn’t been in for her daily Pain complet. 

            Bread in England palls by compassion, the supermarkets here are just not up to the mark, free from the restrictions of decree they produce an inferior product lacking in taste and texture thus demonstrating a lack of love for their wares that subtly seeps into the consciousness of the consumer. Buy a French stick in France and you know it has been fashioned overnight by a craftsman, buy the same thing in England and it is evident it is the result of soulless mass production. Supermarkets have their place in the provisioning of the nation but perhaps bread should be removed from their remit. Hundreds, even thousands of jobs could be created setting up bakeries, on the French model, across our Kingdom.

            Well, we can dream.