The Unbending Beckham

I watched a bizarre program on TV this evening, one worthy of Evelyn Waugh. David Beckham, a tremendously famous soccer star and the husband of a Spice Girl, set out on a journey into the center of the Amazonian jungle. He took along a camera crew and several friends who were less interesting than he was. The goal of this trip into the steaming heart of darkness was to find a tribe so isolated and untutored that it had never heard of David Beckham. With this tribe Beckham would at last be able to just be himself, an ordinary unknown Joe, so to speak, one dude relating to others. He would escape the photographers and handlers and false friends of England. In this quest he succeeded. Not only had the naked tribe members never heard of Beckham, they had never heard of soccer. In fact, I doubt if they grasped the concept of competitive sports.

In an Evelyn Waugh novel, Beckham would have been heartlessly condemned to remain with the tribe for the rest of his life. There was literally no road out. But as it happened, Beckham caught a small chartered plane back to the coast the next morning. In about 90 minutes of screen time only one event held my attention. The tribal people liked to paint their faces and arms with thick lines and symbols. You can imagine their reaction to Beckham's gorgeous array of modern tattoos, which cover his arms and shoulders and neck. The tattoos made the tribal painting look puny, and the locals could not seem to grasp why, when they rubbed at the soccer star's arms, the tattoos did not flake away, as they should, to make way for new ones.