Adamantine

I have been watching the film Blood Diamond make the rounds by way of all the cautionary segments on daytime talk shows. Because I have taught speech courses for a while, I have heard no end of persuasive speeches on conflict diamonds and that magic-bullet solution, the Kimberley process. Truly, the action on the part of the UN and both Presidents Clinton and Bush is all commendable. Diamonds were unquestionably funding civil wars in Sierra Leone and Angola for a while - and probably will continue to fund other conflicts. This is a tragedy and I wish it would stop. I wish all funding of conflicts would stop.

That said, does all the pop focus on "blood diamonds" strike anyone else as a little perverse? I'm trying to unravel the public fascination with this issue. I know that half of it is a story of moral outrage in the tradition of Kathee Lee Gifford apologizing about sweat shop labor conditions. Now the scene is more like Phyllis Diller apologizing for a double-amputee African child. The sheer juxtaposition is undeniable - old/young, white/black, rich/poor - and that highest symbol of timelessness standing outside the world of utility, the diamond, pitched against the vision of someone digging with bare hands at gunpoint. The diamond, which is no more than a thought, a sign, refracting blood, the ultimate sign of signlessness. It's compelling - and not because there is some war going on in Africa. Since when have Americans cared about that before the movie came out ten years later? This is different; the movie is out now.

On the surface, this is a moral tale. But I think the shadow of this collective gush of concern is highly racialized. It is a story of superiority, after all. The axis stretches between the rulers and the ruled on this global scale, between blacks who slave, suffer, and die so that whites can satisfy even their most trifling caprices. The cultural phenomenon of "blood diamonds" is also a story about Darkest Africa and the primeval chaos that has so occupied the Western mind since Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad. In this instance, the blacks, who are not above carving up children, must be disciplined. Here the "white man's burden" has been lifted to the featherweight Kimberley process. While the motif of "blood diamonds" goes around the talk show circuit, I can't help but think that this is at least as much about people feeling their white privilege as feeling compassion.

The fact is that diamonds squander enormous amounts of human energy. That's what makes them valuable as a sign. (The vast majority of the diamond trade goes into producing signs and nothing more.) The entire sign system of the diamond is predicated on the differential between misery and privilege. I can't see how the "blood diamond" story will do anything but reinforce the symbolic value of the diamond. The Kimberley process, indeed the film Blood Diamond (whatever activist pose it might strike), is practically an advertisement for the diamond trade. As an unnamed woman at an aquaintence's wedding told me recently while waving her enormous diamond ring in my face: "I don't care how many African children died for this. I wanted it!" Her defense was entirely voluntary and unprovoked in any way. That's just the point. The more African children die, the more she wants it. She will even go out of her way to bring the subject up. Quite adamant, she was.*

*Adamant

1.	utterly unyielding in attitude or opinion in spite of all appeals, urgings, etc.

2.	too hard to cut, break, or pierce.

–noun

3.	any impenetrably or unyieldingly hard substance.

4.	a legendary stone of impenetrable hardness, formerly sometimes identified with the diamond.

From Greek daman: to tame, conquer