In a few days a baby named Immanuelwill be born in a refugee camp north of the Syrian border in southern Turkey. Another named Jesus will be born in the desert south of the Texas border-crossing in northern Mexico.
In the next two weeks babies will be born in every impoverished backwater over all the Earth, and some of them will be named after Jesus of the Bible — the ”savior of the world” prophesied by the ancients — a man tortured and executed because he enraged the religious leaders of his time.
Why did some of the most powerful rabbis in Jerusalem turn against Jesus and convince their Roman administrators to execute him? Wasn’t it because he told them they didn’t know what they were doing; that they didn’t know what they were talking about?
Two thousand years ago people living in the Roman territories of the Middle East didn’t challenge authorities, at least not to their faces. Brazen confrontation was something leaders weren’t used to and didn’t like.
Jesus claimed that despite impressive learning and years of study and prayer, some religious scholars knew less than they thought about Scripture and what it meant. They knew almost nothing about the nature of God and His plans for humankind. A few acted like instruments of Satan, he said. They lorded their power over common people and demanded respect, even as they supplicated themselves before their Roman rulers.
Billy Lee has offered a gold star to anyone who can find the word Jesus on a Christmas card sold at their local grocery. The Editorial Board
Anyway, one place where babies named Jesus won’t be born on Christmas day 2015 will likely be the Trump Towers. Folks who frequent locations like these have access to private rooms in the best hospitals. Some might choose to birth their children at home, yes, but their homes are palaces and luxury-suites — many with 24 hour on-site medical services, including doctors and nurses.
The homes and suites of billionaires can be busy places, probably, but they never smell like refugee camps. And it’s unusual inside the USA for billionaires to name their children Jesus.
Let’s not sugar-coat. The United States has a sordid history of doing bad things to good people. It has a record of murdering its best people: prophets like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, for example. It has a record of ”bombing the s*** “ out of people (a.k.a. Donald Trump) — as the history of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and the bloody highway of death out of Kuwait reminds those who have been paying attention.
By remote control the USA recently unleashed Hellfire missiles on 700 occasions; sometimes on innocents — people with whom we are not at war — which have cooked by-standers alive with their ungodly heat.
Some modern, right-wing evangelical ”religious leaders” — if anyone can say the words with a straight face — enrich themselves with lucrative book deals. Some write crap to capitalize on the fears of common people who don’t have the sense to know they are being played.
Some fill their mega-churches with armed goons to protect their lucrative fiefdoms and the absurd sums of tax-free money they scam from congregants every single week.
Please note: I said, some.
Why go on?
Everyone knows it’s true.
Some who claim to be Christians have become almost useless to the building of a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.
Do Christians live in America? Of course. Tens of thousands do; maybe hundreds of thousands. But not millions. No way. Not by the way we behave; not by the way we display our culture and values to the angels of the world who watch our every move; or to God who knows our hearts.
Did anyone watch the GOP debate last night? Did anyone watch that pantheon of the gods (as CNN visually-hyped it in their relentless and — can we admit? — ludicrous lead-up advertising) who fought each other tooth and nail to prove which of them would be the most heartless leader of them all?
It’s not insanity, people. It’s evil.
What does America require, an exorcism?
Because it seems to me as if our nation behaves at times like it’s possessed.
If you were Jesus, would you permit your name to appear on Christmas cards in a mega-store that treats Christmas as just another opportunity to make a lot of money? I don’t know if anyone would. During my Christmas shopping yesterday, I couldn’t find a single card with Jesus’s name on it. It surprised me.
Fortunately for us, God’s ways are not our ways, the Bible says. God is love. He has made a really simple request: love all people, including our enemies, as we love ourselves.
It’s a hard truth — that Jesus expects everyone to love unlovable people. I admit, I’m not good at it. No one is. But it’s something we can do to make a better world.
The Holy Spirit of Christ Jesus will help us to love others, Scripture promises. Together we can love others, especially at Christmas, when we try.
In 1949, almost a year after I was born, the latest edition of the 30 volume Encyclopedia Americana hit the streets of America. The collection of big books was the first multi-volume encyclopedia sold in the United States, starting way back in 1829. Each year it grew in size, sometimes adding new volumes to cover more subjects. By 1949, it was truly comprehensive.
I own a complete set of the 1949 edition, which my wife’s dad passed on to me after his death a few years ago. By all accounts, the volumes were a sensation when first published. Not only were they successfully sold door to door throughout the United States, but libraries everywhere stocked them on their shelves for scholars and the public alike to explore and absorb.
1949 was a few short years after the end of World War II. Colleges overflowed with legions of returning GIs who studied for free courtesy of the recently passed GI Bill. The Encyclopedia Americanabecame a beacon of knowledge and enlightenment for hundreds of thousands of optimistic Americans who were ramping up their skills to conquer the ignorance and backwardness of a world they knew all too well from their recent exposure to the wars overseas.
After perusing these volumes during the past few years, I have been struck by how much we knew in 1949, and by how much we thought we knew but didn’t. I was dumbfounded by racist patterns of thinking, which seemed to permeate the collection. It came as a complete surprise. Modern people could be excused for thinking that Hitler himself wrote some of the articles, I thought to myself.
People have said that racism is the original sin of America; that we have never come to terms with the bad things we did (and continue to do), because some of our European forefathers — scientists even — believed that Africans were medically degenerate.
Our country enslaved blacks because ostensibly responsible people told our ancestors that Negroes were animals, like lions or tigers. Of course it was OK to work them like pack-animals, some thought. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all. Besides, slavery was in the Bible.
After slavery ended, whites continued to segregate the races. And they still do.
Look at Florida if you don’t believe it. In the State of Florida, segregation is a way of life. Americans, some among us, seem to be oblivious to the evil of our actions and unaware of the demonic origin of many of our ideas about what is true and what is right.
We tend to repeat lies that hurt whole classes of people; lies that help no one but drive to despair and even suicide folks like South American immigrants, gays and, yes, Middle Eastern refugees who struggle to get by in a society that seems to value only excellence and perfection, money and power, symmetry and form, orthodoxy and moral rectitude.
We look down on, shun, and isolate authentic human beings who typically possess attributes we don’t admire like humility, lowliness, incompetence, average intelligence, awkward manners, social inadequacy, clumsiness, unreliable physical ability, psychological disabilities, ugliness, poor hygiene, ravaged skin, lack of hair, too much hair, unpleasant smells, thinness, fatness, and on and on.
We condemn millions to long prison terms who have done nothing more than act like fools; who have made mistakes, which with a little maturity and wisdom gained in the fresh air of freedom they might not ever make again.
Many readers can probably think of many undesirable attributes of human beings they find repulsive and would repress with long prison terms if only they could. It’s a desire best left unfulfilled.
Most are not permitted beyond these gates. They aren’t worthy.
Our inability to accept and live next to people who have less money, less education, different physical traits; who might be less attractive and less polished; who may not understand the world as we do; who are different in some way we find compelling is destroying our humanity; our ability to love and accept others.
Think about it.
We wreck any chance for happiness; any sense of well-being for tens of millions of ordinary people — probably hundreds of millions — who, it turns out, have very few advantages in this life of dog-eat-dog competition; it’s a fight that some lack the temperament to endure. Bigotry is demoralizing for those bullied by it; it is diminishing our country and our world.
We seem unable to even look at people with physical disabilities and handicaps; the blind; the deaf; the burned; the paraplegic; the paralyzed, the mentally incapacitated, the depressed, the hyperactive and the socially fearful.
Many Americans are hiding themselves behind gates, guard shacks, and walls to avoid facing the simple truth that people are diverse; God demands that we accept and respect everyone, because each person — even those who are unattractive and ungrateful in our own morally-damaged sight — are made from the stuff of God Himself and are in the reality we shun truly beautiful and deserving of respect and deference.
Jesus said that God loves the wicked. He loves people who are weak and powerless and undesirable. How can we do less?
Well… one reason is that we are degenerate, everyone of us, whether we are able to see the ugly truth or not. The most admirable person falls short of God’s glory.
Who believes it’s true?
Anyway, I thought that these two entries from the 1949 Encyclopedia Americana, reprinted below in their brutal original version, might help open the eyes of folks who are blind to the cesspool of ideas which have corrupted the spirits of our country; which have driven some people to avoid, ostracize, exclude, and kill people they think are unworthy to enjoy the advantages and privileges they demand for themselves.
These tombs of hate from our past sat on bookshelves and in libraries where they were read for many decades after their publication. Hatred poured forth not only from encyclopedias like the Americana, but from all forms of media and public discourse, it turns out.
The nasty rhetoric of race, exclusion, and the exaggerated elevation of our elites into a pantheon of god-like celebrities has poisoned our minds and our souls; it continues to poison our churches and schools; the military and our public institutions. It’s painfully evident in the rabid venom-spewing aspirants we find in our politics today who I won’t name.
Why demean a good essay by recognizing deplorable people? The president is a public celebrity who rose to power on an ocean tide of hatred. I guess it does no harm to call him out.
People claim they mean well and are doing God’s will, but golly-gee, someone has to say it (it might as well be me): the movement to transfer children from public schools into homeschooling; the stampede to place civilians armed with concealed weapons into churches and schools; the attempts to scare women out of exercising their constitutionally protected freedom to make healthcare choices involving their bodies; fire bombing healthcare clinics that help the poor; intimidating writers like myself who publish views unpopular with morons — all are symptomatic of a country that has become less free, more fascist, less brave — certainly less accepting, less tolerant, less nurturing, and less forgiving.
America is a mean-spirited place for many people. Even upscale people in high places are afraid to speak their minds plainly out of fear for the faceless billionaires who pull their strings and determine their futures. Look at all the safe-talk on television. Some people call it political correctness. What does that term mean?
It means people’s careers get ruined if they speak about certain subjects in a frank and unconventional way. When was the last time you heard a celebrity advocate for something as innocuous as a progressive income tax? Shorter prison sentences? Maximum incomes? Estate size limits? Limits on inherited wealth?
What accelerates and widens inequality can’t be right.
Our celebrities are held in-check by tight leashes. And it isn’t the public holding the leashes. To remain in the spotlight, celebrities must wear muzzles. Does anyone think they are going to complain?
Try to remember the names of celebrities who said something controversial and were never heard from again. You might remember their faces, maybe even some of the shows they were on. Few remember their names, more likely than not. They dropped off the face of the earth. They disappeared. The list is long, it really is.
I write about forbidden subjects all the time, but I’m not a celebrity. No one controls me, not since I resigned my memberships in certain organizations and work for free. But the public doesn’t read my blog. And, yes, some subjects are off-limits even for writers like me who want to believe they are free.
I don’t write about Israel or North Korea or drug cartels; I don’t bad-mouth artists; I don’t condemn creative people, because people with unusual points of view who have talent are fragile and easily frightened to silence; money and fame drive people into isolation bubbles. I don’t publish articles about my sexuality. I tried once; it didn’t turn out well.
Sometimes I break my own rules, it’s true. But let’s get back on message.
I don’t feel like I’m overstating. Below are two examples of a vicious way of thinking, which was mainstream in the decades following 1949. Today in 2015 some folks continue to embrace crazy reasoning. Who will exorcise the evil winds that freeze-dry hearts to raging cold?
Tolerance isn’t enough. It’s uncommitted and indifferent.
Embracing outcasts in love is the way.
It’s not possible to embrace the marginalized in love when advantaged people segregate themselves by income, class, and race. No one can help when they push aside those who don’t think like them or look like them or act like them. No one who believes that diversity is a plague to be avoided can help desperados who need a hand up.
Think about it.
Who can save their children and grand-children when they lack the courage to confront the billionaires who built the gilded cell-block we call America? Billionaires built prison-America to protect themselves from us.
Here’s the problem. Most folks don’t know the names of the billionaires who rule them. Who can reason with the wealthy? Who can find them?
The truth is, they find us, usually when they need someone like a soldier to fight to protect their property or a worker who will add value to their estates by performing tasks for low wages.
The problem is: they don’t love us. Otherwise they would live in the world where we live, but they don’t. Then again, they might allow us to live in their world, where the water in their pools is blue and clean and the sun is warm. But they won’t do that either.
Maybe someday. Someday maybe if they change, they will. They will unlock the gates. They will throw away the keys. They will let us in.
On that day we will become one people, one nation, indivisible, under God.
While we wait, we change ourselves. We learn to live unafraid. We learn to share our advantages. We teach ourselves to love the unloved.
What else is there?
Billy Lee
[The following are excerpts from the 1949 edition of The Encyclopedia Americana. Billy Lee does not endorse any of it. The Editorial Board.]
DEGENERACY. Unfavorable environment is now generally recognized as the chief cause of the failure of individuals to attain the physical, mental, and moral norm of the race. In certain individuals, however, a defective constitution may predispose them toward an inadequate development of mental, and especially moral, qualities. Such individuals are known as degenerates.
In many such cases the basis of degeneracy is a lesion of the nervous system or of the sense organs. Congenital blindness and deafness can result in idiocy unless early measures are taken. However, the fundamental defects may be obscure and inaccessible to the pathological anatomist of the present day. The neuro-sensory defects are often, but not always, accompanied by malformations of a more conspicuous character, known as stigmata.
These include various distortions of the external ear, facial asymmetry, very early or very late closure of the cranial sutures, polydactylism and other digital anomalies and various signs of imperfect or abnormal development. Individual stigmata may be present in a person of normal mental and moral make-up, but the concurrence of a considerable number of stigmata is a fairly good sign of degeneracy.
The forms assumed by degeneracy are very various. The mental defect varies from utter idiocy, where the patient is unable to protect himself from immediate physical danger, through imbecility, where he is still incapable of carrying out the daily processes of dressing and undressing, washing, etc., to the various grades of feeble-mindedness, in which he is able to satisfy all his immediate personal needs, but cannot earn an independent livelihood nor associate with his fellows on equal terms.
The causes of degeneracy are manifold. The racial poisons of alcohol, drugs and venereal diseases are responsible for a large proportion of the cases, though in many cases alcoholism and drug habits may be symptoms rather than causes of degeneracy. Any factor which enfeebles the mother — poverty, illness or the like — may injure the mental and moral constitution of the child as well as its physical constitution. However, the most important cause of degeneracy is in all probability the inherent inferiority of the stock.
That certain forms of degeneracy exhibit a pedigree conforming to the Mendelian law is now an established fact. This hereditary quality of degeneracy, together with the fact that degenerates are often likely to have many children, owing to their immorality, makes the problem of degeneracy a most serious one.
The so-called Jukes family cost the taxpayers of New York State millions of dollars in the course of the 19th century. For this reason many States have enacted laws making it legal in certain cases to perform on degenerates operations designed to prevent their propagating their kind.
See ALCOHOLISM; CRIMINOLOGY; DEGENERATION; EUGENICS; FEEBLE-MINDEDNESS; IDIOCY; INSANITY; PAUPERISM.
Bibliography. — Gillin, J.L., Poverty and Delinquency (New York 1926) ; Slawson, J., Delinquent Boy (Boston 1926) ; Glueck, S. S. and E., Five Hundred Delinquent Women (New York 1934) ; Chassell, C. R., Relation Between Morality and Intellect (New York 1935) ; Lunden, W. A., Juvenile Delinquency (Pittsburg 1936) ; Burt, C. L., Subnormal Mind (New York 1937) ; Karpman, B., Case Studies in the Psychopathology of Crime (Washington 1944).
DEGENERATION —a work of Max Nordau (1895), which aimed at a scientific criticism of those degenerates not upon the acknowledged lists of the criminal classes. Degenerates, asserted Nordau, are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists.
These, however, manifest the same mental characteristics, and for the most part the same somatic features, as the members of the above-mentioned anthropological family, who satisfy their unhealthy impulses with the knife of the assassin or the bomb of the dynamiter, instead of with pen and pencil….
Now I have undertaken the work of investigating the tendencies of the fashions in art and literature; of proving that they have their source in the degeneracy of their authors, and that the enthusiasm of their admirers is for manifestations of more or less pronounced moral insanity and dementia.
One word best describes my reaction to the above entries from the 1949 Encyclopedia Americana: Yikes!
The gifted female artist promised to build the monument using only the finest Carrara marble, quarried in Italy. It would stand sixty-six feet high and be mounted atop a marble platform ten feet tall. Its several sections, when assembled, would weigh 320 tons.
The committee selected a site on La Cabana Hill in the suburb of Casa Blanca. From a vantage point 260 feet above Havana Harbor, Christ Jesus would view the entire bay, the entrance to the harbor, and the city itself across the water.
The faithful of Havana could look across the bay toward the statue — blazing white under the Havana sun — and know in their hearts that Jesus loved them and watched over them.
Marta Fernandez Batista commissioned the Statue of Christ overlooking Havana Harbor.
It took nearly three years of hard work in both Italy and Cuba, but on Christmas day 1958 Marta dedicated the statue for the people of Cuba. From now on Jesus would defend them from every danger, including the danger posed by the brutal Communists against whom her husband’s army — with America’s help — battled valiantly on the eastern side of the island.
Marta didn’t know (how could she?) that six days after the dedication ceremony, she and her husband would find themselves scrambling into a convoy of planes to fly off the island with hundreds of their closest friends — fleeing for their lives — because guerilla soldiers had somehow overrun Santa Clara, her husband’s last line of defense.
The dirty unshaven mostly black soldiers, who belonged to the devil himself — Che Guevara — were poised to swarm into the city like the fire-ants every Christian knew they were.
Marta and her husband escaped the island after a New Years Eve party made famous in the 1974 classic movie, The Godfather Part Two, which featured Al Pacino. They took expensive art and the Cuban treasury with them, but left behind a 1.2 billion dollar debt as well as a history of annual deficits in the hundreds-of millions for the new government to repay.
In the meantime, while the Batista entourage continued to orchestrate its exile, during a freak storm, lightning struck Marta’s beloved statue of Jesus. Its head disintegrated some say and crashed to the ground.
Sculptress Jilma Madera constructed the Christ in the Harbor statue. Some have claimed that she modeled the face after her own.
It was just as well that Marta didn’t see it happen. She had worked so hard to bring this gift of God’s love to the citizens of Havana. The new government — it wouldn’t become a Communist government for a few more years — cleaned up the mess and rebuilt Jesus to his former glory.
As time went on, the powerful Batista family lived out its patriarch’s remaining years in various countries until Fulgencio died of a heart attack at age 72 in Marbella, Spain in 1973.
Marta moved to America where she lived quietly among the upscale and connected of Palm Springs, Florida. She continued giving to charity, the Church, and even hospitals until she too died, in 2006, from the complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
By all reports Marta was a beautiful Catholic, a Christian, a woman who loved Jesus. But she married a man who John Kennedy once said had run the most repressive and corrupt régime that South America had ever seen.
Havana, under Batista, became a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah. Sicilian Americans in crime syndicates (years later people started calling these groups, the Mafia) operated profitable casinos, as well as gambling, pornography, and prostitution franchises.
In those days, despite American investment (Americans owned three-fourths of pretty much every category of the economy, including land) dissatisfaction ran deep. Universities became hotbeds of discontent, protests, and demonstrations. Trade unions, the press, teachers, agricultural workers, priests, doctors, and lawyers vented their collective outrage at “yanqui” unfairness and domination.
The entire country, 90% of it anyway, congealed in disgust for the goons who ran everything; who stole the island’s wealth in a seemingly endless orgy of greed. Disgust turned to fear when thugs began a regimen of assassination and torture to keep dissenters in check.
Fidel Castro led a movement against the Batista cartel that included almost every person on the island.
Eventually, Fidel Castro, a brilliant attorney and son of a prominent land owner, stepped up to coordinate the opposition, which had become so complex and unwieldy that it was almost impossible to track, let alone direct. He hired a savvy Argentine physician, Ernesto (Che) Guevara, to help him. As time went on they became close friends and made history together.
After the Batista family and their closest friends fled the island, Castro arrested the men who carried out the assassinations and torture of civilians. The new government executed several hundred for capital crimes. It sentenced hundreds more to long prison terms.
Fidel then broke up his own family’s estate by distributing its land to his family’s employees. This generous act set the tone and example for the program of island-wide agrarian reform which followed.
Christ in the Harbor of Havana, Cuba
The elites in the United States were not impressed. They orchestrated a program of assassinations, sabotage, bombings, quarantine, and isolation against the island that included poisoning its agricultural exports and burning and sinking the ships of its trading partners.
The USA established an embargo so effective that some international companies lobbied Congress to make humanitarian changes, which they did.
The USA embargo continues to the present day despite resumption of full diplomatic relations between the two countries this year.
View of Havana Bay from the statue of Jesus. Click pic to view.
The decades-long barbarity of the war against Cuba by the United States shocked the modern world. Many observers (outside the United States) continue to wonder how well Cuba might have done had it not endured decades of ”dirty tricks” to undermine its vision.
Some of the methods used to destabilize the island have made it into the public domain where observers have labeled them ”diabolical.” The history of USA-Cuba relations continues to alarm people around the world. Folks wonder if the United States will ever change. They wonder if the empire to the north can change.
A few of the excesses of the fifty-five year war against Cuba are enumerated in my essay, Hey, Guevara.
But to conclude our story…
As for Marta’s statue of Jesus, it continues to guard Havana Bay to this very day. Despite fifty-five years of relentless attack from what is arguably the most militarized and corrupt nation ever, the island of Cuba and its statue of Jesus still stand.
You have heard that it was said to the men of old, ‘You shall not kill; and whoever kills shall be liable to judgment.’
Jesus
The wars of Israel were the only ‘holy wars’ in history… there can be no more wars of faith. The only way to overcome our enemy is by loving him. Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Those who have waged war in obedience to the divine command (or in conformity with His laws) have represented…the wisdom of government and… put to death wicked men; such persons have by no means violated the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Saint Augustine
The United States deploys drones like the Scan Eagle and the Predator (which can dispatch Hellfire missiles) to kill people by remote control anywhere in the world.
Readers might notice that the quotes by the three Christians cited above the picture don’t agree about murder. Killing is a moral controversy.
The subject is even more contentious between leaders of religions outside Christianity. It’s a strange thing. In the United States where Christianity is mainstream, pastors sometimes lead the charge towardwar; some endorse capital punishment, so it’s confusing.
Can killing people be a good thing? The Catholic Church developed Just War doctrines to permit good people to kill the wicked under certain carefully crafted conditions such as proportionality, just cause, and last resort.
From my point of view, ideas of Just War fall under the umbrellas of self-justification, rationalization, and delusion. Will anyone admit the obvious? All countries are ruled by elites, and the USA is no exception.
Elites get to be elite through in-fighting, war, intrigue, and politics. They are, for the most part, desensitized to violence. The morality of religion is of no use to them except when it helps to consolidate and enhance their prestige and power. If a philosophy like Just War helps to alleviate the guilt feelings of soldiers they order into combat, they are fine with it.
Elites are, by process and definition, really good at fighting to maximize their advantages. Over time elites become a law unto themselves and develop their world view and their reasons for doing things, which are usually not well-understood by the average people who serve them.
Who wants to take on people who can really hurt them?
In most places, people go-along with their elites to get along. It’s less stressful and much safer to pretend that average people’s best interests are at the heart of decisions made by the wealthy and the powerful — especially as they negotiate deals, wage wars, and craft treaties.
Who wants to take-on people who can really hurt them should they ever choose to?
For their part, our elites tolerate religion, because in the United States at least Christianity seems to encourage citizens to be docile and compliant. Preachers and pastors encourage their flocks to turn the other cheek and obey authorities.
Christian evangelicals don’t challenge military power, and they generally oppose government policies designed to curb the power of individuals who accumulate vast wealth. Some encourage gun ownership and participation in wars — confusing non-Christians who might be under the impression that Jesus advocated pacifism and non-violence.
In the United States, the wealthy have built a powerful military and have used it to kill many millions of people during the past seventy-five years (the modern era). Much of the killing has occurred during periods when the United States did not formally declare war.
A lot of the killing has taken place under continuing resolutions like the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which helped to justify the long war in Vietnam.
Another is the AUMF (Authorization for Use of Military Force) — passed by Congress on September 14, 2001 — which provided the legal authority for the United States to use military power in perpetuity against any individual, group, or country who dared threaten it.
Only Barbara Lee(no relation to Billy Lee) of California voted against AUMF, the perpetual war resolution of 14 September 2001. President George W. Bush signed it into law on September 18.
Congressional consent is no longer required to wage war. Military force is now forever justified whenever and wherever the United States is threatened. The Congressional authorization of 2001 makes it easier for the USA to kill people, including American citizens living out of country.
One estimate by The Hill — a news organization whose on-line stories are widely read by members of Congress — places the number of killings by USA drones operating outside of war zones since 2001 at 2,400.
TheBillyLeePontificator.com could not independently confirm the estimate, which one of its editors characterized as “bordering on the ridiculous.”
It defies common sense that high numbers of assassinations of civilians could occur outside of warzones without arousing a profound backlash by people of goodwill, she insisted.
Is she right? Does anyone outside of government really know?
History seems to say it’s possible. Over the years the USA has invaded and tried to overthrow many countries, often under the pretext of retrieving businesses that were seized by their host countries.
In most places, the United States has succeeded — temporarily — like in Iran in 1953 where it secured natural gas and oil reserves; in Guatemala in 1954 when it took back the nationalized United Fruit Company; and in Chile in 1973 when it repossessed certain mines that were producing strategic metals.
The problem for most countries is that after the USA retrieves its property it moves in to take over the country, usually behind the scenes using native-born (and ruthless) dictators loyal to the United States.
USA backed fighters killed and wounded 5,000 Cubans during the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961. Cuba captured 1,200 who they added to several thousand political detainees in a trade for medicine.
Every once in a while, takeover fails, like in Cuba in 1961 and in Vietnam in 1972. In those countries, strategic resources were never at stake, so the losses didn’t seem to affect our safety or our economic security. Still, after the fights ended, the USA worked overtime to make sure it ruined their economies by deploying embargos and unleashing its leverage over international banking.
The USA ignited recent wars in the Middle East — Kuwait, Iraq, Syria — for various reasons and continues them to this day. The United States fights terrorists in undeclared wars permitted by AUMF resolutions, which allow it to kill enemies anywhere in the world by remote control using un-humaned drones.
It’s pointless to argue whether the killings are justified or moral, smart or stupid. Many families have been ruined by drones and by war. They don’t care about smart or stupid. They just hurt; survivors wonder what might have been were their loved ones allowed to live.
So, how many people have we killed? How many hurt? How many wounded? How many amputees; how many blinded; how many deafened; how many disfigured? How many orphans? How many widows? How many dreams crushed; how many aspirations demolished?
The picture reveals the lethality of Hellfire missile-strikes. The heat cooks flesh off bones of bystanders who get too close.
How many loves-of-a-lifetime have been dashed on America’s battlefields?
Unless God Himself reveals it someday, we will never know, because during the era of Bush-senior and his general, Norman Schwarzkopf (of the renown German family) no one bothered to track body-counts; no one kept statistics on the maimed and crippled.
Our military says it doesn’t do counts. It’s in bad taste. A country like the USA doesn’t count pelts or put notches on rifles; besides, how does anyone collect the names of entire families destroyed in atomic blasts like Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
In those attacks, the genealogy archives of families were obliterated. The files of victims, the records of everyone who knew them, were vaporized.
The directories of the dead in Japan are missing, perhaps forever. Unless resurrected by God, the dead, many of them, are forgotten to the end of time.
The Arlington National Cemetery holds the remains of 400,000 veterans who have served the USA in defense of our way of life. It is a sacred place. A summer job during college privileged me to trim the gravestones of thousands who loved their country enough to serve. A cemetery for those the USA has killed in the modern era, should it ever be built, will be 25 to 150 times larger depending on who collects the dead.
Nevertheless, brave reporters and historians have tried to pull together records where they can find them. I can tell you that the numbers of deaths, executions, and imprisonments in America’s wars are in dispute — with some articles on Wikipedia, for example, frozen in place and fought over by review committees for historical accuracy. The reports are hard reading, disturbing really, because some folks seem to be trying for whatever reasons to understate and misrepresent the carnage.
Despite obvious inaccuracies which defy common sense, the numbers on the internet are the most reliable civilians have. They may perhaps be understated, but they are still large. I’ve included links for those who might want to verify the statistics.
Billy Lee
Notes from the Editorial Board: As everyone knows, the United States is a close ally of Israel. Many prominent Israelis are citizens of the United States, such as former Homeland Security Director, Michael Chertoff. Some folks, like Billy Lee, consider Israel a de-facto fifty-first state of the Union, much like Hawaii, though he admits there are important differences, to be sure.
Billy Lee has pointed out that since 1948 Israel and the United States have cooperated in a dozen or so wars and flare-ups — among them, the War of Independence, the Suez Crisis, the Six Day War, the War of Attrition, the Yom Kippur War, the Lebanon War of 1982, the South Lebanon conflict, the first and second Intifadas, the 2006 Lebanon War, the Gaza War, and various operations like Protective Edge — which were fought to secure Israel’s safety and its autonomy.
The USA has spent trillions of dollars to stabilize the Middle East and prop up with money and weapons governments favorable to our side. It has pumped over two-hundred billion dollars into Israel’s economy alone. How many people have been killed in the wars which erupted? Billy Lee doesn’t know.
He seems to think that an accurate figure for war-related killings by the USA should include in some way the deaths inflicted during the many conflicts in the Middle East where the United States was directly involved. He simply doesn’t have the numbers, so he can’t report them. The numbers may be available to others, but they are not included in his analysis.
A similar concern involves NATO, where the United States, again, is partnering with others in wars and conflicts, and is not the sole actor.
As for other conflicts: Billy Lee has added the following list with links to the statistics. The Editorial Board
The names and numbers of people killed in Japan will never be known. USA bombers obliterated their records in the fires they ignited in the Japanese made-from-wood-and-paper neighborhoods and cities.
The War against Japan deserves special mention.
The names and quantities of people the USA killed in Japan will never be known. The Air Force obliterated their records in the fires they set in the Japanese made-from-wood-and-paper neighborhoods and cities.
Beginning in 1945 sixty-seven Japanese cities of consequence were burned to rubble by incendiary night-time attacks involving hundreds of B-29 Superfortress bombers under the command of USA General Curtis LeMay.
During the first attack against Tokyo in March 1945, Lemay deployed 325 bombers to drop a half-million slow-burning napalmcluster-bombs, which killed at least 150 thousand civilians. His bombing of the capital city continued unabated for three weeks; the fire-bombing of the other sixty-six Japanese cities continued for three more months.
Five cities were held back (protected from attack) until August 1945 to permit General LeMay to decisively demonstrate American atomic fire-power. He annihilated two of them — Hiroshima and Nagasaki — with the atomic bombs named Little Boy and Fat Man.
He spared the three remaining targets, Yokohama (Japan’s second largest city, where I lived from 1952-1954), Niigata, and Kokura — after the Japanese surrendered on August 15, 1945.
Some older readers might remember that Curtis LeMay ran for Vice-President in 1968 on a third-party ticket led by Alabama Governor George Wallace. The two men tried unsuccessfully to derail racial integration in the South, which our Congress had recently mandated.
One of General Douglas MacArthur’s closest aides, Bonner Fellers, described Curtis LeMay’s attacks on Japanese civilians as “the most ruthless and barbaric killings of non-combatants in all history.”
The most conservative estimate of the number of civilians burned alive that I’ve seen in print is 500,000. Some historians have estimated the number to be as high as two million. The Japanese effort to evacuate their cities saved countless lives, but left many millions of women and children homeless, until the cities could be rebuilt after the Japanese surrendered.
Official histories written by the US Air Force claim that ”five months of jellied fire attacks” were ”so destructive” that they ”cremated 65 Japanese cities.” The attacks left ”9.2 million homeless.”
Here are some numbers of interest: atomic bomb attacks in Japan — 225,000 killed; Vietnam War — 3.4 million killed; World War II — 55 million killed; Korean War — 2 million killed; Iraq War — 1 million killed.
This list of wars is necessarily incomplete, because the USA fights secret wars from time to time. In his 1990 book, Freedom in Exile, the Dalai Lama spoke of one such war against the Chinese and admitted taking millions from the USA to support the effort. He claimed that America’s policy was to destabilize and overthrow wherever possible each and every Communist country in the world. Inside the US intelligence establishment, the suppression is called Strategic Strangulation.
This policy was the reason many Communist societies sealed their borders during the Cold War. Some, like North Korea, still do. Military historians have claimed that the United States dropped anthrax bombs on North Korean troops and their Chinese allies in 1954. This biological terror was unleashed after what historian Richard Rhodes says was a program of US bombing against cities and dams in North Korea that killed two million civilians.
General Curtis LeMay agreed. He led the US Strategic Air Command during the bombing of Korea. In 1984 he bragged before the Office of Air Force History, ”Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — twenty percent of the population.” It helps to explain why they hate us.
The numbers killed in these secret and not-so-secret wars are argued over; they are not certain or even known — certainly not by civilians who lack security clearances. Mayhem from traumatic wounds is not known.
The consensus seems to be that the total number of human beings killed by the United States since 1940 exceeds ten million. Depending on how it is counted, the number could be far higher. A case can be made that it’s as high as sixty-five million.
In the modern era, the United States has warred against one out of four countries on the earth. I didn’t believe it, until I did the count. Count the number any which way you choose. It’s a big number. And the numbers of wounded and traumatized human beings is certainly enormous, but unknown.
I’d like to think that in the future the United States will resolve its differences with other countries and organizations in a way that doesn’t involve killing people.
The United Nations was established to do just that — peacefully resolve disputes — but the United States runs the place, some say, and others have insisted that the USA is the biggest warmonger on the planet.
It has something to do with its defense industry and the efforts of tycoons to maximize profits for themselves and their shareholders.
I hope it’s not true.
How horrible it is to have so many people killed–And what a blessing that one cares for none of them! Jane Austin, 1811, on the Battle of Albuera
Billy Lee
Postscript: Here is a quotation from wisdom literature, which — who knows? — might help policymakers. I wonder if anyone believes it.
It is by the fear of the LORD that someone turns away from evil. When someone’s ways please the LORD, He makes even their enemies be at peace with them.
I found the passage in the Proverbs of the Bible. See chapter 16.
Miguel Angel Asturias won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967 during my freshman year at college. I must have been chasing girls the day of the announcement. I just don’t remember him. Until a few months ago, I didn’t know who he was.
While doing research on the Cuban Revolution and its leaders for recent blog-posts, Miguel’s name kept popping up here and there in various contexts, so I decided to learn more about the author by trying to take an inside-the-cover peek into his signature book, Men of Maize, on Amazon.com.
Was Asturias really that good that he could win a Nobel prize? What did he write about?
Miguel Angel Asturias, I’d already learned, was born in Guatemala and wrote in Spanish — a language I didn’t read or speak. I was able to find some English translations of his books on-line, but they seemed to be scarce and out-of-print.
On Amazon.com, Men of Maize(Hombres de Maiz) cost $50 — in used condition, of course. “Like-new” copies priced-out at over a hundred dollars. The titles didn’t feature Amazon’s inside-the-cover functionality either, so my free peek inside-the-cover strategy just wasn’t going to work.
Other books by Asturias were also unavailable in English, although a beat-up library copy of Strong Wind (Viento Fuerte) turned up on-line for sale at ten bucks. I decided to buy it and then search through libraries on-line for Men of Maize. It turned out that a solitary university library, which happened to be located nearby, owned a solitary English language copy, so I drove over to check it out.
Miguel Angel Asturias; born 19 Oct 1899; died 9 June 1974
According to the inside cover, the library acquired the book in 1993, the same year Hombres de Maiz was translated into English and incorporated into UNESCO’s World Heritage historical book collection. It had been forty-four years since it was first published, in Spanish. The librarian — who must have jumped out of her chair to place the order — probably thought the book would become a big hit among the institution’s forty-thousand English readers.
Sure enough, according to the book’s ledger, someone or other had already borrowed the award-winning novel five times: June 1996; February 1997; February 2001; July 2003; July 2009. And now a sixth borrower was stepping up to the plate — that would be me — to end the book’s most recent six-year no-hitter. Unless the forty-thousand folks who used the student library were reading it in Spanish, Corn Men wasn’t doing so good, not where I lived, anyway; not in English.
How does a critically acclaimed once-upon-a-time international best-seller written by a Nobel Prize winning author (unavailable in USA bookstores) generate a paltry six library reads in twenty-two years at a major university library that is also serving the public? I don’t know.
I took the book home to study it. Here is the opening sentence: Gasper[pronounced Jasper, like the blood-stone] Ilom lets them steal the sleep from the eyes of the land of Ilom. Ok, not sure what this is about, I’ll keep reading. Gasper Ilom lets them hack away the eyelids of the land of Ilom with axes…Huh? Gasper Ilom lets them scorch the leafy eyelashes of the land of Ilom with fires that turn the moon to furious red…Mmm. Keep reading. Keep reading. OK. End of page one. Gasper stretched himself out,…bound in sleep and in death by the snake of six-hundred-thousand coils of mud, moon, forests, rainstorms, mountains, lakes, birds, and echoes that pounded his bones until they turned to a black frijol paste dripping from the depths of the night.
Gerald Martin, translator.
Page one, I soon learned, was the weakest page in the book. On page two and beyond, the novel began to rise into a tour de force, a masterpiece, which had been lovingly captured and transformed into English by translator, Gerald Martin.
Asturias, I discovered, wrote in a style that critics would later call magic realism. It’s the style of One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Gabo), which also won a Nobel Prize and is required reading in many university literature programs. Gabo published his book in Argentina during the same year that Asturias won his Nobel Prize (1967).
For those familiar with Gabo’s book, it’s use of language is shallow compared to that of Asturias — though it is a fun and light-hearted read; I would say it is more entertaining to average readers interested in plot over word-play and character development. Gabo referred to his book as a kind of inside joke written for friends.
Whatever style anyone chooses to label Corn Men, Miguel Asturias was clearly a genius who knew unusual stuff, and he could write. That’s my view, anyway. His writing stands alone. Critics have compared him to Keats and Joyce, but I say, no. Those authors can sometimes depress the reader with their pedantic displays.
Not Miguel. He was humble, brilliant, knowledgeable, and direct. He didn’t grandstand. He didn’t show-off. He painted with a preternatural palette to portray ways of being which were lucid and compelling; and fabulously unusual. His writing sometimes took my breath away, because it was original, unpredictable, and paradigm-shattering.
Only Shakespeare himself rewires the brains of his readers like Asturias, I thought. Yes, references to Mayan culture might be arcane. But they didn’t impede the flow of the story or obscure its meaning. They simply provided rivulets to explore for those readers who might like to learn more than they know.
Popol Vuh is Mayan scripture. It contains accounts of creation, ancestry, history, and cosmology. It even references a great flood.
My interest in Corn Men, after reading it, has less to do with the story itself, or its backstory, than with its use of language — though all of it is incredible. For example, the Guatemalan writer — a Sorbonne trained ethnologist and bonafide expert in Maya culture — spent forty years transcribing and translating into Spanish the Mayan “bible”, Popol Vuh (Book of the People). His knowledge of Mayan culture saturates the novel.
Miguel Angel Asturias lived and breathed Guatemala, which for him sheltered a personal treasure-cache of Maya ruins, history, legends, culture, writings, and artifacts. Asturias was in love with all of it.
Guatemala should be of interest to all Americans, as well, because it is central to recent US history. In 1954 Guatemala became the second of several modern democracies the United States chose to overthrow. (The first was Iran, in 1953.)
Encouraged by the easy success of its military takeovers, the USA used Guatemala as a base of operations to try again, in 1961, to seize control of Cuba, but its Bay of Pigs invasion (modeled after its strategy in Guatemala), failed.
The USA was undeterred by miscalculation. It learned from its mistakes, made tweaks in its planning and, by the middle 1960s, began overthrowing governments in the Americas and around the world to further its economic and strategic interests.
Like falling dominoes, countries like Chile, Nicaragua, Panama, South Vietnam, and Iraq (there were others) fell to USA backed military coups and takeovers, until President Obama put a stop to it all in 2008. (Two exceptions continue to be Afghanistan and Syria, where takeover planning and operations are ongoing.)
Editors Note:As of 25 May 2018 destabilization of countries the USA dislikes seems to have resumed as a cornerstone of its foreign policy, which is to dominate all countries on the earth. The policy is called strategic strangulation; it’s like waterboarding except that it’s inflicted on countries; it’s being applied against Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, Brazil, Turkey, and many others — which some readers won’t have any trouble identifying. Readers should keep in mind that everything changed when the GOP and its Russian-Israeli backers seized power in the manipulated and rigged election of November 2016. Billy Lee published this essay during the final years of the Obama presidency.
Current problems in socialist democracies like Brazil, Columbia, and Venezuela appear (on the day of this writing) to be the work of wealthy power-brokers working outside the influence of traditional government agencies long associated with destabilization programs; the CIA and its labyrinth of agricultural-aid programs seem to be playing historically minor roles at the present time.
Jacobo Arbenz, Guatemalan President, 1951-1954
Not so in 1954. Back then USA proxies overpowered the popularly elected Guatemalan President, Jacobo Arbenz and forced him to stand naked before reporters before they put him on an airplane and threw him out.
They then stripped another prominent Guatemalan, our writer Miguel Angel Asturias, of his citizenship and expelled him (along with hundreds of his friends and acquaintances) from the country he loved.
Soon, over one-hundred thousand citizens fled to neighboring countries, after they learned that the military government was “disappearing” opponents — a terrifying practice that would spread to other USA backed dictatorships, like Argentina, in the decades to come.
Miguel’s exile (to Argentina and Chile) lasted eight years during which the United States transformed Guatemala into a training ground and staging area for CIA backed militias tasked to, among other things, protect dictators allied with American businesses, hunt down and kill leftist revolutionaries (one of them, Che Guevara), and capsize popularly elected socialist governments, like those in Chile and Nicaragua.
Maya Pyramid in the city of Tikal, Guatemala
As I said before, my interest in Corn Men lies beyond its compelling story and backstory. Yes, it is a novel about the indigenous Indians of Guatemala, who believed their skin was made of corn. Yes, it describes the marginalization and suppression of a native people by modern hi-tech agribusiness, which viewed corn as nothing more than a crop that could be sold.
Corn could not be one’s personal identity, the northern white-men of agribusiness insisted. Corn did not, could not, envelop, protect, and nurture ones soul.
According to the leaders of big agribusiness, corn was something to eat, nothing more. The Mayan Indians knew better. Corn was sacred. Corn was people. They were made from it.
Corn Men don’t remember.
Cross-cultural differences as wide as these, though fascinating, always seem to lead toward tragedy. On the book’s final page, in the epilogue, in the last paragraph, at the last sentence, Asturias shows us the horrific result: a degraded world where corn men become ants. They work on utopian ant farms harvesting kernels of corn. The glory and the magic of living inside skin made of corn has been flayed away.
The thrill of being Corn Men, the joy of being a fruit-like part of the earth, is not even remembered. From now on, corn men are worker ants. It becomes all about the work. It’s all about producing corn, selling corn, eating corn, buying corn, maybe even popping corn. It’s no longer about being corn.
Or is it?
Gerald Martin, the translator, thought Asturias may have intended the last paragraph to show that in the distant future the Indians would actually triumph; their descendants would win their fight to be corn people by establishing a kind of worker’s paradise; a communal corn-based utopia; a society based, presumably, on communism, where they would toil like joyful ants.
Who knows? Asturias never said. His ending remains ambiguous, open to interpretation and discussion. Good literature is like that, it seems.
The dilemmas which Asturias described are thought provoking for sure, but what made me love Corn Men was Miguel’s way with language; the way he used language to paint the surreal internal realities of the many indigenous persons he described. The literary techniques and devices he employed to craft the landscapes, animals, people, and action in Corn Men are complex, varied, and thrilling to encounter and embrace, at least for me.
To my mind, Miguel’ s prose is amazing, wondrous, dense, and sophisticated. Gerald Martin, his translator, preserved and amplified it all in a resplendent English version in 1993, which is the one I read.
Below are my personal picks of phrases from the book, Corn Men, (my proletarian version of the title) to give flavor to uninitiated readers; to acquaint them with the astonishing author, Asturias. And, as always, please, feel free to click on the links in this post to learn more.
Billy Lee
What follows are assorted tidbits from a few chapters in the 1993 Gerald Martin translation of Hombres de Maiz, by Miguel Angel Asturias, first published in 1949. Billy Lee hopes these vivid constructs will stimulate interest in the book for all those folks who like to write and read.The Editorial Board
…rabbits…turned into stars…
…word of the earth turned to flame by the sun almost set fire to the maize-leaf ears of the yellow rabbits in the sky…that planted themselves in the sky, turned into stars, and faded into the water like reflections with ears.
…rivers stagnant with wakefulness…
…he was swallowed by a toothless half moon which sucked him from the air, without biting him, like a small fish.
…ground sticky with cold…
…fingernails heavy as shotgun slugs…
…liquor…the water of war…
Gasper grew older as he talked…
His head fell to the ground like a flowerpot with buds of tiny thoughts.
His thoughts passed out of his ears…
…her hair combed by Gaspar’s teeth…
She shrank back like a blind hen.
A handful of sunflower seeds in her entrails.
…river that…rots…for wanting to sleep…
…river that sleeps as it flows and opens its eyes in the pools and rots for wanting to sleep…
…the earth that falls from the stars…
…creamy skies and butter rivers running low…
…shadow hard as the walls…
…gun fully loaded with seeds of darkness…
…skin like old bark, his hair sticking out over his forehead like the tip of a sucked mango…
…dog dyed red with ringworm…
…face the color of vinegar scum…
…shadowy corpses scattering handfuls of maize down from the sky in torrents of rain…
…firefly wizards…
…firefly wizards, who dwelt in tents of virgin doeskin…
…the mud gets more wrinkled year by year, like an aging face…
…sound of his breathing like water falling on porous earth…
…meat contorted in the fire as though the animals had come back to life and were being burned alive…
…boiling fat made rain bubbles in the tortilla dishes…
…men and women trembling like the leaves smacked by machetes.
…saffron colored mountains bathed in turpentine down to the valleys…
…baked puff-pastry faces…
…white root poison…
…sob chilled his nostrils…
…old fool…afraid of everything…
…his fears were just that, the tremors of an old fool who, because of his age, was starting to be afraid of everything.
…crawling children and warm legs…
Candy rosaries like sugared cartridge belts around young bosoms.
…a swarm of locusts on fire…like golden hailstones with wings…
…skeleton light of fireflies…
…deer like lunar sawdust in the fragile light…
…jaw trembling like a loose horseshoe…
…darkness streamed out of the anthills…
…everything was on fire…like the light at the beginning of the world…
…everything was on fire, without giving off either flame, smoke, or any smell of burning. The candle glow of the fireflies streamed down from his hat, behind his ears, over the collar of his embroidered shirt, over his shoulders, up the sleeves of his jacket, down the backs of his hairy hands, between his fingers, like frozen sweat, like the light at the beginning of the world, a brightness in which everything could be seen…
Without saying a word he started bleeding away inside.
…as his voice turned flesh and blood in the cartilage of his nose, mid sobs and thick snuffles…
Senor Tomas, who sat on his leather stool and sucked in his tears, with his back to the door…
…the fire followed on behind with a rush, like a shaggy dog wagging its tail of smoke at him.
…it’s dangerous to contradict what lunatics or lovers say…
Roads of white earth are like the bones of all roads that fall dead at night. …They remain unburied to give passage to souls in torment…
…fire is like water when it flows…
Fire is like water when it flows, no one can cut it off.
…smoke swirling like milk…
…his sigh dropped from the tip of his spurs like tears, almost like words.
…wrapped in their ponchos like mummies…
…the earth was a huge nipple…
The sun, blear-eyed, could hardly see.
Stones from agave slings hummed through the razor-sharp air in the sun-toasted silence of the ripened fields…
Through the tattered lip his incisors, like two enormous nose drips, thrust forward a ridge of cold laughter.
…gums nailed down with stumps…
Madmen and children speak the truth.
…spines…hidden like jaguars…
…sarespino bushes, which by day seem to keep their spines hidden, like jaguars, and bring them out as it grows dark to wound those who pass by.
…echo of the bells that toll for the dead down in the town until they make everyone dizzy, tilan-tilon, tilan-tilon…
The hands of those who snap the maize plant so the cob will finish ripening are like the hands that break the sound of bells in two, so the dead person will ripen.
…the running of the rats, real persons to judge from the noise they made, as though they were moving furniture, were the last things she heard.
…lighter sneezed sparks as the flint struck the steel.
…sparks that sailed…like little partridge eyes to set alight the gold-starched clothes of dry sun and dry moon, dry salt and dry star, of the maize-fields.
…flowers like doomed flags crawling with insects…
…darkness in the clear light of liquor, a luminous liquid which coats everything inside you black as you swallow it, dresses you in mourning inside.
…spurs speaking to the stallion in telegraphic, star-like language.
Death is the dark betrayal of the liquor of life.
Two thin burned legs inside a petticoat of ash, a head with no ears and a small lock of hair, also of ash, and a few curled fingernails, was all that could be lifted from the ground where Vaca Manuela Machojon had fallen.
The waters of the river would cheep at the edges of the pools, like little chicks.
…speaking as though he were killing lice with his teeth…
…her soul…pleading for relief…
…her soul bulging out of her aged, deep-set eyes, pleading mutely for relief…
…tidal waves of weeping that makes everything salty, because tears are salty, because man is made salty by weeping from the moment he is born…
…jasmine-colored teeth…
…a body that goes out of tune, my son, is no good anymore for this life…
…its blood of red citrus juice bathed the moon…
…the madman’s vision is like a mirror broken inside him and in the pieces he sees what he saw whole before.
…he turned his head with the eyes of a boiled crab…
Musus tried to control his horse, sitting up like a flea in the stirrups, buttocks-battered by the trot.
…hoofs echoed like pewter-pots…
…his eyes were fixed on a long serpent of trees which seemed to be crawling between the mountains with the sound of thunder.
Don Chalo…bellowed at him with his mouth open up to his eyes, and such force of lungs that the sound even poured out of his nose.
The sonorous blood clots of his laughter could not be heard, but it was joyful paint that splashed over his face…
…clotting blood of the red moon…
…the thick clotting blood of the red moon…
…dark forest which stank of horses…
…you could hear something like the boiling fizz of water produced by the stubborn flight of insects…
…flea-bitten nag which paid no heed to word or spur once it became stuck to the ground with the glue of weariness and the thin gum of darkness that was half a dream.
…his ears hummed as though he’d been dosed with quinine…
…silver-coin necklaces of clear water and mountains of leaves that woke at each disturbance, each gust of wind with the clamor of a swarm of locusts sandpapering the air.
…carpets of dry pine needles, rivulets which the shine of the moon turned into navigable rivers of white honey along bare hillsides surrounded by pine groves…
The stallion tossed its head as it felt the splash of large drops of white moon.
…sprinkle of limy light…
Pine cones like the bodies of tiny motionless birds, sacrificed birds petrified with terror on the ever convulsing branches.
…hands…like spiders….
The hands of the second lieutenant looked like scuffling spiders beneath the play of lights and shadows.
The light and shade had awoken the itching of the mange between his fingers.
Air and earth, as the riders advanced, seemed to be folded in dark and luminous pleats, blinking, and the stones and black spinebushes gave grasshopper leaps.
…the brightness that was coming at them now, gropingly, mid a beautiful darkness, seemed more like a star in the sky forgotten there since the beginning of the world.
…they could hear the tinkling of stones as they sang beneath the horses’ hoofs.
The rocks, faintly orange in color, were reflected in the film of moon and water that covered them like the surface of a mirror…
…meteors falling with their tendons bleeding light…
…the collapse of a vegetable being which no longer has the will to resist the onrush of the wind.
They literally merged their necks with the necks of their horses, to offer the least resistance, and because contact with living, sweating animals which smelled like sacks of salt afforded them the vague security of companionship in the midst of danger.
…that man whose pale blue eyes shown like crystals of fire…
…squirrels…chewed on cheerful thoughts…
…distant howling of coyotes in lunar syrup, squirrels gnawing with laughter as they chewed on cheerful thoughts…
The moon had fallen with its slow decaying light in a convex sky weepy with night dew.
Suffocating suphur fumes in which diseases seemed to float…
…whiplashing of the fierce wind…armed with razor leaves.
Black wasps smelling of hot cane liquor fleeing from honeycombs the color of excrement sown in the earth, half honeycomb, half ant’s nest.
Little streams of weeping, like brown sugar water, ran through the dust of the roads on his cheeks.
…it grows chill, like the fur of a dead animal, at night.
I picked you up and brought you back to life by blowing on you like a fire when all that’s left is a spark.
…fireflies played at little candles in the darkness. If only Goyo Yic could have seen just one of those small greenish lights, the color of hope, which lit up his pockmarked face, dry and expressionless as cow dung.
…sticks sounded like snapping guitar strings on the docile backs of the oxen…
To hear them speak was better than charity now, in his solitude, when to hear a voice in his house he had to talk to himself, and it’s not the same at all when you talk to yourself, it’s a human voice, sure, but it’s the voice of a madman.
…people…made from hillside earth…
People from the highlands smelling of wool, crags, and black poplars. People from the coast stinking of salt and sea sweat. People from the east, made of hillside earth, giving off an odor of tobacco, dry cheese, yucca paste and corn starch, and people from the north smelling of drizzle, mockingbird cages, and boiled water.
The blind man heard the sky palpitate like some feathered creature, and a strange itching troubled his groin and nipples, as if his sweat were eating away his courage as acid corrodes metal.
…time, which passes without us noticing: as we always have time, we don’t realize we’re always short of it, was how Culebro explained it to him.
…knees deadened from so much kneeling, hands dripping the white smallpox from the candles they held in bundles…
What color is weeping? he cried, stretched out on the ground, and in the same cry, with the very ache of his weeping, he replied, It’s the color of white rum!
White copal, which is the mysterious white brother to rubber, the black brother, the darkness that jumps.
…a woman who is truly loved cannot be seen…
A woman who is truly loved cannot be seen, she is the flower of the amate, seen only by the blind, the flower of blind men, men blinded by love, blinded by faith, blinded by life.
…let himself be bathed, one of those moonlit nights when everything looks just as it does by day, in the tree milk that flows down from the machete cuts in the bark of the moon, that light of copal the wizards cook in receptacles of dream and oblivion.
The woman made a sound of splintering teeth, grinding them, and of bones straining in their joints, stretching out, curling up, crushing her face with tears, which interlocked the sorrow of sinfulness to her placid smile of contentment.
