Mirrors Stories Of Almost Everyone Quotes

نحن غبار وعدم.. كل ما نفعله ليس سوى قبض ريح.

تقسيم العمل عهد الي الاناث بكل جميع المهام تقريبا ,كي يتمكن الذكور من تكريس انفسهم بالكامل للابادة المتبادلة

كانت الحياة بلا اسم،بلا ذاكرة. كانت لها يدان، ولكن لا وجود لمن تلمسه. وكان لها فم، ولكن هناك من تكلمه. كانت الحياة واحدة. ولأنها واحدة كانت لا أحد...

أبتاه.. ارسم لي العالم على جسدي..!

Hunting Jews has always been a European sport. Now the Palestinians, who never played it, are paying the bill.

The nature of the parts of the body cannot be understood without grasping the nature of the organism as a whole. Symptoms

من أفريقيا بدأت الرحلة البشرية في العالم. ومن هناك بدأ أبوانا في غزو الكوكب. مختلف الدروب أسست لمختلف المصائر، وتولت الشمس توزيع الألوان. ونحن النساء والرجال، قوس قزح الأرض، صارت لنا الآن ألوان أكثر من ألوان قوس قزح السماء؛ ولكننا جميعنا أفارقة مهاجرون. حتى البيض ناصعو البياض يتحدرون من أفريقيا. ربما نرفض الاعتراف بأصلنا المشترك لأن العنصرية تنتج فقدان ذاكرة، أو لأنه يبدو مستحيلا لنا أن نصدق أن العالم كله في تلك الأزمنة البعيدة كان مملكتنا، خريطة شاسعة بلا حدود، وكانت أرجلنا هي جواز السفر الوحيد المطلوب

تأسيس الكتابة ‏ عندما لم يكن العراق قد صار العراق بعد، ولدتْ هناك أول الكلمات المكتوبة. إنها تبدو مثل آثار طيور. رسمتها أيدٍ بارعة، بقصبات مدببة، على الطين. النار التي شوت الطين، حفظتها.. النار التي تقتل وتنقذ، تقتل وتمنح الحياة: مثل الآلهة، مثلنا. بفضل النار مازالت ألواح الطين تروي لنا، الآن، ما رُوي قبل آلاف السنين في تلك الأراضي التي بين نهرين. في أزمنتنا أطلق جورج دبليو بوش بصفاقة سعيدة، ربما لقناعته بأن الكتابة قد اختُرعت في تكساس، حرب إبادة ضد العراق. فكان هناك آلاف وآلاف الضحايا، ولم يكن الضحايا أناساً من لحم وعظم فقط. بل جرى اغتيال الكثير من الذاكرة أيضاً. الكثير من ألواح الطين، التاريخ الحي، سُرقت أو دُمرت في أعمال القصف. ‏ وكان أحد تلك الألواح يقول: ‏ نحن غبار وعدم. ‏ كل ما نفعله ليس سوى قبض ريح. ‏ ص15

The family has no borders, explains Soboufu Somé of the Dagara people: “Our children have many mothers and many fathers. As many as they wish.

Why are some walls so loud and others mute?

بوذا وعظ بالرواقية و التخلي عن العاطفة و انكار الشهوات و لكنه مات من النهم بلحم الخنزير

The voyages of the great Chinese fleet were missions of exploration and commerce. They were not enterprises of conquest. No yearning for domination obliged Zheng to scorn or condemn what he found. What was not admirable was at least worthy of curiosity. And from trip to trip, the imperial library in Beijing continued growing until it held four thousand books that collected the wisdom of the world. At the time, the king of Portugal had six books.

الهرم الآخر ‏ كان يمكن لبناء بعض الأهرامات أن يتأخر أكثر من قرن. آلاف وآلاف الرجال كانوا يرفعون، كتلة بعد كتلة، ويوماً بعد يوم، المنزل الذي سيعيش فيه الفرعون حياته الأبدية، ومعه كنوز جهازه المأتمي. ‏ المجتمع المصري الذي كان يبني الأهرامات، كان هرماً. في القاعدة، كان الفلاح الذي بلا أرض. وخلال فيضانات النيل، كان هو من يبني معابد، ويقيم سدوداً، ويشق قنوات. وعندما تعود مياه النهر إلى مسارها، يعمل في أراضي الآخرين. ‏ منذ حوالي أربعة آلاف عام، وصفه النساخ كما يلي: ‏ المزارع يحمل النير. ‏ كتفاه ينوءان تحت النير. ‏ على رقبته قرحة متقيحة. ‏ في الصباح، يسقي بقولاً. ‏ في المساء، يسقي خياراً. ‏ في الظهيرة، يسقي نخيلاً. ‏ وأحياناً ينهار ويموت. ‏ لم تكن هناك نُصب مأتمية له. عارياً عاش، وفي الموت تكون الأرض بيته. يرقد في دروب الصحراء. ومعه الحصير الذي كان ينام عليه وكأس الطين الذي كان يشرب به. وفي قبضته يضعون بضع حبات من القمح، فقد يخطر له أن يأكل. ‏ ص24

Susan Abdallah, a Palestinian, knows the recipe for making a terrorist: Deprive him of food and water. Surround his home with the machinery of war. Attack him with all means at all times, especially at night. Demolish is home, uproot his farmland, kill his loved ones. Congratulations: you have created an army of suicide bombers.

THE ART OF DRAWING YOU In a bed by the Gulf of Corinth, a woman contemplates by firelight the profile of her sleeping lover. On the wall, his shadow flickers. The lover, who lies by her side, will leave. At dawn he will leave to war, to death. And his shadow, his traveling companion, will leave with him and with him will die. It is still dark. The woman takes coal out of the embers and draws on the wall the outline of his shadow. Those lines will not leave. They will not embrace her, and she knows it. But they will not leave.

Other versions, however, insist the 'but' was snuck in. She sang: 'I am black and I am beautiful.

And when his final days were drawing near, he let it be known that just as the sun determined the route of plants, the seas obeyed the moon. “Senile dementia,” his colleagues diagnosed.

تأسيس تقسيم العمل يقال إن الملك مانو هو من منح سمعة إلهية للطبقات في الهند. من فمه انبثق الكهنة، ومن ذراعيه الملوك والمحاربون. ومن فخذيه خرج التجار. ومن قدميه الخدم والصناع. ومنذ ذلك الحين شيد الهرم الاجتماعي الذي يتألف في الهند من أكثر من ثلاثة آلاف طابق. كل فرد يولد حيث ينبغي له أن يولد، كي يفعل ما ينبغي له أن يفعله. في مهدك يكمن قبرك. أصلك هو قدرك ومصيرك: حياتك هي المكافأة أو العقاب الذي تستحقه على حيواتك السابقة، والوراثة هي التي تحدد مكانتك ووظيفتك. وكان الملك مانو ينصح بتصويب سوء السلوك: إذا استمع شخص من طبقة دنيا إلى أشعار الكتب المقدسة، يسكب رصاص مذاب في أذنيه. وإذا رتل تلك الأشعار، يقطع لسانه. هذه التعاليم التربوية لم تعد تطبق، ولكن مازال من يخرج من مكانه، سواء في الحب أو العمل أو أي أمر آخر، يجازف بالتعرض لعقوبات عامة يمكن لها أن تقتله أو تخلفه أقرب إلى الموت منه إلى الحياة. من هم بلا طبقة، يشكلون واحدا من كل خمسة هنود، وهم أسفل من أشد السافلين، يسمونهم من لا يلمسون، لأنهم ينقلون العدوى: إنهم ملعونون بين الملعونين، لا يمكنهم التكلم إلى الآخرين، ولا السير على دروبهم، ولا لمس أكوابهم أو أطباقهم. القانون يحميهم، والواقع ينبذهم. فالرجال منهم، يمكن لأي كان أن يهينهم. والنساء، يمكن لأي كان أن يغتصبهن، وفي هذه الحالة بالإمكان لمس من لا يلمسون. في أواخر العام 2004، عندما ضرب التسونامي شواطئ الهند، تولى من لا ُيلمسون مهمة جمع القمامة والجثث. مثلما هي العادة دائما. ص14

FORBIDDEN TO BE CURIOUS Knowledge is sin. Adam and Eve ate the fruit of that tree and look what happened to them. Some time later, Nicolaus Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, and Galileo Galilei were punished for having shown that the earth moves around the sun. Copernicus

On popular education: To make students recite by rote what they do not understand is like training parrots. Teach children to be curious so they learn to obey their own minds rather than obeying authorities the way the narrow-minded do, or obeying custom the way the stupid do. He who knows nothing, anyone can fool. He who has nothing, anyone can buy.

ALEXANDRA To be natural and clean, like the water we drink, love must be free and mutual. But men demand obedience and deny pleasure. Without a new morality, without a radical shift in daily life, there will be no real emancipation. If the revolution is not to be a lie, it must abolish in law and in custom men’s right of property over women and the rigid social norms that are the enemies of diversity. Give or take a word, this is what Alexandra Kollontai, the only woman in Lenin’s cabinet, demanded. Thanks to her, homosexuality and abortion were no longer crimes, marriage was no longer a life sentence, women had the right to vote and to equal pay, and there were free child care centers, communal dining halls, and collective laundries. Years

The Church demands of its priests exclusive dedication, a 24/7 routine that protects the peace of their souls from conjugal strife and babies’ shrieks. Perhaps, who knows, the Church also wished to preserve its earthly goods, and thus placed them safely beyond the reach of women’s and children’s claims to inheritance. A trifling detail, but nevertheless it is worth recalling that at the beginning of the twelfth century the Church owned one-third of all the lands of Europe.

Tears sprang to my eyes. I blinked them back, grabbed some tissue, and started awkwardly trying to daub leftover dye into my pale eyebrows, praying it would make a difference. Through the mirror, I saw Tori walk in. She stopped. "Oh. My. God." It would have been better if she'd laughed. Her look of horror, then something like sympathy, meant it was as bad as I thought. "I told Derek to let me pick the color," she said. "I told him." "Hey," Simon called in. "Everyone decent?" He pushed open the door, saw me and blinked. "It's Derek's fault," Tori said. "He—" "Don't, please," I said. "No more fighting." Simon still shot a glare over his shoulder as Derek pushed open the door. "What?" Derek said. He looked at me. "Huh." Tori hustled me out the door, brushing past the guys with a whispered "jerk" for Derek. "At least now you know never to go dark again," she said as we walked. "A couple years ago, I let a friend dye mine blond. It was almost as bad. My hair felt like straw and..." And so, Tori and I bonded over hair horror stories.

RESURRECTION OF DJANGO He was born in a gypsy caravan and spent his early years on the road in Belgium, playing the banjo for a dancing bear and a goat. He was eighteen when his wagon caught fire and he was left for dead. He lost a leg, a hand. Goodbye road, goodbye music. But as they were about to amputate, he regained the use of his leg. And from his lost hand he managed to save two fingers and become one of the best jazz guitarists in history. There was a secret pact between Django Reinhardt and his guitar. If he would play her, she would lend him the fingers he lacked.

WORD SMUGGLERS Yang Huanyi, whose feet were crippled in infancy, stumbled through life until the autumn of the year 2004, when she died just shy of her hundredth birthday. She was the last to know Nushu, the secret language of Chinese women. This female code dated from ancient times. Barred from male language, which they could not write, women founded a clandestine one, out of men’s reach. Fated to be illiterate, they invented an alphabet of symbols that masqueraded as decorations and was indecipherable to the eyes of their masters. Women sketched their words on garments and fans. The hands that embroidered were not free. The symbols were.

الحشري كان هناك فصل بين السماء والأرض، بين الخير والشر، بين الميلاد والموت. ولم يكن النهار والليل يختلطان، وكانت المرأة امرأة وكان الرجل رجلا. لكن «إكسو» الشقي الجوال، كان يلهو، وما زال يلهو، بتركيب خلطات محرمة. شيطناته تمحو الحدود وتجمع ما فرقته الآلهة. بعمله وظرفه تصير الشمس سوداء والليل متوقدا، ومن مسامات الرجال تنبثق نساء، وتتعرق النساء رجالا. من يموت يولد، ومن يولد يموت، وفي كل ما هو مخلوق أو سيخلق يختلط الخلف والأمام، إلى أن لم يعد يعرف من هو الآمر ومن هو المأمور، ولا أين هو الأعلى وأين هو الأسفل. عاجلا أو آجلا سيقر النظام الإلهي مراتبه وجغرافيته، يضع كل شيء في موضعه وكل واحد في مكانه؛ ولكن الجنون يعود، عاجلا وليس آجلا، إلى الظهور. عندئذ تتحسر الآلهة لأن العالم يصعب حكمه

Grandparents For many peoples of black Africa, ancestors are the spirits that live in the tree beside your house or in the cow grazing in the field. The great-grandfather of your great-great-grandfather is now that stream snaking down the mountainside. Your ancestor could also be any spirit that decides to accompany you on your voyage through the world, even if he or she was never a relative or an acquaintance. The family has no borders, explains Soboufu Somé of the Dagara people: “Our children have many mothers and many fathers. As many as they wish.” And the ancestral spirits, the ones that help you make your way, are the many grandparents that each of you has. As many as you wish.

BLACK WINGS At the same Olympics, staged by Hitler to consecrate the superiority of his race, the star that shone brightest was black, a grandson of slaves, born in Alabama. Hitler had no choice but to swallow the bitter pill, four of them actually: the four gold medals that Jesse Owens won in sprinting and long jump. The entire world celebrated those victories of democracy over racism. When the champion returned home, he received no congratulations from the president, nor was he invited to the White House. He returned to the usual: he boarded buses by the back door, ate in restaurants for Negroes, used bathrooms for Negroes, stayed in hotels for Negroes. For years, he earned a living running for money. Before the start of baseball games he would entertain the crowd by racing against horses, dogs, cars, or motorcycles. Later on, when his legs were no longer what they had been, Owens took to the lecture circuit. He did pretty well there, praising the virtues of religion, family, and country.

Presidents of the United States tend to speak in God's name, although none of them has let on if He communicates by letter, fax, telephone, or telepathy. With or without His approval, in 2006 God was proclaimed chairman of the Republican Party of Texas. That said, the All Powerful, who is even on the dollar bill, was a shining absence at the time of independence. The constitution did not mention Him. At the Constitutional Convention, when a prayer was suggested, Alexander Hamilton responded: 'We don't need foreign aid.' On his deathbed, George Washington wanted no prayers or priest or minister or anything. Benjamin Franklin said divine revelation was nothing but poppy-cock. 'My mind is my own church,' affirmed Thomas Paine, and President John Adams believed that 'this world be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it.' According to Thomas Jefferson, Catholic priests and Protestant minsters were 'soothsayers and necromancers' who divided humanity, making 'one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.

MARK TWAIN Some months after invading Iraq, President George W. Bush said he had taken the war to liberate the Philippines as his model. Both wars were inspired from heaven. Bush disclosed that God had ordered him to act as he did. And a century beforehand, President William McKinley also heard the voice from the Great Beyond: “God told me that we could not leave the Filipinos to themselves. They were unfit for self-government. There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate them, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.” Thus the Philippines were liberated from the Filipino threat, and along the way the United States also saved Cuba, Puerto Rico, Honduras, Colombia, Panama, Dominican Republic, Hawaii, Guam, Samoa . . . At the time, writer Ambrose Bierce revealed: “War is God’s way of teaching us geography.” And his colleague Mark Twain, leader of the Anti-Imperialist League, designed a new flag for the nation, featuring little skulls in place of stars. General Frederick Funston suggested Twain ought to be hanged for treason. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn defended their father.

When you lived in the human world, you had legends of the dread beasts and faeries who would slaughter you if they ever breached the wall, didn’t you? Things that slithered through open windows to drink the blood of children? Things that were so wicked, so cruel there was no hope against their evil?” The hair on her neck rose. “Yes.” Those stories had always unnerved and petrified her. “They were based on truth. Based on ancient, near-primordial beings who existed here before the High Fae split into courts, before the High Lords. Some call them the First Gods. They were beings with almost no physical form, but a keen, vicious intelligence. Humans and Fae alike were their prey. Most were hunted and driven into hiding or imprisonment ages ago. But some remained, lurking in forgotten corners of the land.” He swallowed another mouthful. “When I was nearing three hundred years old, one of them appeared again, crawling out of the roots of a mountain. Before he went into the Prison and confinement weakened him, Lanthys could turn into wind and rip the air from your lungs, or turn into rain and drown you on dry land; he could peel your skin from your body with a few movements. He never revealed his true form, but when I faced him, he chose to appear as swirling mist. He fathered a race of faeries that still plague us, who thrived under Amarantha’s reign—the Bogge. But the Bogge are lesser, mere shadows compared to Lanthys. If there is such a thing as evil incarnate, it is him. He has no mercy, no sense of right or wrong. There is him, and there is everyone else, and we are all his prey. His methods of killing are creative and slow. He feasts on fear and pain as much as the flesh itself.” Her blood chilled. “How did you trap such a thing?” Cassian tapped a spot on his neck where a scar slashed beneath his ear. “I quickly learned I could never beat him in combat or magic. Still have the scar here to prove it.” Cassian smiled faintly. “So I used his arrogance against him. Flattered and taunted him into trapping himself in a mirror bound with ash wood. I bet him the mirror would contain him—and Lanthys bet wrong. He got out of the mirror, of course, but by that time, I’d dumped his miserable self into the Prison.

GRANDPARENTS For many peoples of black Africa, ancestors are the spirits that live in the tree beside your house or in the cow grazing in the field. The great-grandfather of your great-great-grandfather is now that stream snaking down the mountainside. Your ancestor could also be any spirit that decides to accompany you on your voyage through the world, even if he or she was never a relative or an acquaintance. The family has no borders, explains Soboufu Somé of the Dagara people: “Our children have many mothers and many fathers. As many as they wish.” And the ancestral spirits, the ones that help you make your way, are the many grandparents that each of you has. As many as you wish.

GRANDPARENTS For many peoples of black Africa, ancestors are the spirits that live in the tree beside your house or in the cow grazing in the field. The great-grandfather of your great-great-grandfather is now that stream snaking down the mountainside. Your ancestor could also be any spirit that decides to accompany you on your voyage through the world, even if he or she was never a relative or an acquaintance. The family has no borders, explains Soboufu Somé of the Dagara people: “Our children have many mothers and many fathers. As many as they wish.” And the ancestral spirits, the ones that help you make your way, are the many grandparents that each of you has. As many as you wish.

Official history has it that Vasco Nunez de Balboa was the first man to see, from a summit in Panama, two oceans at once. Were the natives blind? Who first gave names to corn and potatoes and tomatoes and chocolate and the mountains and rivers of America? Were the natives mute? The Pilgrims on the Mayflower heard Him: God said America was the promised land. Were the natives deaf? Later on, the grandchildren of the Pilgrims seized the name and everything else. Now they are the Americans. And those of us who live in the other Americas, who are we?

It happened in Chicago in 1886. On the first of May, strikes paralyzed cities across the country. The Philadelphia Tribune offered a diagnosis: 'The labor element has been bitten by a kind of universal tarantula - it has gone dancing mad.' Dancing mad were the workers who fought for the eight-hour day and for the right to form unions ... On every May first, the entire world remembers them. With the passing of time, constitutions, laws, and international accords have proved them right. But some of the most powerful corporations have yet to find out. They outlaw unions and keep track of the workday with those melting clocks painted by Salvador Dali.

The three inventions that made the Renaissance possible, the compass, gunpowder, and the printing press, came from China. The Babylonians scooped Pythagoras by fifteen hundred years. Long before anyone else, the Indians knew the world was round, and had calculated its age. And better than anyone else, the Mayans knew the stars, eyes of the night, and the mysteries of time. Such details were not worthy of Europe's attention.

FATHER OF THE COMPUTER Alan Turing was sneered at for not being a tough guy, a he-man with hair on his chest. He whined, croaked, stuttered. He used an old necktie for a belt. He rarely slept and went without shaving for days. And he raced from one end of the city to the other all the while concocting complicated mathematical formulas in his mind. Working for British intelligence, he helped shorten the Second World War by inventing a machine that cracked the impenetrable military codes used by Germany’s high command. At that point he had already dreamed up a prototype for an electronic computer and had laid out the theoretical foundations of today’s information systems. Later on, he led the team that built the first computer to operate with integrated programs. He played interminable chess games with it and asked it questions that drove it nuts. He insisted that it write him love letters. The machine responded by emitting messages that were rather incoherent. But it was flesh-and-blood Manchester police who arrested him in 1952 for gross indecency. At the trial, Turing pled guilty to being a homosexual. To stay out of jail, he agreed to undergo medical treatment to cure him of the affliction. The bombardment of drugs left him impotent. He grew breasts. He stayed indoors, no longer went to the university. He heard whispers, felt stares drilling into his back. He had the habit of eating an apple before going to bed. One night, he injected the apple with cyanide.

COMEBACK KID What is it about Che Guevara? The more they manipulate and betray him, the more he rises anew. There is no comeback kid like him. Could it be because Che said what he thought and did what he said? In this world words and deeds so rarely meet, and when they do they fail to say hello, because they do not recognize each other. Perhaps that is why he is still so dangerous.

ALI He was butterfly and bee. In the ring, he floated and stung. In 1967, Muhammad Ali, born Cassius Clay, refused to put on a uniform. “Got nothing against no Viet Cong,” he said. “Ain’t no Vietnamese ever called me nigger.” They called him a traitor. They sentenced him to a five-year jail term, and barred him from boxing. They stripped him of his title as champion of the world. The punishment became his trophy. By taking away his crown, they anointed him king. Years later, a few college students asked him to recite something. And for them he improvised the shortest poem in world literature: “Me, we.

WALLS The Berlin Wall made the news every day. From morning till night we read, saw, heard: the Wall of Shame, the Wall of Infamy, the Iron Curtain . . . In the end, a wall which deserved to fall fell. But other walls sprouted and continue sprouting across the world. Though they are much larger than the one in Berlin, we rarely hear of them. Little is said about the wall the United States is building along the Mexican border, and less is said about the barbed-wire barriers surrounding the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the African coast. Practically nothing is said about the West Bank Wall, which perpetuates the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and will be fifteen times longer than the Berlin Wall. And nothing, nothing at all, is said about the Morocco Wall, which perpetuates the seizure of the Saharan homeland by the kingdom of Morocco, and is sixty times the length of the Berlin Wall. Why are some walls so loud and others mute?

DIVINE LIGHT,MURDEROUS LIGHT The flames crackle. On the pyre burn discarded mattresses, discarded easy chairs, discarded tires. A discarded god also burns: the fire blackens the body of Pol Pot. At the end of 1998, the man who killed with such abandon died at home, in his bed. No plague had ever so reduced the population of Cambodia. Invoking the sacred names of Marx, Lenin, and Mao, Pol Pot erected a colossal slaughterhouse. To save time and money, every charge came complete with sentence, and every jail had a door to a common grave. The entire country was a great burial mound and a temple to Pol Pot, who purified society to make it worthy of him. Revolutionary purity demanded liquidating the impure. The impure: those who thought, those who dissented, those who doubted, those who disobeyed.

THEY ARE NOT NEWS In the south of India, at the Nallamada hospital, a failed suicide revives. Around his bed, smiles from the ones who brought him back to life. The survivor eyes them and says: “What are you expecting, a thank-you? I owed a hundred thousand rupees. Now I’m also going to owe for four days in the hospital. Some favor you imbeciles did me.” We hear a lot about suicide bombers. The media blather on about them every day. But we hear nothing about suicide farmers. According to official figures, India’s farmers have been killing themselves steadily, at a rate of a thousand a month since the end of the twentieth century. Many suicide farmers die from drinking the pesticides for which they cannot pay. The market drives them into debt, then unpayable debt drives them into the grave. They spend more and more, earn less and less. They buy at penthouse prices and sell at bargain-basement markdowns. They are held hostage by the foreign chemical industry, by imported seeds, by genetically modified crops. Once upon a time, India worked to eat. Now India works to be eaten.

CRIMINOLOGY Every year, chemical pesticides kill no fewer than three million farmers. Every day, workplace accidents kill no fewer than ten thousand workers. Every minute, poverty kills no fewer than ten children. These crimes do not show up on the news. They are, like wars, normal acts of cannibalism. The criminals are on the loose. No prisons are built for those who rip the guts out of thousands. Prisons are built as public housing for the poor. More than two centuries ago, Thomas Paine wondered: “Why is it that scarcely any are executed but the poor?” Texas, twenty-first century: the last supper sheds light on the cellblock’s clientele. Nobody chooses lobster or filet mignon, even though those dishes figure on the farewell menu. The condemned men prefer to say goodbye to the world with the usual: burgers and fries.

BARBIE GOES TO WAR There are more than a billion Barbies. Only the Chinese outnumber them. The most beloved woman on the planet would never let us down. In the war of good against evil, Barbie enlisted, saluted, and marched off to Iraq. She arrived at the front wearing made-to-measure land, sea, and air uniforms reviewed and approved by the Pentagon. Barbie is accustomed to changing professions, hairdos, and clothes. She has been a singer, an athlete, a paleontologist, an orthodontist, an astronaut, a firewoman, a ballerina, and who knows what else. Every new job entails a new look and a complete new wardrobe that every girl in the world is obliged to buy. In February 2004, Barbie wanted to change boyfriends too. For nearly half a century she had been going steady with Ken, whose nose is the only protuberance on his body, when an Australian surfer seduced her and invited her to commit the sin of plastic. Mattel, the manufacturer, announced an official separation. It was a catastrophe. Sales plummeted. Barbie could change occupations and outfits, but she had no right to set a bad example. Mattel announced an official reconciliation.

LIED-ABOUT WARS Advertising campaigns, marketing schemes. The target is public opinion. Wars are sold the same way cars are, by lying. In August 1964, President Lyndon Johnson accused the Vietnamese of attacking two U.S. warships in the Tonkin Gulf. Then the president invaded Vietnam, sending planes and troops. He was acclaimed by journalists and by politicians, and his popularity sky-rocketed. The Democrats in power and the Republicans out of power became a single party united against Communist aggression. After the war had slaughtered Vietnamese in vast numbers, most of them women and children, Johnson’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, confessed that the Tonkin Gulf attack had never occurred. The dead did not revive. In March 2003, President George W. Bush accused Iraq of being on the verge of destroying the world with its weapons of mass destruction, “the most lethal weapons ever devised.” Then the president invaded Iraq, sending planes and troops. He was acclaimed by journalists and by politicians, and his popularity sky-rocketed. The Republicans in power and the Democrats out of power became a single party united against terrorist aggression. After the war had slaughtered Iraqis in vast numbers, most of them women and children, Bush confessed that the weapons of mass destruction never existed. “The most lethal weapons ever devised” were his own speeches. In the following elections, he won a second term. In my childhood, my mother used to tell me that a lie has no feet. She was misinformed.

LYING WARS The war in Iraq grew out of the need to correct an error made by Geography when she put the West’s oil under the East’s sand. But no war is honest enough to confess: “I kill to steal.” “The devil’s shit,” as oil is called by its victims, has caused many wars and will certainly cause many more. In Sudan, for instance, a huge number of people lost their lives between the final years of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first, in an oil war that disguised itself as an ethnic and religious conflict. Derricks and drills, pipes and pipelines sprouted as if by magic in villages turned to ashes and in fields of ruined crops. In the Darfur region, where the butchery continues, the people, all Muslim, began to hate each other when they discovered there might be oil under their feet. The killing in the hills of Rwanda also claimed to be an ethnic and religious war, even though killers and killed were all Catholics. Hatred, a colonial legacy, stemmed from the time when Belgium decreed that those who raised cattle were Tutsis and those who grew crops were Hutus, and that the Tutsi minority ought to dominate the Hutu majority. In recent years, another multitude lost their lives in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the service of foreign companies fighting over coltan. That rare mineral is an essential ingredient in cell phones, computers, microchips, and batteries, all of which are staples of the mass media. The media, however, forgot to mention coltan in their scant coverage of the war.

THE RIVER AND THE DEER The oldest book on education was written by a woman. Dhouda of Gascony wrote Liber Manualis, a manual for her son, in Latin at the beginning of the ninth century. She did not impose a thing. She suggested, she advised, she showed. One of the pages invites us to learn from deer that “ford wide rivers swimming in single file, one after the other, with the head and shoulders of each resting on the rump of the deer ahead; they support one another and thus are able to cross the river more easily. And they are so intelligent and clever that when they realize the one in the very front is tiring, they send him to the end of the line and another takes the lead.

THE HANDS OF THE TRAIN Mumbai’s trains, which transport six million passengers a day, break the laws of physics: more passengers enter them than fit. Suketu Mehta, who knows about these impossible voyages, says when every jam-packed train pulls out, people run after it. Whoever misses the train, loses his job. Then the cars sprout hands out of windows or from roofs, and they help the ones left behind clamber aboard. And these train hands do not ask the one running up if he is foreign or native-born, nor do they ask what language he speaks, or if he believes in Brahma or in Allah, in Buddha or in Jesus, nor do they ask which caste he belongs to, if he is from a cursed caste or no caste at all.

DANGER IN THE SKY In the year 2003, a tsunami of people washed away the government of Bolivia. The poor were sick and tired. Everything had been privatized, even the rainwater. A “for sale” sign had been hung on Bolivia, and they were going to sell it, Bolivians and all. The uprising shook El Alto, perched above the incredibly high city of La Paz, where the poorest of the poor work throughout their lives, day after day, chewing on their troubles. They are so high up they push the clouds when they walk, and every house has a door to heaven. Heaven was where those who died in the rebellion went. It was a lot closer than earth. Now they are shaking up paradise.

THE ROAD GOES ON When someone dies, when his time is up, what happens to the wanderings, desirings, and speakings that were called by his name? Among the Indians of the upper Orinoco, he who dies loses his name. His ashes are stirred into plantain soup or corn wine and everybody eats. After the ceremony no one ever names the dead person again: the dead one, now living in other bodies, called by other names, wanders, desires, and speaks.

FATHER OF THE BOY SCOUTS Arthur Conan Doyle was knighted, and not for the merits of Sherlock Holmes. The writer was invited to join the ranks of the nobility as thanks for the propaganda he wrote for the imperial cause. One of his heroes was Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts. They met while fighting savages in Africa: “There was always something of the sportsman in his keen appreciation of war,” Sir Arthur said. Gifted in the art of following the tracks of others and erasing his own, Baden-Powell was a great success at the sport of hunting lions, boars, deer, Zulus, Ashantis, and Ndebeles. Against the Ndebeles, he fought a rough battle in southern Africa. Two hundred and nine blacks and one Englishman died. The colonel took as a souvenir the horn the enemy blew to sound the alarm. And that spiral-shaped horn from a kudu antelope was incorporated into Boy Scout ritual as the symbol of boys who love nature.

FATHER OF THE RED CROSS The Red Cross was born in Geneva. It grew out of an initiative by several Swiss bankers to help the wounded abandoned on the battlefields. Gustave Moynier led the International Committee of the Red Cross for more than forty years. He explained that the institution, inspired by evangelical values, was welcomed in civilized countries, but repudiated by the colonized. “Compassion,” he wrote, “is unknown among those savage tribes that practice cannibalism. Compassion is so foreign to them that their languages have no word to express the concept.

ORIGIN OF CONCENTRATION CAMPS When Namibia won its independence in 1990, the main avenue of the capital city still bore the name Göring. Not for Hermann, the Nazi, but in honor of his father, Heinrich Göring, one of the perpetrators of the first genocide of the twentieth century. That Göring, who represented the German Empire in the southwest corner of Africa, kindly approved in 1904 an annihilation order given by General Lothar von Trotta. The Hereros, black shepherds, had risen up in rebellion. The colonial authorities expelled them all and warned that any Herero found in Namibia, man, woman, or child, armed or unarmed, would be killed. Of every four Hereros, three were killed, by cannon fire or the desert sun. The survivors of the butchery ended up in concentration camps set up by Göring. And Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow pronounced for the very first time the word “Konzentrationslager.” The camps, inspired by a British forerunner in South Africa, combined confinement, forced labor, and scientific experimentation. The prisoners, emaciated from a life in the gold and diamond mines, served as human guinea pigs for research into inferior races. In those laboratories worked Theodor Mollison and Eugen Fischer, who later became the teachers of Josef Mengele. Mengele carried forth their work as of 1933, the year that Göring the son set up the first concentration camps in Germany, following the model his father pioneered in Africa.

ORIGIN OF HOLLYWOOD On ride the masked men, wrapped in white sheets, bearing white crosses, torches held high: mounted avengers of the virtue of ladies and the honor of gentlemen strike fear into Negroes hungering for damsels’ white flesh. At the height of a wave of lynchings, D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation sings a hymn of praise to the Ku Klux Klan. This is Hollywood’s first blockbuster and the greatest box office success ever for a silent movie. It is also the first film to ever open at the White House. President Woodrow Wilson gives it a standing ovation. Applauding it, he applauds himself: freedom’s famous flag-bearer wrote most of the texts that accompany the epic images. The president’s words explain that the emancipation of the slaves was “a veritable overthrow of Civilization in the South, the white South under the heel of the black South.” Ever since, chaos reigns because blacks are “men who knew none of the uses of authority, except its insolences.” But the president lights the lamp of hope: “At last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan.” And even Jesus himself comes down from heaven at the end of the movie to give his blessing.

STALIN He learned to write in the language of Georgia, his homeland, but in the seminary the monks made him speak Russian. Years later in Moscow, his south Caucasus accent still gave him away. So he decided to become more Russian than the Russians. Was not Napoleon, who hailed from Corsica, more French than the French? And was not Catherine the Great, who was German, more Russian than the Russians? The Georgian, Iosif Dzhugashvili, chose a Russian name. He called himself Stalin, which means “steel.” The man of steel expected his son to be made of steel too: from childhood, Stalin’s son Yakov was tempered in fire and ice and shaped by hammer blows. It did not work. He was his mother’s child. At the age of nineteen, Yakov wanted no more of it, could bear no more. He pulled the trigger. The gunshot did not kill him. He awoke in the hospital. At the foot of the bed, his father commented: “You can’t even get that right.

ORIGIN OF TWO COUNTRIES They say Churchill said: “Jordan was an idea I had one spring at about four-thirty in the afternoon.” The fact is that during the month of March 1921, in just three days, British Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill and his forty advisers drew a new map for the Middle East. They invented two countries, named them, appointed their monarchs, and sketched their borders with a finger in the sand. Thus the land embraced by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the clay of the very first books, was called Iraq. And the new country amputated from Palestine was called Transjordan, later Jordan. The task at hand was to change the names of colonies so they would at least appear to be Arab kingdoms. And to divide those colonies, to break them up: an urgent lesson drawn from imperial memory. While France pulled Lebanon out of a hat, Churchill bestowed the crown of Iraq on the errant Prince Faisal, and a plebiscite ratified him with suspicious enthusiasm: he got 96 percent of the vote. His brother Prince Abdullah became king of Jordan. Both monarchs belonged to a family placed on the British payroll at the recommendation of Lawrence of Arabia. The manufacturers of countries signed the birth certificates of Iraq and Jordan in Cairo’s Semiramis Hotel, and then went out to see the pyramids. Churchill fell off his camel and hurt his hand. Fortunately, it was nothing serious. Churchill’s favorite artist could continue painting landscapes.

ORIGIN OF JAZZ It was 1906. People were coming and going as usual along Perdido Street in a poor neighborhood of New Orleans. A five-year-old child peeking out the window watched that boring sameness with open eyes and very open ears, as if he expected something to happen. It happened. Music exploded from the corner and filled the street. A man was blowing his cornet straight up to the sky and around him a crowd clapped in time and sang and danced. And Louis Armstrong, the boy in the window, swayed back and forth with such enthusiasm he nearly fell out. A few days later, the man with the cornet entered an insane asylum. They locked him up in the Negro section. That was the only time his name, Buddy Bolden, appeared in the newspapers. He died a quarter of a century later in the same asylum, and the papers did not notice. But his music, never written down or recorded, played on inside the people who had delighted in it at parties or at funerals. According to those in the know, that phantom was the founder of jazz.

By reason of his species and his manners, the peasant comes below the pig. He finds moral life profoundly repugnant. If by chance he achieves great wealth, he loses all sense. So you see, his pockets must be kept empty. He who fails to dominate his peasants only augments their vileness.

In the Greek Olympics, women, slaves, and foreigners never took part. Not in Greek democracy either.

A slave was cheaper than a mule. Slavery, despicable topic, rarely appeared in poetry or onstage or in the paintings that decorated urns and walls. Philosophers ignored it, except to confirm it as the natural fate of inferior beings, and to sound the alarm. Watch out, warned Plato. Slaves, he said, unavoidably hate their owners and only constant vigilance can keep them from murdering us all. And Aristotle maintained that military training for the citizenry was crucial, given the climate of insecurity.

The slave is a living tool, just as a tool is an inanimate slave. Hence

In Rome, too, slaves were the sunshine of every day and the nightmare of every night. Slavery stoked the empire’s life and its dread. Even

In her palace at Alexandria, Cleopatra begins her final night. The last of the pharaohs, who was not as beautiful as they say, who was a better queen than they say, who spoke several languages and understood economics and other male mysteries, who astonished Rome, who challenged Rome, who shared bed and power with Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony, now dresses in her most outlandish outfit and slowly sits down on her throne, while the Roman troops advance against her. Julius Caesar is dead, Mark Anthony is dead.

A Christian named Telemaco won sainthood for leaping between two gladiators in the midst of a fight. The crowd made mincemeat of him, pelting him with stones for interrupting the show.

Who said the adulterer’s nose one should snip? To betray you he did not use that tip.

Christmas of 1930 saw Santa Claus working for Coca-Cola. Before then he did not wear a suit and generally preferred to wear blue or green. The artist Haddon Sundblom dressed him in the company colors, bright red with white piping, and gave him the features familiar to us all. Every child’s friend has a white beard, laughs all the time, travels by sleigh, and is so plump that no one can figure out how he gets down the world’s chimneys loaded with presents and carrying a Coke in each hand. Neither

MOHAMMED’S BIOGRAPHER He was an evangelical pastor, but not for long. Religious orthodoxy was not for him. An open-minded man, a passionate polemicist, he traded the church for the university. He studied at Princeton, taught in New York. He was a professor of Oriental languages and author of the first biography of Mohammed published in the United States. He wrote that Mohammed was an extraordinary man, a visionary blessed with irresistible magnetism, and also an impostor, a charlatan, a purveyor of illusions. But he thought no better of Christianity, which he considered “disastrous” in the epoch when Islam was founded. That was his first book. Later on, he wrote others. In the field of Middle Eastern affairs, few academics could compare. He lived indoors surrounded by towers of strange books. When he wasn’t writing, he read. He died in New York in 1859. His

THE PREDESTINED In 1856, William Walker proclaims himself president of Nicaragua. The ceremony includes speeches, a military parade, a mass, and a banquet featuring fifty-three toasts of European wines. A week later, United States Ambassador John H. Wheeler officially recognizes the new president, and his speech compares him to Christopher Columbus. Walker imposes Louisiana’s constitution on Nicaragua, reestablishing slavery, abolished in all Central America thirty years previous. He does so for the good of the blacks, because “inferior races cannot compete with the white race, unless they are given a white master to channel their energies.” This Tennessee gentleman known as “the Predestined” receives orders directly from God.

In 1821, the American Colonization Society bought a piece of Africa. In Washington the new country was christened Liberia and its capital was called Monrovia, in honor of James Monroe, who at the time was president of the United States. Also in Washington, they designed the flag to be just like their own, except with a single star, and they elected the country’s government. Harvard drew up the constitution. The citizens of the newborn nation were freed slaves, or rather slaves expelled from the plantations of the southern United States. No sooner did they set foot in Africa than those who had been slaves became masters. The native population, “those jungle savages,” owed obedience to the newcomers, who had suddenly risen from the bottom to the top. Backed

THE HE’S ARE SHE’S In 1847, three novels excite England’s readers. Wuthering Heights by Ellis Bell tells a devastating tale of passion and shame. Agnes Grey by Acton Bell strips bare the hypocrisy of the family. Jane Eyre by Currer Bell exalts the courage of an independent woman. No one knows that the authors are female. The brothers Bell are actually the sisters Brontë. These fragile girls, virgins all, Emily, Anne, Charlotte, avenge their solitude by writing poems and novels in a village lost on the Yorkshire moors. Intruders into the male world of literature, they don men’s masks so the critics will forgive them for having dared. But the critics pan their works anyway, as “rude,” “crude,” “nasty,” “savage,” “brutal,” “libertine” . . .

THE INSANITY OF FREEDOM It happened in Washington in 1840. A government census measured dementia among blacks in the United States. According to the census, there were nine times as many cases among free blacks as among slaves. The North was a vast insane asylum, and the farther north one went the worse it got. Going from north to south, however, one went from lunacy to sanity. Among the slaves who

EMILY It happened in Amherst in 1886. When Emily Dickinson died, the family discovered eighteen hundred poems hidden in her bedroom. On tiptoe she lived, and on tiptoe she wrote. She published only eleven poems in her entire lifetime, all anonymously or under a pseudonym. From her Puritan ancestors, she inherited boredom, a mark of distinction for her race and her class: do not touch, do not speak. Gentlemen went into politics and business; ladies perpetuated the species and lived in ill health. Emily inhabited solitude and silence. Cloistered in her bedroom, she invented poems that broke the rules of grammar and the rules of her own isolation. And every day she wrote a letter to her sister-in-law Susan, who lived next door, and sent it by mail. Those poems and letters formed a secret sanctuary. There, her hidden sorrows and forbidden desires could yearn freely.

The dismemberment began in Texas, called Tejas back then. There, slavery had been outlawed. Sam Houston led the invasion that reestablished it. Houston and Stephen Austin and other slave-owning land-grabbers are now freedom’s heroes and founding fathers of the state. Their names speak of health and culture. The city of Houston offers cures or solace to the seriously ill, and Austin gives luster to academics.

MR. CORPORATION It happened in Washington in 1886. Gargantuan companies won the same legal rights as regular home-grown citizens. The Supreme Court annulled over two hundred laws that regulated or limited the activities of business, and at the same time extended human rights to private corporations. The law conferred on big companies the same rights as persons, as if they, too, breathed: the right to life, to free expression, to privacy . . . At the beginning of the twenty-first century, corporations are still humans.

the inquisitors of yesteryear knew only too well, as do the country snatchers of today: torture is useless for protecting people. It is only good for terrorizing them. The bureaucracy of pain tortures in order to perpetuate the power of the powers it serves. A confession extracted by torture is worth little or nothing. But in the torture chamber the powerful do drop their masks. By torturing, they confess that fear is their daily bread.

THE DANGEROUS VICE OF ASKING Which is worth more? Experience or doctrine? By dropping stones and pebbles, big balls and little balls, Galileo Galilei proved that velocity remains the same no matter the weight. Aristotle was wrong, and for nineteen centuries no one had noticed. Johannes Kepler, another curious fellow, discovered that plants do not rotate in circles when they follow the light over the course of a day. Wasn’t the circle supposed to be the perfect path of everything that revolves? Wasn’t the universe supposed to be the perfect work of God? “This world is not perfect, not nearly,” Kepler concluded. “Why should its paths be perfect?” His reasoning seemed suspicious to Lutherans and Catholics alike. Kepler’s mother had spent four years in prison accused of practicing witchcraft. They must have been up to something. But

If poor, young, and nonwhite, the intruder from outside is deemed guilty at first sight, guilty of indigence, of chaos, of carrying the unconcealed weapon of his skin. If neither poor nor young nor dark, a nasty welcome is justified in any case, since he or she has come prepared to work twice as hard for half as much. Anxiety about losing one’s job is among the most fearsome of all the fears that govern us in these times of fear, and immigrants are always at hand to take responsibility for unemployment, shrinking wages, crime, and other calamities. In

Historian Richard Nixon knew the vice could be fatal for civilization: “You know what happened to the Greeks? Homosexuality destroyed them. Sure, Aristotle was a homo, we all know that, so was Socrates. Do you know what happened to the Romans? The last six emperors were fags.” Civilizer

In a single night in August 1944, 2,897 Gypsies, women, children, men, perished in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Of all the Gypsies of Europe, one in four was annihilated during the war. About

ORIGIN OF AMERICA In Cuba, according to Christopher Columbus, there were mermaids with men’s faces and roosters’ feathers. In Guyana, according to Sir Walter Raleigh, there were people with eyes on their shoulders and mouths in their chests.

Richard III was the last English monarch to die in battle. Shakespeare gave him the words that made him immortal: “My kingdom for a horse!

BRIEF HISTORY OF TRADE BETWEEN AFRICA AND EUROPE Hereditary slavery had been around since the times of Greece and Rome and was nothing new. But with the Renaissance, Europe introduced certain novelties: never before had slavery been determined by skin color, and never before had the sale of human flesh been the brightest light in the world of business. During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, Africa sold slaves and bought rifles: it traded hands for arms. Then during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Africa delivered gold, diamonds, copper, ivory, rubber, and coffee in exchange for Bibles: it traded the riches of the earth for the promise of heaven.

PROGENY OF THE MIDDLE PASSAGE The leaky little tubs which the sea devours are the granddaughters of those slave ships. Today’s slaves, though no longer called by that name, enjoy the same freedoms as their grandparents who were driven by the lash to the plantations of America. They do not simply depart: they are pushed. No one emigrates by choice. From Africa and from many other places, the desperate flee wars and droughts and exhausted lands and poisoned rivers and empty bellies. Shipments of human flesh are nowadays the most successful export from the south of the world.

Grimod de La Reynière was the founder of culinary journalism. His articles in newspapers and yearbooks fed restaurants with new ideas. No more was the art of good eating a luxury reserved for the banquet halls of nobility. The one whose fingers were all over this had none: Grimod de La Reynière, grand master of pen and spoon, was born with no hands, and he wrote, cooked, and ate with hooks.

Mirrors are filled with people. The invisible see us. The forgotten recall us. When we see ourselves, we see them. When we turn away, do they? BORN

In school they taught me that way back in caveman times we discovered fire by rubbing stones or sticks together. I’ve been trying ever since. I never got even a tiny spark. My

Our early history is lost in mist. It seems all we ever did was break rocks and beat each other with clubs. But one might well ask: Weren’t we able to survive, when survival was all but impossible, because we learned to share our food and band together for defense? Would today’s me-first, do-your-own-thing civilization have lasted more than a moment?

Ham, the conquistador of outer space, was captured in Africa. He became the first chimpanzee to travel far beyond the world, the first chimponaut. They put him in the space capsule Mercury, hooked him up with more wires than a telephone switchboard, and blasted him off. He came back safe and sound, and the record of his bodily functions demonstrated that humans too could survive a voyage into space. Ham was on the cover of Life. And he spent the rest of his own caged in a zoo.

The outcasts, one in five Indians, are beneath those on the bottom. They are called “Untouchables” because they contaminate: damned among the damned, they cannot speak to others, walk on their paths, or touch their glasses or plates. The law protects them, reality banishes them. Anyone can humiliate the men, anyone can rape the women, which is the only time the untouchables are touchable. At the end of 2004, when the tsunami trampled the coasts of India, they collected the garbage and the dead. As always.

ISIS Like Osiris, Isis was privy to the mysteries of perpetual birth. We know her image: a mother goddess breastfeeding her son Horus, as the Virgin Mary suckled Jesus much later on. But Isis was never what we might call a virgin. She began making love to Osiris when they were growing together inside their mother’s womb. And she practiced the world’s oldest profession for ten years in the city of Tyre. In the thousands of years that followed, Isis traveled the world resuscitating whores, slaves, and others among the damned. In Rome, she founded temples for the poor alongside bordellos. The temples were razed by imperial order, their priests crucified, but like stubborn mules they came back to life again and again. And when Emperor Justinian’s soldiers demolished the sanctuary of Isis on the island of Philae in the Nile, and built the very Catholic church of Saint Stephen on the ruins, Isis’s pilgrims continued paying homage to their errant goddess at the Christian altar.

Lao Tse, village philosopher, believed that the richer a nation is, the poorer it becomes. He believed that knowing war teaches peace, because suffering inhabits glory: Every action provokes reactions. Violence always returns. Only thistles and thorns grow where armies encamp. War summons hunger. He who delights in conquest, delights in human pain. Every victory should be celebrated with a funeral.