Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World

THE END OF THE MILLENNIUM AS PROMISE AND BETRAYAL

In 1902, the Rationalist Press Association of London published a New Catechism in which the twentieth century was baptized with the names Peace, Freedom, and Progress. Its godparents predicted that the newborn would liberate the world from superstition, materialism, misery, and war.

Years have passed, the century has turned. What world has it left us? A desolate, de-souled world that practices the superstitious worship of machines and the idolatry of arms, an upside-down world with its left on its right, its belly button on its backside, and its head where its feet should be.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS THAT POSE MORE QUESTIONS

Faith in the powers of science and technology fed expectations of progress throughout the twentieth century. When the century was halfway through its journey, several international organizations were promoting the development of the underdeveloped by handing out powdered milk for babies and spraying fields with DDT. Later we learned that when powdered milk replaces breast milk it helps babies die young and that DDT causes cancer. At the turn of the century, it’s the same story: in the name of science, technicians write prescriptions for curing underdevelopment that tend to be worse than the disease, and in the process they humiliate people and annihilate nature.

Perhaps the best symbol of the epoch is the neutron bomb, the one that burns people to a crisp and leaves objects untouched. A sad fate for the human condition, this time of empty plates and emptier words. Science and technology, placed at the service of war and the market, put us at their service: we have become the instruments of our instruments. Sorcerer’s apprentices have unleashed forces they can neither comprehend nor contain. The world, that centerless labyrinth, is breaking apart, and even the sky is cracking. Over the course of the century, means have been divorced from ends by the same system of power that divorces the human hand from the fruit of its labor, that enforces the perpetual separation of words and deeds, that drains reality of memory, and that turns everyone into the opponent of everyone else.

Stripped of roots and links, reality becomes a kingdom of count and discount, where price determines the value of things, of people, and of countries. The ones who count arouse desire and envy among those of us the market discounts, in a world where respect is measured by the number of credit cards you carry. The ideologues of fog, the pontificators of the obscurantism now in fashion, tell us reality can’t be deciphered, which really means reality can’t be changed. Globalization reduces international relations to a series of humiliations, while model citizens live reality as fatality: if that’s how it is, it’s because that’s how it was; if that’s how it was, it’s because that’s how it will be. The twentieth century was born under a sign of hope for change and soon was shaken by the hurricanes of social revolution. Discouragement and resignation marked its final days.

Injustice, engine of all the rebellions that ever were, is not only undiminished but has reached extremes that would seem incredible if we weren’t so accustomed to accepting them as normal and deferring to them as destiny. The powerful are not unaware that injustice is becoming more and more unjust, and danger more and more dangerous. When the Berlin Wall fell and the so-called Communist regimes collapsed or changed beyond recognition, capitalism lost its pretext. During the Cold War, each half of the world could find in the other an alibi for its crimes and a justification for its horrors. Each claimed to be better because the other was worse. Orphaned of its enemy, capitalism can celebrate its unhampered hegemony to use and abuse, but certain signs betray a rising fear of what it has wrought. As if wishing to exorcise the demons of people’s anger, capitalism, calling itself “the market economy,” now suddenly discovers its “social” dimension and travels to poor countries on a passport that features its new full name, “the social market economy.”

For a Course on the History of Ideas

“Manolo, how you’ve changed your thinking!”

“No, Pepe, not at all.”

“Yes, you have, Manny. You used to be a monarchist. Then you supported the Falange. Then you backed Franco. After that, you were a democrat. Not long ago you were with the socialists and now you’re on the right. And you say you haven’t changed your thinking?”

“Not at all, Pepe. My thinking has always been the same: to be mayor of this town.”

The Stadium and the Boxes

In the eighties, the Nicaraguan people were sentenced to war for believing that national dignity and social justice were luxuries to which a poor little country could aspire.

In 1996, Félix Zurita interviewed General Humberto Ortega, who had been a revolutionary. How quickly times have changed. Humiliation? Injustice? That’s human nature, said the general. No one is ever satisfied with what he gets.

“There’s a hierarchy,” he said. And he explained that society is like a soccer stadium: “A hundred thousand people can squeeze into the stadium, but only five hundred can sit in the boxes. No matter how much you love the people, you can’t fit them all in the boxes.”

A McDonald’s ad shows a boy eating a hamburger. “I don’t share,” he says. This dummy hasn’t learned that now we’re supposed to give away our leftovers instead of tossing them in the garbage. Solidarity is still considered a useless waste of energy and critical consciousness is but a passing phase of stupidity in human life, but the powers that be have decided to alternate the carrot with the stick. Now they preach social assistance, which is the only form of social justice allowed. Argentine philosopher Tato Bores, who worked as a comedian, knew all about this doctrine years before ideologues started promoting it, technocrats started implementing it, and governments started adopting it in what some call the Third World. “You ought to give crumbs to the elderly,” Don Tato counseled, “instead of to the pigeons.”

The Field

Do people watch the game or do they play it?

When a democracy is real, shouldn’t people be on the field? Is democracy exercised only every four, five, or six years, when you cast your vote? Or is it exercised every day of every year?

A Latin American experiment in daily democracy is under way in the Brazilian city of Pôrto Alegre. There residents debate and decide what to do with the municipal funds available for each neighborhood, and they approve, amend, or quash proposals from the local government. Staff and politicians propose, but it’s the people who dispose.

The most mourned saint of the end of the century, Princess Diana, having been abandoned by her mother, tormented by her mother-in-law, cheated on by her husband, and betrayed by her lovers, found her vocation in charity. When she died, Diana was the head of eighty-one public charities. If she were still alive, she would make a great minister of the economy in any government of the South. After all, charity consoles but does not question. “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint,” said Brazilian bishop Helder Cámara. “And when I ask why they have no food, they call me a Communist.”

Unlike solidarity, which is horizontal and takes place between equals, charity is top-down, humiliating those who receive it and never challenging the implicit power relations. In the best of cases, there will be justice someday, high in heaven. Here on earth, charity doesn’t worry injustice, it just tries to hide it.

The twentieth century was born under the sign of revolution, but the adventurous attempts to build societies based on solidarity were shipwrecked, leaving us to suffer a universal crisis of faith in the human capacity to change history. Stop the world, I want to get off. In these days of collapse, the number of penitents — repenters of political passion or of all passion — multiplies. More than a few fighting cocks have become hens a-laying, while dogmatists, who thought they were safe from doubt and discouragement, either take refuge in nostalgia for nostalgia that evokes more nostalgia or simply lie frozen in a stupor. “When we had all the answers, they changed the questions,” wrote an anonymous hand on a wall in the city of Quito.

With a speed and efficiency that would arouse Michael Jackson’s envy, many revolutionary activists and parties of the red or pink left are undergoing an ideological color change. I once heard it said that the stomach shames the face, but contemporary chameleons prefer to explain it another way: democracy must be consolidated, we have to modernize the economy, there is no alternative but to adapt to reality.

Reality, however, says that peace without justice, the peace we enjoy today in Latin America, is a field sown with violence. In Colombia, the country that suffers the most violence, 85 percent of the dead are victims of “common violence,” and only 15 percent die from “political violence.” Could it be that common violence somehow expresses the political impotence of societies that have been unable to establish a peace worthy of the name?

History is unambiguous: the U.S. veto has blocked or closed off to the point of strangulation most of the political experiments that have sought to get at the roots of violence. Justice and solidarity have been condemned as foreign aggression against the foundations of Western civilization, leaving it plain as can be that democracy has limits and you’d better not test them. The story is a long one, but it’s worth recalling at least the recent examples of Chile, Nicaragua, and Cuba.

At the beginning of the seventies, when Chile tried to take democracy seriously, Henry Kissinger dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s of the White House decree against that unpardonable foray. “I don’t see why,” he said, “we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.”

The process that led up to General Pinochet’s coup d’état left hanging a few questions practically no one asks anymore about relations between countries in the Americas and the imbalance in the rights they enjoy. Would it have been normal for President Allende to say that President Nixon was not acceptable to Chile, just as President Nixon said with a straight face that President Allende was not acceptable to the United States? Would it have been normal for Chile to organize an international credit and investment blockade against the United States? Would it have been normal for Chile to pay off U.S. politicians, journalists, and military officers and then encourage them to drown democracy in blood? And suppose Allende had mounted a coup d’état to block Nixon’s inauguration and another to overthrow him? The great powers that govern the world practice terrorism without compunction, since their crimes lead them not to the electric chair but to the thrones of power. And the crime of power is the mother of all crimes.

Nicaragua was sentenced to ten years of war in the 1980s when it committed the insolence of being Nicaragua. An army recruited, trained, armed, and led by the United States tormented the country, while a campaign to poison world opinion portrayed the Sandinista revolution as a conspiracy hatched in the basement of the Kremlin. Nicaragua wasn’t attacked because it was a satellite of a great power but to force it back into being one. Nicaragua wasn’t attacked because it lacked democracy but so that democracy would be lacking. While fighting the war, the Sandinistas also taught half a million people how to read and write, cut infant mortality by a third, and inspired a sense of solidarity and a yearning for justice in many, many people. That was their challenge and that was their damnation. In the end, exhaustion from the long, devastating war cost the Sandinistas an election. And later, as tends to happen, several of their leaders sinned against hope by disowning their own words and deeds in an astonishing about-face.

During the years of war, peace reigned in the streets of Nicaraguan towns. Since peace was declared, the streets have become scenes of war, the battlegrounds of common criminals and youth gangs. A young U.S. anthropologist, Dennis Rodgers, joined a group of toughs in one of the worst barrios of Managua. He found that such gangs are indeed the violent response of young people to a society that excludes them, and they flourish not only because of grinding poverty and the absence of any hope for work or study but also out of a desperate search for some sort of identity. In the seventies and eighties, years of revolution and war, young people saw themselves in their country, in the colony that wanted to become a country, but the youth of the nineties were left without a mirror. Now they are patriots of the barrio, or of a block in the barrio, and they fight to the death against gangs from enemy neighborhoods or enemy blocks. By defending their territory and organizing themselves to fight and steal, they feel a little less alone and a little less poor in their atomized and impoverished world. They share what they steal and spend the loot from their muggings on glue, marijuana, drink, bullets, knives, Nike shoes, and baseball caps.

The World Map

The equator did not cross the middle of the world map that we studied in school. More than half a century ago, German researcher Arno Peters understood what everyone had looked at but no one had seen: the emperor of geography had no clothes.

The map they taught us gives two-thirds of the world to the North and one-third to the South. Europe is shown as larger than Latin America, even though Latin America is actually twice the size of Europe. India appears smaller than Scandinavia, even though it’s three times as big. The United States and Canada fill more space on the map than Africa, when in reality they cover barely two-thirds as much territory.

The map lies. Traditional geography steals space just as the imperial economy steals wealth, official history steals memory, and formal culture steals the word.

In Cuba street violence has also grown, and prostitution has flourished, ever since the country’s Eastern European allies collapsed and the dollar became the island’s currency. For forty years Cuba was treated as a leper for the crime of having built in this hemisphere a society based more on solidarity and less on injustice. In recent years, that society has lost most of its material base of support: the economy is out of whack, the tourist invasion has warped people’s daily lives, work has lost its value, and the dolorous traitors of yesterday have become the dollar-are-us traders of today. Despite these recent sorrows, even the revolution’s bitterest enemies admit that some of its achievements still stand, above all in education and health. The mortality rate for Cuban children, for example, is half that for the young of Washington, D.C. Fidel Castro is still the political leader who speaks forbidden truths to the world’s rulers and the one who most insists that the ruled must unite. As a friend just back from Cuba told me, “There are shortages of everything — except dignity. That they have in such quantities they could give out transfusions.” But the crisis in Cuba and the island’s tragic isolation have stripped bare the limitations of a top-down system that hasn’t shaken the bad habit of believing things do not exist unless they’re mentioned in the official press.

Scrawled on City Walls

I like night so much, I’d throw a blanket over day.

True, crickets don’t work. But ants can’t sing.

My grandmother said no to drugs. And she died.

Life is a disease that goes away on its own.

This factory smokes birds.

My dad lies like a politician.

No more action! We want promises!

Hope is the last thing we lost.

We weren’t asked about coming into the world. But we demand to be asked about living in it.

There’s a different country somewhere.

The nine U.S. presidents who have screamed successive condemnations of Cuba for its lack of democracy have done nothing more than denounce the consequences of their own acts. It was the ceaseless aggression and the long, implacable blockade that drove the Cuban revolution to become more and more militarized, far removed from the model that was originally envisioned. The omnipotence of the state, which began as a response to the omnipotence of the market, ended up succumbing to the impotence of the bureaucracy. The revolution sought to grow by transforming itself, and it spawned a bureaucracy that reproduces by repeating itself. At this point, the internal blockade, the authoritarian blockade, is turning out to be just as much of an enemy as the external imperial blockade, stifling the creative energy of the revolution. Many Cubans have lost their opinions for lack of use. But others are not afraid to speak and are eager to act. Thanks to their encouragement, Cuba is alive and kicking, offering proof that contradictions are the heartbeat of history, no matter how badly that sits with those who view them as heresies or as wrenches that life throws into the best of plans.

For much of the twentieth century, the existence of the Eastern bloc, so-called real socialism, encouraged the independent forays of countries that wished to escape the trap of the international division of labor. But the socialist states of Eastern Europe had a lot of state and little or nothing of socialist. When they fell, we were all invited to the funeral of socialism, but the undertakers were mistaken about who had died.

In the name of justice, so-called socialism had sacrificed freedom. The symmetry is revealing: in the name of freedom, capitalism sacrifices justice day in, day out. Are we obliged to kneel before one of these two altars? Those of us who believe that injustice is not our immutable fate have no reason to identify with the despotism of a minority that denied freedom, was accountable to no one, treated people as children, and saw unity as unanimity and diversity as treason. Such petrified power was divorced from the people it ruled. Perhaps that explains the ease with which it fell, without pity or glory, and the rapidity with which a new power emerged featuring the same personalities. Bureaucrats turned a quick somersault and in a flash reappeared as successful businessmen and mafia capos. Moscow now has twice as many casinos as Las Vegas, while wages have fallen by half and in the streets crime grows like a mushroom after a rain.

The Other Globalization

The Multilateral Agreement on Investment, a new set of rules to liberate the circulation of money, was a sure thing at the beginning of 1998. The most-developed countries had negotiated the accord in secret and were ready to impose it on all the others and on the bit of sovereignty those countries still retained.

But civil society broke the news. Using the Internet, alternative organizations managed to ring alarm bells throughout the world and pressure governments to good effect. The accord died unhatched.

We are in the midst of a tragic but perhaps healthy crisis of convictions — a crisis for those who believed in states that claimed to belong to everyone but were really of the few and ended up being no one’s; a crisis for those who believed in the magic formulas of the armed struggle; and a crisis for those who believed in political parties that went from withering denunciations to bland platitudes, that began by swearing to bring down the system and ended up administering it. Many party activists now beg forgiveness for having believed that heaven could be built. They work feverishly to erase their own footprints and climb down from hope as if hope were a tired horse.

End of the century, end of the millennium, end of the world? How much unpoisoned air do we have left? How much unscorched earth? How much water not yet befouled? How many souls not yet sick? The Hebrew word for “sick” originally meant “with no prospect,” and that condition is indeed the gravest illness among today’s many plagues. But someone — who knows who it was? — stopped beside a wall in the city of Bogotá to write, “Let’s save pessimism for better times.”

In the language of Castile, when we want to say we have hope, we say we shelter hope. A lovely expression, a challenge: to shelter her so she won’t die of the cold in the bitter climate of these times. According to a recent poll conducted in seventeen Latin American countries, three out of every four people say their situation is unchanged or getting worse. Must we accept misfortune the way we accept winter or death? It’s high time we in Latin America asked ourselves if we are to be nothing more than a caricature of the North. Are we to be only a warped mirror that magnifies the deformities of the original image: “Get out if you can” downgraded to “Die if you can’t”? Crowds of losers in a race where most people get pushed off the track? Crime turned into slaughter, urban hysteria elevated to utter insanity? Don’t we have something else to say and to live?

At least now we hardly ever hear the old refrain about history being infallible. After all we’ve seen, we know for sure that history makes mistakes: she gets distracted, she falls asleep, she gets lost. We make her and she looks like us. But she’s also, like us, unpredictable. Human history is like soccer: her finest trait is her capacity for surprise. Against all predictions, against all evidence, the little guys can sometimes knock the invincible giants for a loop.

On the woof and warp of reality, tangled though it be, new cloth is being woven from threads of many radically different colors. Alternative social movements don’t just express themselves through parties and unions. They do that, but not only that. The process is anything but spectacular and it mostly happens at the local level, where across the world a thousand and one new forces are emerging. They emerge from the bottom up and the inside out. Without making a fuss, they shoulder the task of reconceiving democracy, nourishing it with popular participation and reviving the battered traditions of tolerance, mutual assistance, and communion with nature. One of their spokesmen, ecologist Manfred Max-Neef, describes these movements as mosquitoes on the attack, stinging a system that repels the hug and compels the shrug: “More powerful than a rhinoceros,” he says, “is a cloud of mosquitoes. It grows and grows, buzzes and buzzes.”

Latin Americans

They say we missed our date with history, and it’s true we’re usually late to appointments. Neither have we been able to take power, and the fact is we do sometimes lose our way or take a wrong turn, and later we make a long speech about it.

We Latin Americans have a nasty reputation for being charlatans, vagabonds, troublemakers, hotheads, and revelers, and it’s not for nothing. We’ve been taught by the law of the market that price equals value, and we know we don’t rate much. What’s worse, our good nose for business leads us to pay for everything we sell and buy every mirror that distorts our faces.

We’ve spent five hundred years learning how to hate ourselves and one another and work heart and soul for our own ruin. That’s what we’re up to. But we still haven’t managed to correct our habit of wandering about daydreaming and bumping into things or our inexplicable tendency to rise from the ashes.

The Landless

Sebastião Salgado photographed them, Chico Buarque sang to them, José Saramago wrote about them: five million families of landless peasants wander the deserted vastness of Brazil “between dreams and desperation.”

Many of them have joined the Movement of the Landless. From encampments improvised by the sides of roads, rivers of people flow through the night in silence into the immense, empty farms. They break the padlocks, open the gates, enter. Sometimes they’re greeted by bullets from hired guns or soldiers, the only ones working on those unworked lands.

The Movement of the Landless is guilty. Not only does it show no respect for the property rights of sponging landlords; even worse, it fails to fulfill its duty to the nation. The landless grow food on the lands they occupy when the World Bank commands the countries of the South not to grow their own food but rather to be submissive beggars on the world market.

In Latin America, they are a species at risk of expansion: organizations of the landless, the homeless, the jobless, the whateverless; groups that work for human rights; mothers and grandmothers who defy the impunity of power; community organizations in poor neighborhoods; citizens’ coalitions that fight for fair prices and healthful produce; those that struggle against racial and sexual discrimination, against machismo, and against the exploitation of children; ecologists, pacifists, health promoters, and popular educators; those who unleash collective creativity and those who rescue collective memory; organic agriculture cooperatives, community radio and television stations, and myriad other voices of popular participation that are neither auxiliary wings of political parties nor priests taking orders from any Vatican. These unarmed forces of civil society face frequent harassment from the powerful, at times with bullets. Some activists get shot dead. May the gods and the devils hold them in glory: only trees that bear fruit suffer stonings.

The Zapatistas

Mist is the ski mask the jungle wears. That’s how it hides its persecuted children. From the mist they emerge, to the mist they return. The Indians of Chiapas wear majestic clothing, they float when they walk, and they speak softly or remain silent. These princes condemned to servitude were the first and are the last. They’ve been run off the land and out of the history books, and they’ve found refuge in mist, in mystery. From there they’ve emerged, wearing masks, to unmask the power that humiliates them.

With the odd exception, like the Zapatistas in Chiapas or the landless in Brazil, these movements rarely garner much public attention — not because they don’t deserve it. To name just one, Mexico’s El Barzón emerged spontaneously in recent years when debtors sought to defend themselves from the usury of the banks. At first it attracted only a few, a contagious few; now they are a multitude. Latin America’s presidents would do well to learn from that experience, so that our countries could come together, the way in Mexico people came together to form a united front against a financial despotism that gets its way by negotiating with countries one at a time. But the ears of those presidents are filled with the sonorous clichés exchanged every time they meet and pose with the president of the mother country, the United States, always front and center in the family photos.

It’s happening all across the map of Latin America: against the paralyzing nerve gas of fear, people reach out to one another, and together they learn to not bow down. As Old Antonio, Sub-commandante Marcos’s alter ego, says, “We are as small as the fear we feel, and as big as the enemy we choose.” Such people, unbowed, are having their say. There is no greater authority than one who rules by obeying. Marcos represents the sub, the under — the underdeveloped, the underfed, the underrated, the under-heard. The indigenous communities of Chiapas discuss and decide, and he is but the mouth that speaks with their voices. The voice of those who have no voice? People obliged to remain silent do have a voice, a voice that deserves to be heard. They speak by their words but also by their silence.

Official history, mutilated memory, is a long, self-serving ceremony for those who give the orders in this world. Their spotlights illuminate the heights and leave the grass roots in darkness. The always invisible are at best props on the stage of history, like Hollywood extras. But they are the ones — the actors of real history, the denied, lied about, hidden protagonists of past and present — who incarnate the splendid spectrum of another possible reality. Blinded by elitism, racism, sexism, and militarism, the Americas continue to ignore their own plenitude. And that’s twice as true for the South: Latin America has the most fabulous human and vegetal diversity on the planet. Therein lies its fecundity and its promise. As anthropologist Rodolfo Stavenhagen puts it, “Cultural diversity is to the human species what biological diversity is to the genetic wealth of the world.” If Latin America is to realize the marvels promised by our people and our the land, we’ll have to stop confusing identity with archeology and nature with scenery. Identity isn’t frozen in museums and ecology can’t be reduced to gardening.

Five centuries ago, the people and the land of the Americas were incorporated into the world market as things. A few of the conquistadors, those who were themselves conquered, managed to see America’s splendor and to revel in it. But the powers behind the Conquest, a blind and blinding enterprise like every other imperial invasion, could see Indians and nature only as objects of exploitation or as obstacles. In the name of the one and only God, the one and only language, and the one and only truth, cultural diversity was written off as ignorance and criminalized as heresy, while nature, that ferocious beast, was tamed and obliged to turn itself into money. The communion of indigenous peoples with the earth was the essential truth of American cultures, a sin of idolatry that merited punishment by lash, gallows, and the pyre.

Warning

The duly appointed authorities hereby warn the population that a number of lazy and bored young ne’er-do-wells are on the loose, wandering con men who carry the malevolent virus that spreads the plague of disobedience.

Fortunately for public health, these subjects are easy to spot, since they have the scandalous habit of thinking out loud, dreaming in color, and violating the norms of collective resignation that constitute the essence of democratic culture. They refuse to carry the mandatory old-age cards, even though, as everyone knows, these are dispensed free of charge on every street corner and in every village in the countryside thanks to the “Elderly Mind, Healthy Body” campaign, which has been such a great success for many years.

Ratifying the principle of authority and overlooking the provocations of this minority of upstarts, the Higher Government reiterates its irrevocable decision to keep a watchful eye on the development of our youth, who are our country’s principal export product and who constitute the foundation of our balance of trade and of payments.

We no longer speak of “taming” nature; now its executioners like to say it must be “protected.” Either way, nature was and still is viewed as outside us: civilization, which confuses clocks with time, also confuses postcards with nature. But the vitality of the world, which wriggles out of all classifications and is beyond explanation, never sits still. Nature realizes itself in movement and we, too, children of nature, exist in motion. We are who we are and at the same time are what we do to change who we are. As Paulo Freire, the educator who died learning, liked to say, “We become by walking.”

Kin

We are family of everything that buds, grows, matures, tires, dies, and sprouts again.

Every child has many parents, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, grandparents. The grandparents are the dead and the hills. Children of the earth and of the sun, watered by she-rains and he-rains, we are all related to the seeds, to the corn plants, to the rivers, and to the foxes that announce how the year will unfold. The stones are related to the snakes and to the lizards. Corn and beans, brothers to each other, grow up together without squabbling. Potatoes are the daughters and mothers of those who plant them, because he who creates is created.

Everything is sacred, and we are too. Sometimes we are gods and the gods, sometimes, are just little people.

That’s what is said, what is known, among the Indians of the Andes.

The Music

He was a magician with the harp. On the prairies of Colombia, no fiesta could take place without him. Mesé Figueredo had to be there with his dancing fingers that delighted the breeze and made legs go wild.

One night, on his way to a wedding, he was mugged on a lonely path. Mesé was on one mule, the harp on another, when the robbers jumped him and beat him to a pulp.

The next day someone found him lying in the road, a bloody bunch of rags more dead than alive. In what remained of his voice, that scrap of flesh said, “They took the mules.”

He said, “They took the harp.”

“But,” he breathed and laughed, “they didn’t take the music.”

Truth lies in the voyage, not the port. There is no greater truth than the search for truth. Are we condemned to crime? We all know that we human creatures are busy devouring our neighbors and devastating the planet, but we also know that we would not be here if our distant Paleolithic grandparents hadn’t learned to adapt to the natural world to which they belonged and hadn’t been capable of sharing what they hunted and gathered. Living wherever, living however, living whenever, each person contains many possible persons. Every day, the ruling system places our worst characteristics at center stage, condemning our best to languish behind the backdrop. The system of power is not in the least eternal. We may be badly made, but we’re not finished, and it’s the adventure of changing reality and changing ourselves that makes our blip in the history of the universe worthwhile, this fleeting warmth between two glaciers that is us.

THE RIGHT TO RAVE

The new millennium is upon us, though the matter shouldn’t be taken too seriously. After all, the year 2001 for Christians is 1379 for Moslems, 5114 for Mayans, and 5762 for Jews. The new millennium starts on January 1 only because one fine day the senate of imperial Rome decided to end the tradition of celebrating the new year at the beginning of spring. The number of years in the Christian Era is a matter of whim as well: another fine day the pope in Rome decided to assign a date to the birth of Jesus, even though nobody knows when he was born.

Time pays no attention to the borders we erect to fool ourselves into believing we control it. Even so, the millennium is a frontier the whole world both celebrates and fears.

AN INVITATION TO FLIGHT

The millennium is a good opportunity for orators of inflated eloquence to spout off on the destiny of humanity and for the agents of God’s ire to announce the end of the world and other assorted calamities, while time itself continues its long, tight-lipped march through eternity and mystery.

The truth is, who can resist? On such a date, arbitrary though it is, everyone is tempted to wonder about the time to come. And just how is anyone to know? Only one thing is certain: in the twenty-first century, we’ll all be people from the last century and, what’s worse, we’ll be from the last millennium.

If we can’t guess what’s coming, at least we have the right to imagine the future we want. In 1948 and again in 1976, the United Nations proclaimed long lists of human rights, but the immense majority of humanity enjoys only the rights to see, hear, and remain silent. Suppose we start by exercising the never-proclaimed right to dream? Suppose we rave a bit? Let’s set our sights beyond the abominations of today to divine another possible world:

• the air shall be cleansed of all poisons except those born of human fears and human passions;

• in the streets, cars shall be run over by dogs;

• people shall not be driven by cars, or programmed by computers, or bought by supermarkets, or watched by televisions;

• the TV set shall no longer be the most important member of the family and shall be treated like an iron or a washing machine;

• people shall work for a living instead of living for work;

• written into law shall be the crime of stupidity, committed by those who live to have or to win, instead of living just to live like the bird that sings without knowing it and the child who plays unaware that he or she is playing;

• in no country shall young men who refuse to go to war go to jail, rather only those who want to make war;

• economists shall not measure living standards by consumption levels or the quality of life by the quantity of things;

• cooks shall not believe that lobsters love to be boiled alive;

• historians shall not believe that countries love to be invaded;

• politicians shall not believe that the poor love to eat promises;

• earnestness shall no longer be a virtue, and no one shall be taken seriously who can’t make fun of himself;

• death and money shall lose their magical powers, and neither demise nor fortune shall make a virtuous gentleman of a rat;

• no one shall be considered a hero or a fool for doing what he believes is right instead of what serves him best;

• the world shall wage war not on the poor but rather on poverty, and the arms industry shall have no alternative but to declare bankruptcy;

• food shall not be a commodity nor shall communications be a business, because food and communication are human rights;

• no one shall die of hunger, because no one shall die from overeating;

• street children shall not be treated like garbage, because there shall be no street children;

• rich kids shall not be treated like gold, because there shall be no rich kids;

• education shall not be the privilege of those who can pay;

• the police shall not be the curse of those who cannot pay;

• justice and liberty, Siamese twins condemned to live apart, shall meet again and be reunited, back to back;

• a woman, a black woman, shall be president of Brazil, and another black woman shall be president of the United States; an Indian woman shall govern Guatemala and another Peru;

• in Argentina, the crazy women of the Plaza de Mayo shall be held up as examples of mental health because they refused to forget in a time of obligatory amnesia;

• the Church, holy mother, shall correct the typos on the tablets of Moses and the Sixth Commandment shall dictate the celebration of the body;

• the Church shall also proclaim another commandment, the one God forgot: You shall love nature, to which you belong;

• clothed with forests shall be the deserts of the world and of the soul;

• the despairing shall be paired and the lost shall be found, for they are the ones who despaired and lost their way from so much lonely seeking;

• we shall be compatriots and contemporaries of all who have a yearning for justice and beauty, no matter where they were born or when they lived, because the borders of geography and time shall cease to exist;

• perfection shall remain the boring privilege of the gods, while in our bungling, messy world every night shall be lived as if it were the last and every day as if it were the first.

A Question

In the twelfth century, the official geographer of the kingdom of Sicily, al-Idrisi, drew a map of the world, the world that Europe knew about, with south on top and north on the bottom. That was common in mapmaking back then. And that’s how the map of South America was drawn eight centuries later, with south on top, by Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres-García. “Our north is south,” he said. “To go north, our ships go down, not up.”

If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?

This book was completed in August 1998. Check your local newspaper for an update.