Let me respond to some of the apprehensions I have been expressing in this essay with my own prophetic piece of literature.
During one of my many returns to dictatorial Chile, I wrote a fable for children entitled La Rebelión de los Conejos Mágicos, The Rabbits’ Rebellion.
In that story, the King of the Wolves invades the land of the rabbits and immediately decrees that rabbits do not exist. He expunges them from books and bans their name from being mentioned privately or publicly. He sets up a gigantic system of pythons that slither through houses and hawks that fly everywhere, insuring that nobody contravene his commands. Still, in order to dispel persistent rumors that the bunnies are audaciously alive, he orders a series of photos of himself taken by a monkey photographer, whose daughter happens to be a big fan of the rabbits and insists, in spite of being punished by her parents, that the forbidden creatures come to visit her in dreams. The photographer soon finds himself in trouble, because each photo that he takes and is displayed all over the kingdom so the Wolf’s eyes can scrutinize all actions of his citizens, each and every photo ends up being infiltrated and overrun, timidly at first, and then more daringly, by the recalcitrant rabbits. No matter how much the photographer and the Wolf-King’s counselors try to erase their presence, the mischievous ears of the rabbits keep intruding into the margins of the photo. And when his Wolfiness erects a gigantic throne to prove that he is invulnerable, the rabbits finally decide to move out of the photos and into reality, munching away at the legs of the throne until it comes crashing down. The final directive of the Wolf-King before he retreats into anonymity is to the photographer: don’t print this picture!
But those are not the last words of the story. The last words belong to the little monkey girl who would not let her imagination be subdued, who kept dreaming of rebellion despite the fear and spying that reigned in that kingdom. I trust that the last words of that children’s story written decades ago during a brutal dictatorship, still resonate today.
The world, the story says—the world, the story predicts—the world is and was and will be full of rabbits.
21.
HOW WE OVERCAME TYRANNY BEFORE: TAKE HEART, FRIENDS
From my home, here in Santiago de Chile, I look up at the immense mountain range of the Andes and my spirits are lifted. Since my childhood, these mountains have bestowed on me a sense of security and permanence sadly absent from my life, but in these troubling times, they afford me something else: an intimation of hope.
Because, exactly 200 years ago, on Feb. 12, 1817, a group of men crossed these very Andes, impenetrable, colossal, majestic, in an extraordinary journey that was to liberate Chile from colonial rule. Their exploits became a turning point in the emancipation of all Spanish-speaking America.
Starting in 1810, across the continent, patriots stirred by the European Enlightenment and encouraged by the successful revolt of the 13 American colonies against their British masters had worked to cast off the imperial yoke of Spain. From Mexico to the Southern Cone, independence movements introduced an array of reforms that make Latin Americans proud to this day.
In Chile, in particular, freedom was the watchword: freedom of the press and freedom to assemble, freedom to elect our own representatives to a National Congress, freedom to trade with any nation and freedom to receive a secular education beyond the stifling reach of the church. And most crucially, my country adopted Libertad de Vientres, the Freedom of Wombs law, which established that any child born of a slave was immediately free.
In spite of these achievements, those first years of Chile’s independence were fraught. Fratricidal conflict between moderates and radicals weakened the cause of reform. By 1814, the Spanish crown had reconquered many of the mutinous territories it had lost, a period known, precisely, as La Reconquista.
In October that year, after defeat at the battle of Rancagua, near Santiago, the remaining contingent of the patriotic army retreated across the Andes to the province of Mendoza, in Argentina, one of the few lands that remained in the hands of the revolutionaries. From there, as they plotted their return, they had to watch the restored Spanish overlords annul the independence movement’s liberal transformations. A Tribunal of Vigilance and Public Security set up a reign of terror—torture, jailings, executions, deportations, expropriations—to curb defiance.
A century and a half later, in 1973, a tyrannical regime of violence visited Chile once more in the name of conservative values and oligarchical interests. The dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet not only attacked the left-wing reforms of Salvador Allende, but also systematically erased advances in social and civil rights—indeed, the welfare state—for which generations of Chileans had fought since independence.
After the 1973 military takeover, just as in the dark days of La Reconquista, those opponents of the regime who stayed in the country and those who, like myself, my wife and countless others, became exiles were comforted by the example of how, at the dawn of its sovereign history, our country had been liberated by an epic struggle against fear and subjugation.
We would repeat to ourselves the story of the “Ejército Libertador de los Andes,” the rugged army of patriots who had crossed the same cordillera I contemplate as I write these words. Thousands of troops (many of them former slaves), mules and horses, dozens of scouts and some scores of civilians, including auxiliary and medical personnel, took a perilous route.
The Argentine general José de San Martín and the Chilean leader Bernardo O’Higgins, both revered as founding fathers of their respective republics, were bold and inventive enough to believe that the Andes would be not a barrier to their search for justice, but a friend. Though hungry, thirsty and exhausted, the insurgents beat the Spanish forces of La Reconquista on Feb. 12, 1817, at the battle of Chacabuco.
Inspired by that distant feat, 20th-century Chileans also found the strength, patience, craftiness and unity to vanquish their oppressor, the Pinochet dictatorship. We did so by occupying every space possible, invading every corner and organization of the country, unshackling our fetters one by one. It took 17 painful years, and many dead and disappeared, but today we enjoy a thriving democracy that is constantly seeking to expand the rights of all people—men, women, immigrants, students, pensioners, workers, artists.
Would that I could say the same of the world at large.
All over the globe, the slow but steady accomplishments of the past are under siege. Worse still, the earth itself is threatened by climate disaster and extinction. The forces of regression and authoritarianism, contemporary avatars of La Reconquista, are on the march in country after country, fueled by ethnic nationalism. Walls are going up along borders as swiftly as the hearts of millions are closing to solidarity. Rights that we had considered unassailable and secure are being eroded.
Not since the iniquity of Hitler and Mussolini have we witnessed such a resurgence of hatred against the Other, even as the United States—one of the countries that led the fight against fascism—is now governed by men who would turn back the clock, and use repression rather than persuasion to obliterate so many gains and glories we took for granted.
Having seen in my own country how easily a proud democracy can be replaced by the most terrifying of tyrannies, I believe it is never too soon to issue a warning about the dangers ahead. If I invoke, 200 years later, the example of those revolutionary patriots who were undeterred in their quest for liberty by catastrophic odds and some of the highest mountains on the planet, it is not because I think that an invasion from abroad is the answer to the daunting challenges humanity faces. It is for what we can learn today about resistance and hope from the Army of the Andes.
Just as those fighters for independence found a sanctuary from which to gather strength, so should the multitudes who struggle now for justice and equality seek a similar haven. From that place of safety, we can hold firm against the forces of fear and reaction, and inch by inch, take back our land—bold in the knowledge that no obstacle i
s too large, no enemy too mighty, no mountain range of desolation and death too insurmountable.
Each of us occupies some space of respite from the whirlwind, each of us has something to contribute, our own Andes to cross, if we are to prevail. The mountains of Chile tell us that if we are brave enough, resourceful enough, imaginative enough, then nothing in this miraculous world is impossible.
22.
THE WHISPERING LEAVES OF THE HIROSHIMA GINGKO TREES
On Aug. 6, 1945, a 14-year-old schoolboy named Akihiro Takahashi was knocked unconscious by a deafening roar and flash of blinding light. When he awoke, he found he had been thrown many yards by the detonation of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. He had survived because his school was about a mile from the epicenter of the blast.
Dazed and burned, Akihiro headed to the river to cool himself. Along the way, he witnessed a scene of apocalypse: corpses strewn like rocks, a baby crying in the arms of its charred mother, scalded men peppered with shards of glass, their clothes melted, wandering like ghosts through the wasteland, the unbreathable darkened air, the raging conflagrations. In an instant, about 85,000 men, women and children had perished. In the days and months that followed, tens of thousands more slowly succumbed to their injuries and the effects of radiation.
I met Akihiro Takahashi in 1984, when he was the director of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. By then middle-aged, his body was a testament to that war crime and its aftermath. One ear was flat and mangled, his hands were gnarled and from a finger on each grew a black fingernail.
“You must see the Hibakujumoku, the survivor trees,” he said to me, almost as an order, at the end of a long conversation in his office. “You must see the gingkos.”
It was the first time I had ever heard of this tree. With one of his twisted hands, he gestured toward the city beyond the museum. They were a sign of wonder, the three trees that I visited, in the Hosen-Ji and Miyojoin-Ji temples and at the Shukkeien gardens, spreading and magnificent and resilient.
The gingko, I learned, was an expert in survival, a species found in fossils 270 million years old. These specific trees had been saved because their roots underground had been spared the nuclear annihilation. Within days of the explosion they had sprouted new greenery surrounded though they were by Hiroshima’s horrors of carbonized bodies and black rain and wailing survivors.
The gingkos, Akihiro Takahashi said, expressed better than anything he could say through an interpreter the endurance of hope, the need for peace and reconciliation.
And so, decades later, when the majestic old oak trees in front of our home in the United States were rotting and had to be cut down, it seemed natural to us to replace them with gingko trees. We purchased two specimens, and paid to have them planted along the street we live on, and we convinced the city forestry department to plant a third nearby.
The choice was not simply a challenge to death — though these trees would live far beyond the limits of the oaks, and would be here when we were long gone — but also an aesthetic decision. The gingkos are elegant and supple, their leaves are delicate lobes of green shaped like tiny fans.
I watered these miraculous trees every day and greeted them each morning. On occasion, I even spoke and sang to them.
I thought of Akihiro Takahashi again the other day. Early one morning, my wife and I woke to discover a crew of workers excavating huge holes right next to the roots of our gingko trees in order to make room for thick coils of snaking yellow tubes of fiber-optic cables. As soon as I saw what was happening, I sprang into action. It helped that I could speak Spanish to the workers. I argued vehemently — and persuaded them to dig their trenches farther from the gingkos’ roots. I checked to see that other trees in the street were unharmed and then went home to fire off emails to the city authorities to ensure that inspectors oversaw future encroachments of this sort.
Though our particular trees are safe, I am haunted by deeper, more ominous thoughts about how this great survivor now seems threatened by the depredations of modernity: the gingko vs. the gigabyte. This is, after all, a conflict between nature in its most pristine, slow and sublime form and the demands of a high-speed society that, armed with an astonishing technological prowess, wants to expand everywhere, burrow through any obstacle in its way, communicate instantly with infinite efficiency. The battle is one the Earth is losing as this Sixth Extinction, a manmade extinction, wreaks its havoc on land, water and air, on our plants and creatures.
I am far from being a Luddite. In this isolationist, chauvinistic era, I welcome the human connections that our global communications networks enable. They at least offer a glimmer of what we might achieve, the peace and understanding between different cultures and nations that Mr. Takahashi dreamt of, all those years ago in Hiroshima. Yet, as we heedlessly rush into the future with our arrogant machinery, will we ever stop to ponder the consequences? How many species are threatened today by our insatiable desires, our incessant overdevelopment, our inability to measure joy and happiness by anything other than by the latest gadget?
The Hiroshima gingkos, the tenacious older brothers and sisters of the tender green trees in front of our North Carolina house, were able to resist the most devastating outcome of science and technology, the splitting of the atom, a destructive power that could turn the whole planet into rubble. Those trees’ survival was a message of hope in the midst of the black rain of despair: that we could nurture life and conserve it, that we must be wary of the forces we unleash.
How paradoxical, how sad, how stupid, it would be if, more than seven decades after Hiroshima opened the door to the possible suicide of humanity, we did not understand that warning from the past, that call to the future, what the gentle leaves of the gingko trees are still trying to tell us.
A NOTE ON THE ESSAYS
The first version of “Grieving for America” appeared in Salon on November 6, 2016, and then, in another, post-election incarnation, on November 9th in El País (Madrid), Página Doce (Buenos Aires) and Proceso (Mexico City) under the title “América se quita la mascara.” Other parts of this introduction were written specially for this book.
“Phillip II, the Sixteenth Century Spanish Monarch, Writes to His Excellency Donald Trump” was published in Time on March 10, 2016, under the title “The Prudent King’s Advice to Trump.” This version is slightly longer.
“America Meets Frankenstein” was published in Time on September 6th, 2016, under the title: “The Case for Feeling Compassion Toward Trump Supporters.” This version is slightly longer.
“My Mother and Trump’s Border” was published in Salon on September 25, 2016.
A first version of “Latin American Food and the Failure of Trump’s Wall” was published in the Los Angeles Times on November 4, 2012, under the title “The Other Melting Pot” and has been substantially rewritten for this book.
“Faulkner’s Question for America” originally appeared in The Atlantic on November 4, 2016, under the title “Will America Earn the Right to Survive?”
“Now, America, You Know How Chile Felt” originally appeared in The New York Times on December 16, 2016. Another piece on American intervention in the affairs of foreign countries, akin to this one, was published on the CNN website on July 29, 2016. Not included here, it can be read at http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/29/opinions/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-illegal-electoral-interference-ariel-dorfman/.
A first version of “The River Kwai Passes Through Latin America and the Potomac: What it Feels Like to be Tortured” was published at Tomdispatch on June 17, 2014, in conjunction with The Nation, under the title “How to Forgive Your Torturer: The River Kwai Passes Through Latin America and Washington.” It has been rewritten and updated for this book.
“Words of Encouragement for Donald Trump from James Buchanan, the Worst President in U.S. History” originally appeared in The Los Angeles Times on January 19, 2017.
“A Message from the End of the World” originally appeared in The N
ew York Times on March 31, 2017.
“Should Iago Be Tortured?” was originally published in The New York Times on July 23, 2017, in a different version titled “Shakespeare’s Torture Test.”
A different and earlier version of “Mission Akkomplished: From Comrade Bush to Tovarisch Trump” was published in The New Statesman on May 8, 2006 with the title “Mission Akkomplished: Mayday for Comrade Bush.” It has been drastically rewritten for the Trump era.
“Martin Luther King Marches On” was originally transmitted by the BBC on August 27, 2003, under the title “Martin Luther King: A Latin American Perspective,” and published on August 28th, 2003 on Tomdispatch with the title “What Martin Luther King Might Say Today.” Tomdispatch then published, on August 27, 2013, an updated and revised version titled “Martin Luther King and the Two 9/11s.” The text that appears in this book has been revised yet again for the Trump era.
“Searching for Mandela” is a speech delivered on July 31, 2010, in Johannesburg, originally titled “Whose Memory? Whose Justice?: A Meditation on How and When And If To Reconcile,” published on the Mandela Foundation website (https://www.nelsonmandela.org/news/entry/eighth-nelson-mandela-annual-lecture-address) and in several other papers, journals and websites.
“The Truth That Made Her Free” was published in The New York Times Book Review on December 23, 2016.
A very different version of “The Dancing Cosmos of Albert Einstein” was published in The New Statesman under the title “Dancing To His Tune” on August 29, 2005. It has been considerably updated due to new scientific information and experiments.
“Reading Cervantes in Captivity” is a longer version of a piece in The New York Times Book Review on October 9, 2016, titled “In Exile with ‘Don Quixote’.”
“Revisiting Melville in Chile” was published by The Nation on May 10, 2017 under the title “What Hermann Melville Can Teach Us About the Trump Era.”
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