by W. E. Gutman
*
Gazing at my old school building on Rue de Rennes, across the Église Saint-Germain des Près, and remembering the great lessons learned along the way that day in Paris, I was reminded that it is in censorship that the seeds of suspicion, fear and social disquiet grow best. When the truth is sacrificed at the altar of political correctness, the consequences are incalculable. As Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) warns, “To be silent is to lie.” Unamuno was right. Silence invites more injustice, more deaths. Armed only with words, journalists wage an ill-balanced and often fruitless war. The other side has guns, greased, loaded and aimed at the truth by a triumvirate of collusive interests. The first seeks to gain global control by establishing a chimerical “new world order.” The second is keen on opening new markets for the bulimic corporate juggernaut. At the bottom are the reactionary political structures of compliant debtor nations that salivate, like Pavlov’s dogs, when the bell of foreign aid rings.
“It’s amazing that, historically, words have prevailed,” says prize-winning essayist and author, Roger Rosenblatt. His may be an ontological perspective. Words endure in the impersonal, two-dimensional realm of the printed page, but they do not prevail. Instead, they leave a wasteland of lofty rhetoric that has done nothing to change human nature, chill passions and curb hatred. Some horrors are too deep for words or, as deconstructionist philosophy suggests, writing is a dangerous substitute for living as it is likely to betray personal experience.
*
Ebbing passion and waning romanticism in the presence of horror produce a different kind of desolation, one felt deeply in an inaccessible region of one’s soul. For years I thought that one way of erring on the side of justice was to side unerringly with the victims of injustice -- the vanquished, the dispersed, the humiliated, the persecuted, the forgotten. Behind prison walls. At mass graves and hurriedly dug sepulchers. Wherever voices of dissent and cries for freedom had been hushed. Amid the anonymous bones scattered about the steaming earth. Pogroms, exile, occupation, torture, war, genocide, ethnic cleansing: They’ve all become a blur in an unceasing tempest of human agony. Shocking prime-time images of man’s inhumanity to man don’t lie. Our world, the evening news reminds us, is a sewer in which we wade, knee-deep, in the blood of martyrs. Gathered at the dinner table, we watch them die or fade away like ghosts. “Past is prelude,” we declare with scholarly condescension. We owe it to our fragile, overtaxed psyches to forget an endless stream of atrocities -- the Crusades, the “Holy” Inquisition, Shoah, the near-extermination of native Americans, the wholesale slaughter of Armenians, Biafra, the killing fields of Cambodia, the intertribal carnage between Hutus and Tutsis, the bloodbath in Chiapas and the Guatemalan highlands, the 64-year-old blood-letting between Israelis and Palestinians, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria; the wanton murder of street children.
Distance, racial differences, cultural incongruities, all help intellectualize other people’s suffering. We endure it by perfunctorily purging our souls after each infamy. “You can’t change human nature,” we pontificate, as we partake of dessert. In a pinch, a mind-numbing sitcom will help set our minds at ease. We survive the truth by looking the other way.
The heavy capital of idealism and exuberance I’d invested in unmasking and impaling vampires had by now steadily dwindled. The reason for this lassitude was not a lack of energy or a diminished commitment to justice, but the cumulative effect of disillusionment and disgust at people crippled by sloth and inertia. I’d spent nearly two decades fighting their battles as if they were my own, my activism exhausted in a futile effort to agitate the popular conscience, to stiffen backbones weakened by despotism and exploitation. In so doing, I’d finally hit a brick wall and the stars the impact produced in my head showered me with an insight of blinding clarity. At long last, I understood that mine was a puny and hopeless contest against formidable foes. I realized that the people of Central America would never change, never rebel, not on the streets, not at the polls. A short memory and a weak character will do that to people. Neither alienation nor profound discontent will spur them to shake the political dustbin. Fearful of change, unnerved by serious reformation, they will choose to be seduced by the echo of old, hackneyed words rather than awakened by the unsettling resonance of their own reality.
Passive, submissive, Central Americans never look back, except to reminisce about a blurry and irretrievable past. They are too busy existing and procreating like lemmings to realize that they’re being fleeced, that they’re being led to slaughter then devoured by the very shepherds entrusted with their care. Occasionally, they give in to knee-jerk reactions, a primordial reflex now reduced to feeble tics that are promptly stilled by police truncheons. Feeling the sting of injustice and institutionalized villainy, they will succumb to a brief and atypical act of defiance that horrifies the flock and is then swiftly swept under the rug of public indifference. Anticipated and tolerated by the oligarchy, these random displays of exasperation are then loudly flouted as the undesirable byproducts of a free society, instead of being flagged and deplored as the warning signs of grave social ills.
For lack of a cohesive voice, Mesoamericans -- apathetic if not inert -- will continue to put into office people who know how to stir their nations’ messianic hopes of deliverance from the status-quo but who spend their term polishing the next speech instead of cleaning up the shit, which is what they were elected to do in the first place. Most will be content to live with slogans instead of awakening from the stupor of their political gullibility. Democracy does not work in a vacuum. It demands active participation by all. Its tender shoots will wilt so long as people continue to bask in the feeble light of hope. A basic right of democracy -- and a key responsibility -- is to make politicians accountable for their words, responsible for their broken promises. Long overdue is an upsurge of nausea, a loud, collective spasm of revulsion at the vampires impaled at their throats. Time has come to slam the shutters open and exclaim loud and clear: “We’re mad as hell and we won’t take it anymore.” Not the potholes and the crumbling sidewalks, not the garbage, the foul air and polluted water, not the power outages, unregulated traffic, police corruption, influence peddling, drug running, and money laundering, not the gangs and child prostitution and human trafficking, not the inept and fossilized bureaucracies, not the Byzantine red tape, usurious bank rates, lofty explanations, limp excuses, words, words, words.
But such outbursts are dramatized on television and in cinemas where the people purge themselves on a Saturday night out -- never in the streets -- or in the saloons where the national bile is habitually drowned. At the polls, where the democratic process has been reduced to a thoughtless ritual, there will be no surprises. It will be business as usual. Voters will opt for the “least worst” and hope for the best. This is the safe way out. Convictions are easily subverted by sheepish conformity. In the rush to find someone to blame for their woes, the good people of Central America will ultimately exorcise and exonerate their tormentors.
There is comfort in perpetuity. It helps deaden hopeless dreams.
*
What happened to the idealism, the zeal, the élan that once inspirited me? Why have disgust, rancor and indifference replaced empathy? Is it age? Is it the realization that I’d been screaming at the deaf and gesticulating before the blind and petitioning the heartless? Is it the pervading squalor, the immovable plutocracies and rampant corruption in nations so lacking in self-respect, ambition and initiative that they wallow in their own excrement and keep smiling? Is it the sudden awareness that I was speaking to myself? Imagine how much time, effort, passion and paper and kilobytes were wasted in the process, how many words uttered in vain.
“Tout passe, tout lasse, tout casse,” say the cynical French. Everything slips away, everything tires, everything breaks. Battle-weary, shell-shocked, I lay down my weapons. Nature’s laws are immutable. There are those who eat. And there are those who are eaten. I was tired of sorting through the leftovers
.
In time, back home, rested, cleansed and eager to find them, I would uncover other depredations and, with them, fresh pretexts for one last hurrah of rabble rousing, one prolonged final burst of fury that would bring on criticism, censorship and subtler forms of rebuke and disaffection, this time not in some backwater Third World nation but in the mythical land of the free and the home of the brave, the Grand Master of corruption, the capo di tutti capi, the United State of America.
PART FOUR
THE OPEN SEA
In hindsight
WHERE THINGS ARE NOT
Downstream, as they near the end of their journey, rivers take on a certain solemnity. But beneath the glassy surface, turbid, silt-laden vortices churn with restless vigor. It is there that memories of a distant beginning lay submerged, roiling in a state of suspended animation until the current wrenches them free and delivers them to the open sea. Fond of allegories I seize upon the metaphor. I’m stunned by the bewildering brevity of time. “Time,” said Henri Bergson, “is what hinders everything from being ceded all at once.” His was an optimist’s perspective. Time is a thief: it takes back everything it bestows -- itself included.
Writers spend half their lives dreaming, the other half trying to remember their dreams.
*
Pity the chronicler. His travail is dissonant, his art off-key, his output seldom more than the disfigured fragments of a straying spirit in search of its worldly self. I seek no comfort or recompense by disrobing the past. I only want to fondle the moods and emotions I unearth as I wander along the maze. Anxious to rummage through a drawer full of memories, or a pile of junk, I fondle them, suck on them, so to speak, with equal doses of lechery and reverence, as if they were the Muses’ breasts. In short, I milk them dry to set them free. It’s the moods these transfigurations convey, the dismay, the outrage they might possibly elicit, that makes me reach for a pen, not some vainglorious urge to inform, enlighten or entertain. I shall ventilate the shadows, stir the foulest exhalations, but I promise no light, no wisdom, no eternal truth. I conform to no particular communion. I’m afflicted with an exquisite curse: I was baptized in ink. It is in the blackness of night, where memories incubate, that ink runs swiftest and deepest of all. I know; I’ve been swept in its ebbs and flows, never sunk, willing to risk drowning again and again with each pen stroke. To reminisce is to return to the embryo, where unborn reality gestates. To evoke the past is to break loose from reality endured, to bypass a realm vast and limitless where monsters, mythic and real lie in wait. The voyage is fraught with perils; the path is uncharted. It is the very nature of such journeys that compels those who embark on their gossamer wings to ask themselves, sooner or later, whether it was wise to abandon hearth and home when the old armchair feels so good, when the winds of conformity sing alluringly upon the moonlit waters of the inlet, there before them. For they are apt to discover on arrival at some uncharted port-of-call, as I did when I first arrived in America, that there had been no compelling reason for them to make the trek in the first place. For when all is said and done, at the very conclusion of their aimless peregrinations, weary and confused, they will wisely conclude, as I did, that some ideals are not meant to be aimed at, let alone exceeded.
Buoyed by parental qualms about the future, catapulted by curiosity, immaturity and armed with a colossal disregard for the consequences of my actions, I’d done the unthinkable. I’d crossed the Atlantic, not to flee from persecution or seek my fortune, but to survey the penalties such expedition might levy. In hindsight, I could have found cogent reasons to stay in Paris but my arguments, stunted by immaturity and held back by wanderlust, lay fallow within me, insufficiently parsed, unvoiced. My ability to follow an idea to its logical conclusion would often be sapped by restlessness, corrupted by haste, undermined by the urge to get to the “other side.” Inquisitive, I’d spent my childhood exploring the universe around me. Eager to unlock their secrets, I’d taken apart -- and ruined -- clocks, radios, telephones and other devices. I’d played Frankenstein, splicing worms and grafting the thorax of one insect onto the abdomen of another. I’d set fire to unexploded ordnance, just to see what would happen; a piece of shrapnel that lodged in my calf had to be surgically removed. I’d pilfered and sold scrap metal, doctored an I.D. card to gain access to an R-rated movie, injected a pet tortoise with cortisone and shown off my father’s speculum to girls foolish enough to play patient as I avidly studied their anatomy. I would rush into adulthood, tempting fate, quelling doubts and overlooking fear in exchange for the trials of involuntary expatriation, military service, matrimony, fatherhood and the ordeals of marital discord, adultery, divorce and depression. And I would pursue an endless stream of occupations, some mind-numbing, others that took me halfway around the world as I chased after my own tail in pursuit of Nirvana.
Daunting and beguiling, New York, the fabulous city I openly vilified and secretly adored, would witness these contests with a detachment that deepened the exasperation and heightened the passion. I blame New York for making self-exile and alienation strangely bearable. I blame myself for letting it hold me in its dizzying embrace as the years spent ambling in its vast labyrinths turned to decades. I also blame myself for being deaf to its siren song: I should have run the other way while there was still time. Or I should have surrendered to it body and soul. I did neither and found myself meandering in a limbo of my own creation.
*
So much had happened since I’d first arrived in the U.S. My uncle had fled Romania and settled in Paris, where he turned to writing and art criticism. His mother (my grandmother), was now by his side. Meanwhile, my parents too had crossed the Atlantic, ostensibly to be near me. Like me, both had been dazzled at first by America’s bounties but the love affair was short-lived. They would both bitterly regret leaving Europe. And, like me, they allowed force of habit, relative ease, inertia and old age to entrap them like flies on fly paper in a country where they would never feel at home.
My father had passed the difficult English-language medical boards and was promptly hired by Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Likening the facility’s maddening tempo and impersonal atmosphere to “assembly-line medicine and piece-work healthcare,” he quit in disgust after less than a month.
My parents then moved to a small Ohio town where my father had obtained work at a state-run psychiatric hospital. Determined to humanize the institution by enriching the lives of the patients, many of whom had long been victims of antediluvian and cruel treatment by doctors and nurses alike, he made enemies. He became enraged when a staff physician placed two mentally challenged inmates -- a man and a woman -- in solitary confinement and deprived them of “privileges,” including dessert for two weeks for having attempted to copulate behind some bushes. To his horror, my father discovered that the couple, institutionalized for life, had been chemically sterilized.
“We aim to foster Christian principles,” the physician had protested in defense of his actions. “Fornication and other lewd acts are frowned upon in this country, Dr. Gutman.”
“This is a hospital, not a monastery,” my father retorted. “And this is the twentieth century, not the Dark Ages. Your job is to make patients’ lives as comfortable and sweet as possible, not to punish them for being human and for seeking affection and intimacy.”
My father would have other run-ins with his staff and, eventually, with the State of Ohio. He kept a diary documenting medical malfeasance and acts of cruelty against some of the patients. This disquieting document, which incriminates several of his former colleagues -- all of them probably dead by now -- and points an accusatory finger at Ohio’s snake-pit approach to psychiatry, is now in my possession. I have been itching to make it public.
Uncompromising in matters of conscience and medical probity, warned not to meddle with “established practice,” my father resigned. A month or so later he was appointed Senior Surgeon at the Syracuse Hospital in upstate New York. He held that position until my mother’s death i
n 1973. New York State, he discovered, was no less strait-laced in matters of sex and religion than Ohio, but found most of his colleagues and senior management somewhat more receptive to his egalitarian views. He chronicled a number of bizarre cases involving abuse of authority, the enforcement of absurd blue laws and the illegal experimentation of psychotropic drugs on unsuspecting patients, some of them minors. His notes -- should I choose to publish them -- would add new dimensions to ghoulish leaks in the press (and subsequent corroboration by the U.S. government) that thousands of Americans had been unwittingly exposed to radioactive, chemical and biological agents from the 1940s into the 1970s. As I would later point out in a series of widely circulated articles, the government's tardy and uncharacteristic expiation-by-confession of past trespasses showed more than just a willingness to lay bare a tarnished conscience. It was nothing short of a ploy to keep far more sinister secrets frozen beneath the thick ice of official censorship. Like an iceberg, U.S. complicity in the rewiring, robotizing and subversion of the minds and bodies of thousands of unsuspecting Americans runs far deeper than imagined. And, because such trickery -- allegedly dictated by the need to thwart equally demonic cold war threats -- calls for absolute secrecy, the government almost succeeded in keeping a tight lid on this ultra-covert component of its war machine. Almost. Small leaks would eventually spring from the warlocks' overflowing cauldrons. Most were swiftly swabbed clean. A short memory and a phlegmatic unconcern for the inscrutable ways of government helped appease America's scruples and dissipate the telltale noxious fumes from its delicate nostrils.