Category: Biography

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JESUS, THE CHRIST

Micah 7: 3-6
Both hands are skilled in doing evil; the ruler demands gifts, the judge accepts bribes, the powerful dictate what they desire — they all conspire together. The best of them is like a brier, the most upright worse than a thorn hedge. The day God visits you has come, the day your watchmen sound the alarm. Now is the time of your confusion.

Jesus, book of Matthew 

For whatever reasons (some mentioned in Bible) Jesus’s parents, their families and friends thought his birth was important. Like most Jewish couples in those days, Mary and Joseph hoped their child would become the Anointed One — the Messiah promised by prophet Isaiah — who would rule ancient Israel and the world with a righteous sword. Despite all hope and plans, things went wrong from the start.

For one thing, Roman authorities decided to conduct a census, which disrupted everyone’s plans, because it required that Jews return to their ancestral towns to be counted. 

The family lived in Nazareth; they were compelled to travel to Bethlehem. Mary was full-term pregnant. Worse, when they arrived, no place was available to birth the baby. They bed in a stable for farm animals. It was a place unfit for babies, at least by modern standards.

For whatever reason — gossip, religion fever, displaced people hysteria, hatred of Rome, whatever — more than a few people believed that this particular birth might have political upside. Roman spies became aware, and Governor Herod decided to nip mania in the bud. He ordered an infanticide — agents assassinated every male under age two.

The story is that wealthy people found Joseph and Mary before Herod; they provided resources to flee to Egypt. Jesus would not see Nazareth until he turned eight. 

Scholars agree that Egypt was the birthplace of Judaism.  Moses (of Exodus) and Joseph (coat of many colors) were historically prominent; the details of their lives are the tapestry through which Torah was written.

For those who don’t know, Joseph enabled Jews to come to Egypt in ancient times, mainly to avoid famine in Israel. They immigrated around 1520 BCE and eventually became slaves. About 200 years after, in 1311 BCE, Moses led freed Jewish slaves out of Egypt.

When Jesus arrived almost a millennium and a half later, Egypt had evolved to become a Roman sanctuary city for a sizable Jewish population. And it had become safe harbor for legendary libraries and intellectuals.

History doesn’t say whether Jesus lived in cosmopolitan Alexandria or some other city, or what his life was like in Egypt, but after he returned to Israel, he knew things. He was skilled with his hands like his father Joseph, who according to tradition was a carpenter; most scholars believe he was a builder, yes, but most likely a stone mason.

Jesus learned to read and write Hebrew and probably hieroglyphics (who knows?) and maybe more. He may have been a child prodigy. Things he said caught the attention of rabbis in Israel before he reached age of bar mitzvah. 

At age twelve, his parents found him studying secretly at Temple in Jerusalem. Temple leaders studied him; he came to them from Egypt, after all. They knew the Bible prophesy, Out of Egypt I have called my son — reference to Messiah. Rabbis may have worked with Jesus for some time believing he could be the promised one. 

Bible records claim that Jesus had a way about him that set him apart as he matured. According to one writer, people liked it.  Luke wrote in his little book that …Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man. 

Some assumed that Jesus might be the promised military leader who would lead Jews to throw Romans out of the Holy Land. In the end, Jesus did more, but not the way people thought.

His life mirrored ancient Scripture in every way imaginable. Scholars know that, now.  Christian colleges offer courses to cover hundreds of passages which foreshadow in detail Jesus’s life and meaning.

But back then — in year zero — no one in Israel understood prophetic texts. It wasn’t clear to anyone that Messiah would not be a military general. Truth was different — more satisfying for some than anyone imagined.

Billy Lee 

Comment from Editors:
As is Billy Lee’s custom, he sometimes collects sayings by famous people and makes essays from them. He did for William Shakespeare, Miguel Angel Asturias, and Blaise Pascal; he even did it for himself in two collections of his own tweets first published on Twitter.

In this essay Billy Lee collected many (not all) sayings of Jesus as remembered by four followers who wrote tracts moderns call Gospels. In these little books, Jesus tells stories known as parables. They make big portions of the Gospels.

Billy Lee decided not to include parables in his collection, because they not only take a lot of space, but their meanings can also be difficult for the uninitiated to figure out. It takes effort to work them through. *  

For purposes of this essay Billy Lee has chosen to focus on easier to understand admonitions and warnings — uncut, unfiltered, uncensored; no hidden meanings; everything open in plain sight for any serious person to read and wonder, because it is these simple things that seem to border on the miraculous; they are words that have compelled and comforted believers for centuries.

Words of Jesus are thought to have broken some of the cruelest people who ever lived; Jesus has dropped more than a few hardened haters to their knees, many in tears, not only in great novels but in life. 

Through his words, Jesus assures poor and ruined people that life will be set right. Humanity will be rescued by love — even as justice rolls down from mountain-tops like a mighty river.

History and experience tell those who have eyes to see and ears to hear that it’s true. Jesus is the way. He is light for all who live. 

from Matthew’s Tract

It is written: People will not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.

Stop doing bad things, for the kingdom of heaven is nearby.

…follow me, and I will send you forth to fish for people.

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

…until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.

…unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.

 It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.

 All you need to say is simply yes or no; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.

…love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your father in heaven.

For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your father will not forgive your sins.

You cannot serve both God and money.

So do not worry, saying, What shall we eat? or What shall we drink? or What shall we wear? For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged…

So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.

…small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them.

Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my father who is in heaven.

I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. 

Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.

…learn what this means: I desire mercy, not sacrifice. For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.

I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves. Be on your guard…

…when they arrest you, do not worry about what to say or how to say it. At that time you will be given what to say,  for it will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. 

Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death. You will be hated by everyone because of me, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.

Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body in hell.

Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.

…the kingdom of heaven has been subjected to violence, and violent people have been raiding it.

For if the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Sodom, it would have remained to this day. But I tell you that it will be more bearable for Sodom on the day of judgment than for you.

…you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this is what you were pleased to do.

Come to me, all you who are weary and overly burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

If you had known what these words mean, I desire mercy, not sacrifice, you would not have condemned the innocent.

Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined…

Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven…

 …whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.

But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear.

…the deceitfulness of wealth chokes the word, making it unfruitful.

The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. 

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When someone finds it, they hide it again, and then in their joy sell all they have and buy that field. 

…the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was let down into the lake and caught all kinds of fish. When it was full, the fishermen pulled it up on the shore. Then they sat down and collected the good fish in baskets, but threw the bad away

…every teacher of the law who has become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.

What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?  Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?

…if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, Move from here to there, and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you. 

 …whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

 …your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should perish.

If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over.  But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses. If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan…

For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.

Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?

 …forgive your brother or sister from your heart.

If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.

...it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.

…with God all things are possible.

But many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first.

…whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant,  and whoever wants to be first must be your slave— just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. 

If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer. 

…prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.

…the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit. 

…many are invited, but few are chosen.

At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. But about the resurrection of the dead — have you not read what God said to you,  I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. ? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.  All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.

The greatest among you will be your servant.  For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.

…you have neglected the more important matters of the law — justice, mercy, and faithfulness.

…on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.

I am sending you prophets and sages and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify; others you will flog…

…you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me.  At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other,  and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.

Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.

…the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.

I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in,  I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.

My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done…

…all who draw the sword will die by the sword.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? 

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

Excerpts collected and edited by Billy Lee

from Mark’s Tract

…whoever is not against us is for us…

No one is good — except God alone.

Excerpts collected and edited by Billy Lee.

Due to its unusual presentation, we are recommending that the full Gospel of MARK be read in one session. Interested readers can click the link to access content. The tract is 11,300 words, which are gathered into 16 chapters. A typical reader will need about one hour. The Editorial Board

from Luke’s Tract

The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. 

…no prophet is accepted in his hometown…

I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, because that is why I was sent. 

Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you…

…whoever has been forgiven little loves little.

…for whoever is not against you is for you.

Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.

…rejoice that your names are written in heaven.

…everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. 

Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.

…you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them…

Woe to you experts in the law, because you have taken away the key to knowledge.

Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.

This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself? This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.

Do not be afraid, little flock, for your father has been pleased to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give to the poor. 

Be dressed ready for service and keep your lamps burning…

From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.

I have come to bring fire on the earth… Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division.

…unless you change your evil ways, you too will all perish…

What is the kingdom of God like? What shall I compare it to?  It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his garden. It grew and became a tree, and the birds perched in its branches.

Make every effort to enter through the narrow door…

…those who humble themselves will be exalted.

…when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.

…those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.

…remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony.

If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.

Even if they sin against you seven times in a day and seven times come back to you saying, I am sorry; I will change, you must forgive them.

The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, nor will people say, Here it is, or There it is, because the kingdom of God is within you. 

…when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?

What is impossible with man is possible with God.

…the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.

…if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.

The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone…

The people of this age marry and are given in marriage.  But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God’s children, since they are children of the resurrection. But in the account of the burning bush, even Moses showed that the dead rise, for he calls the Lord the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.

I will give you words and wisdom that none of your adversaries will be able to resist or contradict.

Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.

…pray that you may be able to escape all that is about to happen, and that you may be able to stand before the Son of Man.

Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing. 

…today you will be with me in paradise.

Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.

Excerpts collected and edited by Billy Lee 

from John’s Tract

…no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.

…no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, You must be born again. The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.

No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man. Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him. 

…whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

…a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth…

…just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it. 

…whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life.

…as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself…

You have never heard his voice nor seen his form, nor does his word dwell in you, for you do not believe the one he sent. You study  the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me… 

…the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.

…my father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.

I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.

…unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.  For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.

…the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you — they are full of the Spirit and life.

…where I am, you cannot come.

Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink.  Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.

I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.

…you have no idea where I come from or where I am going…

I am going away, and you will look for me, and you will die in your sin. Where I go, you cannot come.

…you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

…you are looking for a way to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God.

You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me.  

…whoever obeys my word will never see death.

…before Abraham was born, I am.

I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.

I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. 

I lay down my life — only to take it up again.  No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again.

I am God’s Son…

I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.

…you will see the glory of God…

…unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.

When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.  

The one who looks at me is seeing the one who sent me.

I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world. 

Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.

As I have loved you, so you must love one another.

Where I am going, you cannot follow now, but you will follow later.

I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.

I am the way and the truth and the life.

I am in the Father and the Father is in me…

Because I live, you also will live. Someday you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. 

…the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.

Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.

…apart from me you can do nothing.

Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no person than this: to lay down their life for their friends.  

You did not choose me, but I chose you…

If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first.

If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also.

They hated me without reason.

…the time is coming when anyone who kills you will think they are offering a service to God.

I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth.

I came from God. 

I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart. I have overcome the world.

Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.

Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one.  

…your word is truth.

Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.

My kingdom is not of this world.

…my kingdom is from another place.

…the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth hears my voice.

I am thirsty.

It is accomplished.

Excerpts collected and edited by Billy Lee

Postscript

Isaiah 6: 8-10

”Woe to me!” I cried. ”I am ruined! For I am a man whose lips speak all manner of evil, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”

Then an angel of high rank flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar.  With it he touched my mouth and said, ”See, this hot coal has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin is set right.”

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying: Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?

And I said: Here am I.  Send me!

He said:  Go and tell this people: Be ever hearing but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving. Make the heart of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes. Otherwise, they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.

* Jesus quoted Isaiah 6 in Matthew 13 to explain why he taught certain groups of people using allegories (or parables). Jesus told his disciples:  …knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them.

Billy Lee

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FLYING BLIND

It’s possible to fly blind and survive. It’s possible to fly a twin-engine Beechcraft through a wicked storm without instruments; without communication; find the airfield, locate an empty runway, and land safely.

It’s possible to feel the air disappear beneath your wings and freefall — even tumble — thousands of feet, time after time, dozens of times, recover the aircraft, and keep on flying.

It’s possible for clouds to be impenetrable, lightning to be relentless and unceasing, rain to be thick as waterfalls — with a vomiting passenger in the seat next to you — and keep your wits, keep your senses, keep your fear in check, keep your focus, and keep flying.

Anything is possible during a storm when all is lost except training and skills and the belief that you really are the best pilot in the Navy — when you know deep in your gut that this storm, which forecasters managed to miss, is not how it’s going to end for you or the high-ranking government official sitting in the seat next who hates to fly; who hitched a ride, who chose you, because he trusted you to get him to his meeting with the president, or whoever it was, in one piece.

It’s not possible to stay dry however. During this flight my dad, the pilot, sweat through his clothes. When I met him after his ten minute drive home from the airfield, I asked him, how did you get so wet?  His hair and face looked like he just stepped out of the shower. His flight-suit was dark with sweat; water dripped from his cuffs; even his shoes squeaked from pooling sweat around his feet.

I had a rough flight, he said. The worst flight of my life. I got overheated. Never sweat like this, ever. I’m ok. We made it. No problems.

Dad left it at that. But a week later, his passenger came to our house for dinner. He told the whole story. He said Dad saved his life during that flight. No one in the Navy was a better pilot, he insisted, and I believed him.  

It was 1964; I was a high school sophomore living at home in Arlington, Virginia near the nation’s capitol. It was the year when Barry Goldwater, the darling of the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, ran for president. He lost everywhere except Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Arizona — his home state. (Today — a lifetime later — lunatics are mainstream; go figure.)

In 1964, the American Nazi Party — led by retired Navy Commander Lincoln Rockwell — owned a field next to our neighborhood where it maintained a barracks and its national headquarters.

Rockwell’s few dozen men were heavily armed; we heard they used German Shepherds to keep gawkers away, but we never saw any when me and my friends snuck onto the property to fire bottle rockets at the barracks. One time a trooper in black boots and tee-shirt walked up on us and clicked the bolt on his rifle. We ran like hell to get away. He didn’t squeeze the trigger. We didn’t trespass again, either.

One time, we visited the Nazi offices and barracks on a dare. A guard let us into the headquarters. I was amazed at how much red color there was. The carpeting on the floors, the walls — even the carpeting on the ceilings — all was red.

It was quiet inside, like a church; even tranquil. One of the men invited us to take some pamphlets from a table in the foyer. We took some, but I don’t remember reading anything but a few of the headings. The content — what little I scanned — seemed ignorant. The Nazis despised Jews and Negroes. What else was new?

A few years later someone on a roof at a strip mall near our house fired a shot at Rockwell. He was leaving the laundromat where he washed his clothes, of all things.

I always bought pop-sickles and candy a few doors down at the Seven-Eleven. It didn’t seem particularly remarkable to learn in 1967 as I started my sophomore year at college that someone assassinated the Nazi commander a mere half-mile from my house.

But to get back to my essay…

Dad crashed a couple of planes during his time in the Navy; it seemed like every pilot screwed up sometime in those early days during World War II and a little after. 

During one accident Dad and another pilot collided over a town in Florida. Dad had to bail; he was flying low; his parachute opened immediately; he swung three times as he hung suspended beneath; he hit the ground hard. Except for bruises, he was fine. The other pilot tumbled into the ground and was killed.

The Navy court-martialed my dad, which came as a shock; an official inquiry followed; it lasted a few months, and, in the end, Dad had to take the stand and testify; he was terrified the whole time, my grandfather told me.

Dad confirmed it; he was never more scared before or after, he confessed many years later. The Navy cleared Dad of wrong-doing; he lived to fly another day — with a clean record — which is all he wanted to do anyway since as a boy he first saw an airplane fly over his farm.

Flying was freedom. It was so clear. He hated working in the mud and manure of a farm; if he could fly, he could escape — like the pilots who flew over his farm, he would be free. He would find a way.

It took planning and luck, but he made it. He took a train from Detroit to Chicago; he managed to sign up for the Navy flight program five minutes before the deadline. The rest is history.

Dad rose rapidly in the ranks of both Naval Aviation and Navy intelligence; more specifically the National Security Agency (NSA), which in those days tracked ships, mostly. Early on, the Navy taught him to speak Russian; much later, they taught him French, but it was too late. He never became fluent.

People who know how I write, must by now realize that this essay is going somewhere amazing; somewhere they don’t expect. Have patience. Keep reading.

Dad was a leader with strong views about what made for good leadership. He believed in taking care of his men; he believed in meting out justice to misbehaving officers and enlisted men in the same way — no favoritism to officers.

Military justice doesn’t work the same way as civilian justice. People who have served in the Navy know that commanders can throw their people in the “brig” for any reason — or no reason.

Commanders have absolute power, which they must have if they are to lead an effective fighting force that obeys orders under combat duress and the threat of death. Dad punished officers in the same way he disciplined the men.

(Editor’s note: women didn’t serve in fighting units until the 1990s.)

But Dad had another belief about power that people who have never wielded it don’t understand. To lead disparate and rebellious people — which large groups of humans tend to be — it is essential to keep them guessing; to keep them off guard; to keep them off-balance; and most important, to keep them uninformed. Never tell subordinates anything they don’t have an absolute need to know. Make everyone unsure of what they think they know and what they think they don’t know.

How does this work in practice? Why is it effective?

My uncle Dean told me a story about a time when Dad took him to visit the anti-submarine, jet-helicopter squadron he commanded in Key West, Florida. It was dark — about nine o’clock at night (2100 hours they say in the Navy). 

Dad parked his car outside the guard shack; he and Dean got out and walked past the guard. The guard motioned them through with a salute and a smile.

According to my uncle, Dad whirled around and stormed the guard. He stood toe to toe, in his face, and dressed him down. You will demand identification from anyone who passes this point, sailor!  He pointed at my uncle. This man, here, he might be a spy. You put the security of the most important squadron of fighters on this island at risk. Report to my office tomorrow morning — 1000 hours.

Yes sir! the guard said.

Dad took Uncle Dean into the hangar and showed him anti-submarine jet-helicopters. He took him aboard his favorite and showed him the complicated arrays of instruments and armaments then available to the armed forces.

Gages and dials, buttons and levers, advanced screens and switches covered the cockpit ceiling, its floor and doors and front panels. Belts and canisters and other incomprehensible items filled every available nook and cranny. There was no empty space, anywhere.

Dean got quite a show, I can tell you, because Dad took me on the same tour. My thought after seeing how the Navy fights was, how does anyone learn all this complicated stuff, let alone fly these monstrous beasts, which slay the Russian sub-dragons?

Anyway, the tour ended after ten or fifteen minutes, and the two men left the hangar to return to the car and begin the drive home. We lived on the base less than two miles from the squadron. Dad and Dean walked along laughing about something, when the guard stopped them. May I see your identification, gentlemen? he said calmly.

Once again, Dad spun on his heels. What? Are you blind? Am I not the commander of this squadron? Do you not see me every day? You checked Dean, here, ten minutes ago. He is a guest. Leave us alone and show respect. Return to post.

Sir… yes sir!  the guard shouted.

Later, Dean asked dad. You ordered this sailor to always ask for ID. Later, when he did exactly as you asked, you humiliated him. Why?

When you’re in charge, Dad said, the men have to know. You keep them guessing. You keep them off-balance. You force them to determine in their own minds what they believe you expect from them. Everything works better that way.

Yeah, it’s weird. But I think he might have understood something important. I’ve known other powerful men who operate the same way. I’ve worked for some.

Our newly elected president seems to share this view of power. Disinformation seems to be his modus operandi.

Another sacrosanct principle of leadership is not sharing information with “the help.” No one will ever see the tax returns, balance sheets, income statements, or health records of the newly elected president.

It’s called flying blind. Everyone flies blind except the pilot. He’s trained. He knows what to do. The world might seem to be falling apart all around. But with any luck at all, the pilot will land the plane — safely.

There is one thing that my dad once did that has been erased from history by disinformation. In the must-read book by Oliver Stone, The Untold History of the United States, Mr. Stone tells a story about an incident during the Cuban missile crisis that almost led to nuclear war. Here is an excerpt:

On October 27 [1962] an incident occurred that Schlesinger accurately described as ”not only the most dangerous moment of the Cold War. It was the most dangerous moment in human history.” A navy group led by the carrier USS Randolph began dropping depth charges near a Soviet B-59 submarine sent to protect the other Soviet ships approaching Cuba. Those inside the U.S. destroyers were unaware that the Soviet sub was carrying nuclear weapons. Soviet signals officer Vadim Orlov described the scene: ”The depth charges [sic] exploded right next to the hull.”

Get the book to read a harrowing account of the hours of hell Russian men inside the sub endured. Some officers passed out. The bottom line is this: the submarine’s commanding officer gave an order to launch a nuclear missile, but the communist political officer on board, Vasili Arkhipov, overruled him.  According to Oliver Stone, Arkhipov refused to launch, single handedly preventing nuclear war.

I can tell readers that the only weapons of war we had in Key West capable of chasing nuclear subs and dropping depth charges with the accuracy described in the book was Sikorsky anti-submarine jet-helicopters, which were under the command of my dad. They used new communication technologies called spread spectrum communications. The Russians were unable to jam USA crosstalk or track the trajectories of our most lethal weapons.  

The Russians were flying blind, and it hurt them, big-time. These secret technologies have since become the foundation of modern communications used by satellites, cell phones, and GPS. 

One pilot in the Navy had both the nerve and skill to deploy depth charges onto a nuclear submarine without risk of a direct hit, which would have released poisons. Only one had access to intelligence about Russian subs in the area — intelligence no one but a few senior officers shared. 

He was the one pilot in theater who was not flying blind. He happened to be an NSA officer, yes. He knew the rules of engagement on both sides. He spoke Russian. He trusted his training and skills. He could chase a Russian nuclear sub out of Cuban waters and turn the confrontation in our favor.

It’s what he did.

Enough said.

Researchers told Oliver Stone that we were flying blind; it was only luck and a Russian political operative who prevented a nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. So, he wrote it down.

What else could he do? He wasn’t there. I was. I lived with one of the key players. We ate breakfast and dinner together almost every single day.

Maybe most on the aircraft carrier USS Randolph and its escort ships were sailing blind, like Stone suggested; maybe most of the pilots were flying blind; but not everyone. Maybe, sometimes, people get lucky.

That’s what Dad believed. He always said, people make their own luck.

Practice, preparation, persistence, plus perception based on the best intelligence; the best equipment; the best technology — there is nothing lucky or blind about any of it.

Add a little patriotism.

It’s why we win.

Billy Lee

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BAD THINGS

When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God. Leviticus 19: 33-34

Follow the way of love and eagerly desire gifts of the Spirit, especially prophecy.
1 Corinthians 14: 1

Dad could tell the future. He was a Navy pilot who took off and landed on aircraft carriers, sometimes at night. His time to defend America was long ago. Aircraft carriers were then new to war, and pilots crashed their planes and helicopters a lot. Until the kinks got worked out over a period of many years, the Navy lost about one out of four pilots to mishaps at sea.

Dad predicted a number of crashes. Soon the pilots in his squadron wouldn’t fly if he got a “bad feeling.” His commanders respected him. Over time, good fitness reports and promotions led him to command an anti-submarine, jet-helicopter squadron during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Afterward, the Navy rated his squadron (HS-1) the safest combat aviation group on America’s east coast. Not one man was lost during his command.

Dad went with his feelings; when he got that “bad feeling”, he always flew the mission himself, or led it, rather than risk the lives of his men. Dad rose rapidly in the ranks, holding many important positions, not only in the Navy but also at the NSA (National Security Agency). Near the end of his career, a president appointed him to lead another intelligence agency not known to the public.

Navy fliers I talked with who knew dad said he was the best pilot in the United States Navy. He could fly anything under any conditions. Navy officers don’t lie. It’s against their Code of Conduct. Of course, I believed every word.

My dad was fearless to the very end of his ninety-one years of life. He once ate a half pound of spoiled cheese, because it was a gift, and he refused to embarrass the giver. The cheese smelled the way cheese smells when it has been ripened at the bottom of an army latrine; I almost threw up from the stench, but dad gulped it down like porterhouse steak. He grabbed the cheese with both hands, tore it in half, and inhaled a deep breath to savor the aroma. I was amazed that the rancid mess didn’t instantly kill him.

Today, many people seem to be having apocalyptic fears. People I don’t know well, who seem normal, have told me about vivid dreams they have had about good and bad things. Sometimes their visions trouble them. The thought has crossed my mind that a lot of folks are teetering on the edge of insanity. It’s sad and troubling.

The election added a lot of stress to people’s lives, did it not?  Election tampering by foreign intelligence agencies ran rampant and was obvious to anyone who was paying attention. The United States has an unfortunate reputation for election tampering in other countries, which goes back many decades; our recent election seemed to give other countries a golden opportunity for pay-back, which some inflicted brazenly — perhaps as a warning for us to back-off; to stand-down. Who knows?

Anyway, the election is done; Trump won; Hillary won the popular vote but lost the electoral college. In the countryside of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan (among other states) Trump won by huge margins never before seen in the free world, ever. His biggest leads came in districts with electronic voting machines. These margins overwhelmed the leads racked up by Democrats in urban areas.

It was a strange election that lasted a very long time. Many “unprecedented” things happened during the contest that no one in America has ever experienced before. Is it any wonder that some people feel unhinged by an outcome that makes no statistical sense; by an outcome no one saw coming?

Republicans now control the entire federal government; they control enough state governments to enable easy passage of amendments to the Constitution, should the GOP decide to change America in that way.

Some people want to know: what’s coming next; what sudden shocks might rock their world?

How would I know?

Yes, I took the time to compile a list of bad things that could happen. Yes, it may have been a waste of time; maybe my effort might have been better spent helping the poor.

(FILES): These recent file photos show the ten Republican presidential candidates who will appear August 6, 2016 on Fox News for the first US presidential debate of the 2016 Republican primary cycle. Top row from left: Billionaire real-estate tycoon Donald Trump; former Florida governor Jeb Bush; Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker; Florida Senator Marco Rubio; former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. Bottom row from left: Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson; Kentucky Senator Rand Paul; Texas Senator Ted Cruz; New Jersey Governor Chris Christie; and Ohio Governor John Kasich. AFP PHOTO / Files
With GOP leaders like these, what things could possibly go bad?

It’s possible that none of the bad things in the list below will happen. Maybe some will. My contribution to understanding the future is simply to point out things that have a chance of happening, which people may not have considered, or yet read about, or even shared (if they have thought about them).

My blog is read by not very many people; stilI, I felt compelled to write these “heads-up” warnings to help any curious humans (or bots) who might accidentally stumble onto my essay; to open the eyes of the few and the lucky, so that they might better understand what’s coming next; to inoculate some of them — especially the people I love — against the despair that can overwhelm any one of us when we find ourselves ambushed by the bad things in our future.

So here is my list of BAD THINGS. I might add to it from time to time if my imagination runs amok, or freaked-out people tell me scary stuff.

Here it is:

— The First Family refuses to live in the White House.

— Blacks and women start disappearing from news shows, replaced by white men.

— Athletes and entertainers step forward to confess: yes, they voted for Trump.

— Evidence emerges: The birth certificate was faked. Congress starts an investigation.

— The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is overturned.

— The military draft of young people is resurrected.

— The USA drops a neutron bomb on a city for the very first time.

— The United Nations disbands.

— Russia reestablishes its control over Eastern Europe.

— The Philippines makes a military alliance with China.

— Donald Trump resigns.

— Mike Pence becomes president.

— A hot year kills hundreds of millions.

— Many popular foods become unavailable.

— The president’s wife reveals that he is gay.

— The Mueller investigators reveal that the new president is an agent of the Russian government — hand-picked by Paul Manafort.

— A major volcanic eruption inside the USA kills hundreds of thousands.

— The Post Office is privatized.

— The Veterans Administration is privatized.

— Social Security is privatized.

— Medicare is privatized.

— Prisons are privatized.

— Public education is privatized.

— Tax deductions are eliminated, raising taxes on the poor and middle-class.

— Inheritance taxes are eliminated, locking-in a permanent aristocracy.

— Unlawful assembly is redefined: three or more unrelated people who gather in a public space for any purpose other than private discourse shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, unless they have in their possession a permit signed by the president of the United States.

— A 1954 law denying tax exemptions to churches who endorse politicians is repealed.

— Church attendance plummets.

— Charitable giving plummets.

— Inflation rises to 22% per year.

— The banking system collapses.

— Stock markets close.

— Congress declares misdemeanor unlawful assembly a felony.

— The WALL is retooled to restrain fleeing Americans.

— The Constitution is amended to eliminate all forms of naturalization to block any pathway to citizenship for children bred by foreigners. 

— An insect species is destroyed by a gene-driver released from an unregulated lab.

— Chipmunks are rendered extinct by a second gene-driver accident.

— Internet access is placed under federal regulation.

— SCOTUS hands over abortion policy to the states.

— SCOTUS rules that businesses have a constitutional right to choose who can buy their products and services, and who cannot.

— State governments add lithium to city water supplies to raise the spirits of unhappy citizens.

— Congress mandates that electronic nano-chips be injected into the buttocks of every person to help ICE track, identify, and differentiate people’s movements and immigration status.

— Congress declares that felony unlawful assembly is ”from this time forward” a capital offense.

— The 2020 election is postponed until ”we can figure out just what the hell is going on.”

— GOP controlled state legislators amend the constitution to fight terrorism; they rescind the Bill of Rights.

— Cruel and unusual punishment replaces baseball as our country’s most popular spectator sport.

— Selfies by folks jumping off bridges and skyscrapers go viral on social media.

 Billy Lee

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WHAT HILLARY DID

Hillary Clinton 6
Hillary Clinton sometimes shares stories with people about her late mother Dorothy Rodham who was born on 4 June 1919 — the same day that the women’s voting rights amendment cleared its final legislative hurdle in the US Congress.

People have a difficult time grasping a simple truth: every time the right of women to vote in national elections has come before the Supreme Court, the Court has voted against it. Despite a national movement that started in 1848 at Seneca Falls and continued with annual meetings of National Women’s Rights Conventions from 1850 onward, courts in America have rarely ruled in favor of women’s rights; the Supreme Court has never ruled in favor of a woman’s right to vote; never.

Even when women were arrested and imprisoned; when they went on hunger strikes and guards force-fed them like modern day prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the courts remained harsh and unforgiving.

It took a constitutional amendment (the 19th) passed by the votes of loving brothers, fathers, grandfathers, husbands, sons, and boyfriends in state legislatures across the country for women to make their successful end-run around the opposition to female voting that infused the Supreme Court; it wasn’t until 1920 that every woman in America secured the right to walk into polling places to vote in national elections. They never looked back.

Voting rights for women became a settled legal matter in 1922 when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the procedures demanded by the Constitution were properly followed. The 19th amendment would never be reversed — short of another constitutional amendment. That amendment can never come now that women are voters.

It’s been ninety-six years. There are women walking around today who were alive when their right to vote was granted. It wasn’t that long ago. Hillary Clinton has sometimes reminded us that her late mother was born on June 4, 1919 — the same day the voting amendment passed its final legislative hurdle in the United States Congress.

Before I explain just what it was that Hillary did, here’s some background; a little history, Billy Lee-style:

Alfred_A._Stratton civil war amputee
Union soldier Alfred Stratton lost both arms to cannon fire at age 19. One of every thirteen soldiers lost limbs in the Civil War. After his discharge Sgt. Stratton sold pictures of his wounds to support his family. He died at age 29 leaving behind his wife and two children. For me his eyes convey the heartache of a soldier who won at war and lost everything.

After the end of the Civil War, which traumatized the nation with its toll of 750,000 deaths and millions maimed and wounded — 1 of every 13 soldiers who served became an amputee — something worse happened. The men in America who survived but lost their way of life to war, many of them, became demoralized and angry; they spiraled downward. Some who managed to keep their limbs continued to fight; they went to war against the ”redskins” in genocidal campaigns that decimated our native populations.

But other men — I would say most of the survivors — went on a drinking binge. The binge lasted decades. Some men drank themselves to death. The tranquilizers and antidepressants that might have saved many hadn’t yet been invented.

Opiates were available, yes, and many ex-soldiers purchased them in bottled elixirs sold by traveling salesmen. But alcohol was the remedy of choice for men whose minds and missing limbs exuded the chronic, excruciating pain of amputations and the memories of horrors. Alcoholic spirits were cheap and easy to buy. The excessive use of alcohol and the inevitable abuse of women that always seemed to follow became a national epidemic; a cultural disgrace. It lasted decades; some say it has never really ended.

The bullying of minorities, native people, and women — cruelty often directed against the weak and defenseless — became a way of life for many veterans who suffered post-traumatic-stress-disorder, which no one understood at the time. The vocabulary folks needed to even discuss the dynamics of this personal degradation by war was not available like it is today. For southern soldiers, the trauma of a lost way of life; the shock of watching former slaves ascend to leadership positions once reserved for whites-only became too much to bear.

Violence against women — their vulnerability in the face of drunk husbands and boyfriends — reached a level that women simply couldn’t take anymore. Many women believed that if they could just get their husbands to stop drinking, the abuse they experienced at home might come to an end.

No one understood at the time that the drinking and abuse were symptoms of an underlying psychological distress, not the cause. A hundred-and-fifty years of fear and paranoia was erupting out of the guilt and shame of seizing lands that belonged to others; of kidnapping, enslaving, and vilifying millions of Africans; murdering tens-of-thousands of women and children during wars with the Indians; and blood-letting in the war between north and south where brothers killed their own brothers.

Americans wasted the lives of other Americans in the Civil War at a rate that has never been equaled since by any external enemy or foe. Americans suffered more casualties during the Civil War than in all other wars combined.

All this evil bubbled up out of the badlands of America — America was arguably the world’s largest and most isolated island at the time. The men who witnessed war; who lived it; who perpetuated it and became its victims held onto their minds and emotions by clinging to desperately delicate threads. Many lost their grip — emotionally and physically — and died early; some took their own lives.  

By the beginning of the twentieth century, most women had had enough. By 1914 (the start of World War I) they were fed up, vulnerable, and powerless. Their men were going off to fight another senseless war where a third of the dead would expire by poison gas while hiding helpless in the muck of trenches. The government passed the Selective Service Act of 1917 (the draft) because in this war young men, many of them, lost their will to fight. 

Women had a big stake in the new war. Most women, despite the abuse, had male friends and relatives. They were mothers; sisters; daughters; grandmothers; even great-grandmothers. They nurtured the men in their lives who weren’t coping well with the nightmare-world into which the USA morphed after terrible decades of slavery, endless war, cruel repression that followed Reconstruction, and the extermination of the native peoples (who they called Indians).

Men, some of them, began to see that women might be right. As a country, what we were doing wasn’t working. People were going to have to change the way they lived and conducted the nation’s affairs.

Most folks know what happened. Women — who couldn’t vote — organized. Men joined them. Everyone seemed to agree on the underlying problem: it wasn’t so much the wars or racial violence or even the rise of robber barons and corrupt governance; what was wrong with America — it was so plain to see for anyone who made the effort to open their eyes — was the alcohol.

Get rid of alcohol, the Devil’s drink, and God would heal our land. God would make right the terrible things we had done. Citizens would all enjoy together at long last the peace of mind that comes with the forgiveness of sin and the love that only Jesus brings to every man who murders and rapes because he can’t stop drinking.

In January 1919 — led by women from the suffrage and temperance movements among others — the 18th amendment passed, which put commercial restrictions on the manufacture and sale of alcohol. The amendment took full effect in January 1920. The public consumption of alcohol — with all its problems — was now in the past.

Let women vote poster

Emboldened and buoyed by their power to pass almost simultaneously — and in the face of judicial opposition — two constitutional amendments: one that allowed women to participate in the nation’s democracy; the other that corralled the wicked impulses unleashed by alcohol in their war-weary men (World War I ended in November 1918), the women of 1920 felt the stirrings of a new optimism about life in the United States and their future.  

With the help of the men who leaned on them for comfort and emotional support, 75% of the states agreed to ratify the two amendments certain to set things right; amendments that would most assuredly lead the way forward to the salvation of America.

Thus began the walk on the pathway toward righteousness. Citizens basked in the light of greatness; they had won the war in Europe; men marched home in the glow of favor that comes to every repentant people by the forgiveness of Almighty God.

The nation was being transformed into a people; a united people, a nation of both men and women who turned their backs on the devil; who put behind them his corrupting spirits and ales.

Americans — all of us together — at last embraced liberty and freedom and voting-rights for women. After all was said and done — campaign posters explained it beautifully — it was women who brought every single voter into the world. 

And indeed alcohol related crimes fell fast after 1920.

There was a little problem, though.

Despite widespread support for the right of women to vote and for the prohibition of the public consumption of alcohol, it turned out that not everyone in America wanted to climb on board the choo-choo train of righteous-living.

Again, we know what happened. Men formed gangs from which they drew the power to circumvent Prohibition. They continued manufacturing and distributing alcohol, which they sold in clubs they called speakeasies and blind pigs.

Although the 18th amendment did not forbid drinking by private individuals in their own homes, the Constitution of the United States now forbade the commercial production and sale of spirits and ales in public spaces like clubs and liquor stores.

Like the forbidden fruit of a modern Garden of Eden, blind pigs became the rage in every major city in America. By the 1930s, the revenues generated by illegal clubs were so enormous that the gangs who merchandized alcohol were able to wrest control over whatever businesses or local and state governments they chose.

Inequality is never good. Neither is packing a family into a car with no seat belts.

What happened? Crime cartels took over and basically ran our country into the ground. By 1930 our economy collapsed. The Great Depression began. By 1933 ordinary people had enough. Voters — women and men — repealed Prohibition. Voters hoped repeal would stimulate the economy, emasculate the crime-bosses, and reverse the rot that was infesting like a plague of sewer-rats every city and municipality.

It wasn’t to be. By 1933 the iron grip of organized crime was entrenched and intractable. It wasn’t going to let go. Despite massive government spending, new social programs, and numerous public-works projects, unemployment, poverty, and despair continued to demoralize society. The USA spiraled downward; it seemed to never end; maybe it would last forever. 

World War II changed everything. The cartels went into the munitions business. They took control of the factories that built bombers and guns. We’ve been at war ever since. We’ve waged war against one out of every four countries on Earth during the past 75 years. Business has been good.

In the 1980s the cartels decided to try their hand at pharmaceuticals; medical care would come later. It was challenging; pharma was technical; it was hard to understand. What they learned was this: Americans were open, even eager, to try new drugs; to adopt new treatments. The treatments and drugs offered hope. It didn’t seem to matter if they worked all that well.

The drug cartels lobbied Congress for regulatory relief so they could advertise their ”medicines” on television. The rest as they say is history. The people of the United States are now the most drug dependent civilization ever. We may not be that healthy compared to people in a lot of other countries but with the right medications we sort of feel like we might be.

We all know the results. Americans spend more on heath care and drugs than on their houses and food. USA health care is a mess — who will argue with me? But it’s lucrative.

Health care is today the biggest cash cow for the most heartless group of wise-guys ever to take control of American institutions; let’s give this group of con-artists some respect and refer to them as “the medical profession“.

Why not?

Even if folks were able find out the address of their local hospital administrator and a few of his surgeons, they would never be able to visit to drop-off their complaints because these high-rollers live in a hidden world behind gates, most of them. They live like the heads of caliphates, many of them. Yes, these individuals are clever. But Americans are paying too high a price for cleverness.

So… readers who’ve read this far might be asking,

Well… are you going to tell us what Hillary did?

Of course I am. Would I let readers down?

Never!

Hillary’s husband, Bill Clinton, became president of the United States in January 1993. One of the first things he did was appoint his wife to help create a healthcare plan to cover every American — detractors would come to call it HillaryCare.

First Lady Hillary Clinton testifies for the final day before the Senate Finance Committee on Health Care September 30, 1993. REUTERS/Mike Theiler
First Lady Hillary Clinton testifies for the final day before the Senate Finance Committee on Health Care 30 September 1993.  REUTERS/Mike Theiler

The techniques used by the healthcare industry to crush universal health care are a case-study in Evil — for anyone who has the stomach to examine what its leaders did. Anyone can click on links in this essay to learn more if they want.

I don’t really care to get into it; the details, that is. The whole episode disgusts me as it should any fair-minded person who cares about ordinary people and their health.

The bottom-line is this: Hillary walked into a snake pit, then hit a brick wall. The healthcare industry chose to demolish the wife of a sitting president in the first year of his first term. They made an example of her.

People would think twice before pulling a stunt like healthcare reform again. It worked — for 15 years anyway — until the Kenyan usurper with no birth certificate, President Barack Hussein Obama, showed up.

The bad-actors who administer the health delivery system in America today consider Hillary Clinton a clear and present danger to their trillion-dollar cash cow. They intend to regain control of Health Care as soon as the GOP wins the presidency this fall. That’s their plan, anyway.

After defeating Hillary’s efforts in 1993, the industry and their buddies began a CIA-style disinformation campaign against her which has continued for the past 23 years — in case she might rise from the ashes of defeat to come after them one more time.

Guess what? She’s on her way. This time she is not one person — the eager-to-please wife of a new president. This time she is 120 million voters strong and counting. If current polling holds, she will be the next president. 

Look at what these yahoos said about President Obama after he tried to fix our casino-style healthcare system during his first term. Does anyone think these folks are not able to discredit others while maximizing their own considerable advantages?

They’ve thrown up roadblock after roadblock. They’ve arranged things so that the new healthcare options can’t be fully implemented until Obama has left the White House. With the election of a Republican president, they plan to dismember and discard ObamaCare  — quickly. Most Americans will never fully understand what they missed or what was taken from them.

Before ObamaCare, when people got sick, insurance administrators sometimes kicked them out of the healthcare casino, altogether. People were on their own. Good luck, and God bless. 

The people who enforced these heinous policies are the same people who call Obama incompetent and a failed president. These are the people who have inflicted the nightmare of the current Republican contender on America; who are willing to scare the whole world to prove they are serious.  

These insurance folks and their  allies aren’t the government; they are civilians with the money to hire experts; they believe themselves fully capable of discrediting even the Crucifixion of Jesus should it ever become necessary. 

During the next six months they are going to use every technique in the army psyche manual to convince voters that Hillary Clinton is a witch who deserves to be burned on a phallic stake.

Watch and learn. They don’t want ObamaCare fixed. They want it wrecked.

Read my essay, Why This Time Women Will Win, to learn more.

Character assassination is just another way to kill someone, to my way of thinking. It’s murder. The Bible says it is, anyway.  I’m intrigued by the possibility that when Jesus said anything at all — even in a Book as discredited by the wealthy and powerful as the Bible apparently is — it might actually be God who is doing the talking.

Our self-described healers of broken bodies (I’m not going to name them because I don’t want them showing up at my house) cooperated with insurance company executives and drug company titans to destroy Hillary Clinton’s reputation. Their lavish lifestyles give them away.

People believe crazy stuff because they’ve listened to these creeps — sometimes on Fox News, the GOP propaganda mill. One guy on my Twitter feed called Secretary Clinton, Killary. He wasn’t smart enough to make up this epithet on his own, believe me. If this guy is the Christian he claims to be, Jesus is going to ask him someday why he would say such a thing. It could get awkward.

People on the right seem to believe that if they hate somebody, they can make stuff up to tear them down. It’s the way the game is played. 

There is an irony of wickedness here that almost defies explanation. It’s all because when she was young and naive Hillary believed that even the bad guys would do the right things when given the right opportunities; she dared to challenge the way health care is delivered in America — to make it fair and accessible to the 80% of Americans who could not afford it.

She learned the hard lesson many Americans now know is true. It isn’t about health care. It’s about protecting the golden cash-cow.

Who wants to work for $25 per month? they are always telling us about Cuban doctors. People who feel called to help the suffering multitudes will be the only takers in a system like that. People who value money will find something else to occupy their time.

Anyway, with a Hillary Clinton win this fall — should the Democrats take majorities in the House and Senate — our citizens will finally have a government with the right people in place to better defend us against being used for prey by the predators who presently plunder us.

Sandy Hook parents grieve
Victims of Sandy Hook massacre Christmas Season 2012. CBS News reported that the shooter’s parents were NRA members because NRA certificates and pamphlets were found in their homes. The NRA forced CBS to retract the story.  (Photo by Reuters / Andrees Latif — 2012)

Hillary has also taken on the NRA, in case anyone forgot; it’s another (some would argue) bad-boy organization that scares the daylights out of its opposition because a lot of crazy people with guns seem to be among its members. They defend the Second Amendment, which they think permits them to scare the crap out of people by carrying their guns into churches, hospitals, libraries, and schools.

NRA family members are numbered among the crowd of people who have ”gone postal” during the past few years; people who massacred politicians, children, and theater-goers. Hillary challenged this monster-cult. Its a group of men mostly who intimidate congressional leaders to vote against their own common sense.

Children die every week because the gun-makers sell unsafe firearms to an irresponsible public. It’s not right. It’s not safe. It’s not freedom. It’s manufactured fear, plain and simple.

The right to bear arms described in our Second Amendment was included to keep Americans safe and free, not scared and intimidated. It was written to save time when raising an army should foreigners like France or England choose to invade. The NRA has turned the amendment on its head into a money-making scheme for gun panderers who play to people’s paranoia and hate. It’s that simple, at least to me.

So yes, Hillary is a threat to people who are used to getting their way while they live like the cold-hard oligarchs they have become. Do these bad people have nice smiles? Do they wear beautiful clothes? Of course they do. They are billionaires. Their smiles cost hundreds-of-thousands of dollars, some of them. Their clothes cost more.

Hillary is not a billionaire. She never will be. For those readers not good at numbers, let me remind everyone: a billion is 1,000 millions. The man who is running against her; who calls her crooked Hillary — claims to possess 14,000 piles of a million dollars each.

Is it possible to earn and keep billions while working honestly and playing fair? I might believe him if someone I trust analyzed his tax returns, his company balance sheets, and income statements. Until he agrees to release them like everyone else who runs for president, I’m more than skeptical; I’m incredulous. 

In any event, it is the policy of theBillyLeePontificator.com to advocate for income and estate maximums based on agreed-upon and reasonable ratios tied to the minimum wage. These maximums can be very high and do no harm. Please read my essay, Capitalism and Income Inequality, to learn more.

We at theBillyLeePontificator.com do not believe we need a revolution to achieve simple changes to our tax codes that will impact less than one-hundred thousand privileged people.

We are 324 million people living in a democratic republic. It can’t be that hard to raise taxes on the greedy who are distorting our democracy and driving our country off a cliff to protect their power and privilege. Please read my essay Is Something Wrong With America? to learn more.

Something else Hillary did this week while challenging some of the most powerful people on Earth: she clinched the Democratic nomination for president; she’s the first woman of a major political party to do it.

What Hillary achieved cannot be overstated. It’s pretty darn incredible given the negative attitudes toward women-in-leadership espoused by many church and corporate leaders — behind closed doors, of course.  

Here are the election results; they might amaze some readers. The numbers say that mama Clinton has a fighting chance to win this election. My wife prays for her safety and success every single day.

So do I.

Billy Lee

2016 06 07 primary results popular vote
These results are from the 35 states where both parties held a popular vote contest. DC Democrats vote on June 14. Bold black ink indicates the winner. Blue ink indicates a second place finish.

2016 06 07 primary results mixed and caucus
These results are from the 11 states and 4 territories where both parties held caucus contests; and the 5 mixed primaries where one party held a popular vote, the other a caucus.

Editors Note: In the November election of 2016, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump in popular votes by nearly 3 million. Third-party candidates polled 8 million more. Donald Trump lost the popular count by 11 million votes — one of the largest popular defeats in the nation’s history. Manipulation of vote counts in Michigan and a few other states secured his win in the Electoral College. All courts everywhere refused to hear a single challenge to the results, which were razor thin in three states. 

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CHRIST IN THE HARBOR


Jesus Christ statue at Havana Bay 6

A statue of Jesus overlooks Havana Bay in Cuba. It has a fascinating history.

In 1956, Marta Fernandez, the devout Catholic wife of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, formed a committee to choose a sculptor to design and build a statue of Christ, which would overlook the city of Havana. Inspired, no doubt, by the statue of Christ the Redeemer, which overlooks Rio de Janeiro from Corcovado Mountain, she conducted a contest for the commission. Cuban sculptress, Jilma Madera, won.

The gifted female artist promised to build the monument using only the finest Carrara marble, quarried in Italy. It would stand sixty-six feet high and be mounted atop a marble platform ten feet tall. Its several sections, when assembled, would weigh 320 tons. 

The committee selected a site on La Cabana Hill in the suburb of Casa Blanca. From a vantage point 260 feet above Havana Harbor, Christ Jesus would view the entire bay, the entrance to the harbor, and the city itself across the water.

The faithful of Havana could look across the bay toward the statue — blazing white under the Havana sun — and know in their hearts that Jesus loved them and watched over them.

Marta Fernandez Batista
Marta Fernandez Batista commissioned the Statue of Christ overlooking Havana Harbor.

It took nearly three years of hard work in both Italy and Cuba, but on Christmas day 1958 Marta dedicated the statue for the people of Cuba. From now on Jesus would defend them from every danger, including the danger posed by the brutal Communists against whom her husband’s army — with America’s help — battled valiantly on the eastern side of the island.

Marta didn’t know (how could she?) that six days after the dedication ceremony, she and her husband would find themselves scrambling into a convoy of planes to fly off the island with hundreds of their closest friends — fleeing for their lives — because guerilla soldiers had somehow overrun Santa Clara, her husband’s last line of defense.

The dirty unshaven mostly black soldiers, who belonged to the devil himself — Che Guevara — were poised to swarm into the city like the fire-ants every Christian knew they were.

Marta and her husband escaped the island after a New Years Eve party made famous in the 1974 classic movie, The Godfather Part Two, which featured Al Pacino. They took expensive art and the Cuban treasury with them, but left behind a 1.2 billion dollar debt as well as a history of annual deficits in the hundreds-of millions for the new government to repay.

In the meantime, while the Batista entourage continued to orchestrate its exile, during a freak storm, lightning struck Marta’s beloved statue of Jesus. Its head disintegrated some say and crashed to the ground.

Jesus Christ statue at Havana Bay 4
Sculptress Jilma Madera constructed the Christ in the Harbor statue. Some have claimed that she modeled the face after her own.

It was just as well that Marta didn’t see it happen. She had worked so hard to bring this gift of God’s love to the citizens of Havana. The new government — it wouldn’t become a Communist government for a few more years — cleaned up the mess and rebuilt Jesus to his former glory.

As time went on, the powerful Batista family lived out its patriarch’s remaining years in various countries until Fulgencio died of a heart attack at age 72 in Marbella, Spain in 1973.

Marta moved to America where she lived quietly among the upscale and connected of Palm Springs, Florida. She continued giving to charity, the Church, and even hospitals until she too died, in 2006, from the complications of Alzheimer’s disease.

By all reports Marta was a beautiful Catholic, a Christian, a woman who loved Jesus. But she married a man who John Kennedy once said had run the most repressive and corrupt régime that South America had ever seen.

Havana, under Batista, became a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah. Sicilian Americans in crime syndicates (years later people started calling these groups, the Mafia) operated profitable casinos, as well as gambling, pornography, and prostitution franchises.

In those days, despite American investment (Americans owned three-fourths of pretty much every category of the economy, including land) dissatisfaction ran deep. Universities became hotbeds of discontent, protests, and demonstrations. Trade unions, the press, teachers, agricultural workers, priests, doctors, and lawyers vented their collective outrage at “yanqui” unfairness and domination.

The entire country, 90% of it anyway, congealed in disgust for the goons who ran everything; who stole the island’s wealth in a seemingly endless orgy of greed. Disgust turned to fear when thugs began a regimen of assassination and torture to keep dissenters in check.

fidel castro gives a speech
Fidel Castro led a movement against the Batista cartel that included almost every person on the island.

Eventually, Fidel Castro, a brilliant attorney and son of a prominent land owner, stepped up to coordinate the opposition, which had become so complex and unwieldy that it was almost impossible to track, let alone direct. He hired a savvy Argentine physician, Ernesto (Che) Guevara, to help him. As time went on they became close friends and made history together.

After the Batista family and their closest friends fled the island, Castro arrested the men who carried out the assassinations and torture of civilians. The new government executed several hundred for capital crimes. It sentenced hundreds more to long prison terms.

Fidel then broke up his own family’s estate by distributing its land to his family’s employees. This generous act set the tone and example for the program of island-wide agrarian reform which followed.

Christ in the Harbor, Havana, Cuba
Christ in the Harbor of Havana, Cuba

The elites in the United States were not impressed. They orchestrated a program of assassinations, sabotage, bombings, quarantine, and isolation against the island that included poisoning its agricultural exports and burning and sinking the ships of its trading partners.

The USA established an embargo so effective that some international companies lobbied Congress to make humanitarian changes, which they did.

The USA embargo continues to the present day despite resumption of full diplomatic relations between the two countries this year.

View of Havana Bay from the statue of Jesus. Click pic to view. 

The decades-long barbarity of the war against Cuba by the United States shocked the modern world. Many observers (outside the United States) continue to wonder how well Cuba might have done had it not endured decades of ”dirty tricks” to undermine its vision.

Some of the methods used to destabilize the island have made it into the public domain where observers have labeled them ”diabolical.”  The history of USA-Cuba relations continues to alarm people around the world. Folks wonder if the United States will ever change. They wonder if the empire to the north can change.

A few of the excesses of the fifty-five year war against Cuba are enumerated in my essay, Hey, Guevara.

But to conclude our story…

As for Marta’s statue of Jesus, it continues to guard Havana Bay to this very day. Despite fifty-five years of relentless attack from what is arguably the most militarized and corrupt nation ever, the island of Cuba and its statue of Jesus still stand.

Billy Lee

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CORN MEN

Miguel Angel Asturias won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967 during my freshman year at college. I must have been chasing girls the day of the announcement. I just don’t remember him. Until a few months ago, I didn’t know who he was.

While doing research on the Cuban Revolution and its leaders for recent blog-posts, Miguel’s name kept popping up here and there in various contexts, so I decided to learn more about the author by trying to take an inside-the-cover peek into his signature book, Men of Maize, on Amazon.com.

Was Asturias really that good that he could win a Nobel prize? What did he write about?


Miguel Angel Asturias, I’d already learned, was born in Guatemala and wrote in Spanish — a language I didn’t read or speak. I was able to find some English translations of his books on-line, but they seemed to be scarce and out-of-print.

On Amazon.com, Men of Maize (Hombres de Maiz) cost $50 — in used condition, of course. “Like-new” copies priced-out at over a hundred dollars. The titles didn’t feature Amazon’s inside-the-cover functionality either, so my free peek inside-the-cover strategy just wasn’t going to work.

Other books by Asturias were also unavailable in English, although a beat-up library copy of Strong Wind (Viento Fuerte) turned up on-line for sale at ten bucks.  I decided to buy it and then search through libraries on-line for Men of Maize. It turned out that a solitary university library, which happened to be located nearby, owned a solitary English language copy, so I drove over to check it out.

Miguel Angel Asturias; born Oct 19, 1899; died June 9, 1974
Miguel Angel Asturias; born 19 Oct 1899; died 9 June 1974

According to the inside cover, the library acquired the book in 1993, the same year Hombres de Maiz was translated into English and incorporated into UNESCO’s World Heritage historical book collection. It had been forty-four years since it was first published, in Spanish. The librarian — who must have jumped out of her chair to place the order — probably thought the book would become a big hit among the institution’s forty-thousand English readers.

Sure enough, according to the book’s ledger, someone or other had already borrowed the award-winning novel five times: June 1996; February 1997; February 2001; July 2003; July 2009.  And now a sixth borrower was stepping up to the plate — that would be me — to end the book’s most recent six-year no-hitter.  Unless the forty-thousand folks who used the student library were reading it in Spanish, Corn Men wasn’t doing so good, not where I lived, anyway; not in English.

How does a critically acclaimed once-upon-a-time international best-seller written by a Nobel Prize winning author (unavailable in USA bookstores) generate a paltry six library reads in twenty-two years at a major university library that is also serving the public?  I don’t know.

I took the book home to study it.  Here is the opening sentence: Gasper[pronounced Jasper, like the blood-stone] Ilom lets them steal the sleep from the eyes of the land of Ilom.  Ok, not sure what this is about, I’ll keep reading.  Gasper Ilom lets them hack away the eyelids of the land of Ilom with axes…  Huh?  Gasper Ilom lets them scorch the leafy eyelashes of the land of Ilom with fires that turn the moon to furious red…  Mmm. Keep reading. Keep reading. OK. End of page one.  Gasper stretched himself out,…bound in sleep and in death by the snake of six-hundred-thousand coils of mud, moon, forests, rainstorms, mountains, lakes, birds, and echoes that pounded his bones until they turned to a black frijol paste dripping from the depths of the night.

Gerald Martin, translator of Miguel Angel Asturias and Gabriel García Márquez
Gerald Martin, translator.

Page one, I soon learned, was the weakest page in the book. On page two and beyond, the novel began to rise into a tour de force, a masterpiece, which had been lovingly captured and transformed into English by translator, Gerald Martin.

Asturias, I discovered, wrote in a style that critics would later call magic realism.  It’s the style of One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Gabo), which also won a Nobel Prize and is required reading in many university literature programs. Gabo published his book in Argentina during the same year that Asturias won his Nobel Prize (1967).

For those familiar with Gabo’s book, it’s use of language is shallow compared to that of Asturias — though it is a fun and light-hearted read; I would say it is more entertaining to average readers interested in plot over word-play and character development. Gabo referred to his book as a kind of inside joke written for friends.

Whatever style anyone chooses to label Corn Men, Miguel Asturias was clearly a genius who knew unusual stuff, and he could write. That’s my view, anyway. His writing stands alone. Critics have compared him to Keats and Joyce, but I say, no. Those authors can sometimes depress the reader with their pedantic displays.

Not Miguel. He was humble, brilliant, knowledgeable, and direct. He didn’t grandstand. He didn’t show-off. He painted with a preternatural palette to portray ways of being which were lucid and compelling; and fabulously unusual. His writing sometimes took my breath away, because it was original, unpredictable, and paradigm-shattering.

Only Shakespeare himself rewires the brains of his readers like Asturias, I thought. Yes, references to Mayan culture might be arcane. But they didn’t impede the flow of the story or obscure its meaning. They simply provided rivulets to explore for those readers who might like to learn more than they know.

Popol Vuh cover
Popol Vuh is Mayan scripture. It contains accounts of creation, ancestry, history, and cosmology. It even references a great flood.

My interest in Corn Men, after reading it, has less to do with the story itself, or its backstory, than with its use of language — though all of it is incredible. For example, the Guatemalan writer — a Sorbonne trained ethnologist and bonafide expert in Maya culture — spent forty years transcribing and translating into Spanish the Mayan “bible”, Popol Vuh  (Book of the People).  His knowledge of Mayan culture saturates the novel.

Miguel Angel Asturias lived and breathed Guatemala, which for him sheltered a personal treasure-cache of Maya ruins, history, legends, culture, writings, and artifacts. Asturias was in love with all of it.

Guatemala should be of interest to all Americans, as well, because it is central to recent US history. In 1954 Guatemala became the second of several modern democracies the United States chose to overthrow. (The first was Iran, in 1953.)

Encouraged by the easy success of its military takeovers, the USA used Guatemala as a base of operations to try again, in 1961, to seize control of Cuba, but its Bay of Pigs invasion (modeled after its strategy in Guatemala), failed.

The USA was undeterred by miscalculation. It learned from its mistakes, made tweaks in its planning and, by the middle 1960s, began overthrowing governments in the Americas and around the world to further its economic and strategic interests.

Like falling dominoes, countries like Chile, Nicaragua, Panama, South Vietnam, and Iraq (there were others) fell to USA backed military coups and takeovers, until President Obama put a stop to it all in 2008. (Two exceptions continue to be Afghanistan and Syria, where takeover planning and operations are ongoing.)

Editors Note: As of 25 May 2018 destabilization of countries the USA dislikes seems to have resumed as a cornerstone of its foreign policy, which is to dominate all countries on the earth. The policy is called strategic strangulation; it’s like waterboarding except that it’s inflicted on countries; it’s being applied against Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, Brazil, Turkey, and many others — which some readers won’t have any trouble identifying. Readers should keep in mind that everything changed when the GOP and its Russian-Israeli backers seized power in the manipulated and rigged election of November 2016. Billy Lee published this essay during the final years of the Obama presidency.

Current problems in socialist democracies like Brazil, Columbia, and Venezuela appear (on the day of this writing) to be the work of wealthy power-brokers working outside the influence of traditional government agencies long associated with destabilization programs; the CIA and its labyrinth of agricultural-aid programs seem to be playing historically minor roles at the present time.

Jacobo Arbenz 2
Jacobo Arbenz, Guatemalan President, 1951-1954

Not so in 1954. Back then USA proxies overpowered the popularly elected Guatemalan President, Jacobo Arbenz and forced him to stand naked before reporters before they put him on an airplane and threw him out.

They then stripped another prominent Guatemalan, our writer Miguel Angel Asturias, of his citizenship and expelled him (along with hundreds of his friends and acquaintances) from the country he loved.

Soon, over one-hundred thousand citizens fled to neighboring countries, after they learned that the military government was “disappearing” opponents — a terrifying practice that would spread to other USA backed dictatorships, like Argentina, in the decades to come.

Miguel’s exile (to Argentina and Chile) lasted eight years during which the United States transformed Guatemala into a training ground and staging area for CIA backed militias tasked to, among other things, protect dictators allied with American businesses, hunt down and kill leftist revolutionaries (one of them, Che Guevara), and capsize popularly elected socialist governments, like those in Chile and Nicaragua.

Maya pyramid in Gutemala
     Maya Pyramid in the city of Tikal, Guatemala

As I said before, my interest in Corn Men lies beyond its compelling story and backstory. Yes, it is a novel about the indigenous Indians of Guatemala, who believed their skin was made of corn. Yes, it describes the marginalization and suppression of a native people by modern hi-tech agribusiness, which viewed corn as nothing more than a crop that could be sold.

Corn could not be one’s personal identity, the northern white-men of agribusiness insisted. Corn did not, could not, envelop, protect, and nurture ones soul.

According to the leaders of big agribusiness, corn was something to eat, nothing more. The Mayan Indians knew better. Corn was sacred. Corn was people. They were made from it.

Mayan Corn Men
      Corn Men don’t remember.

Cross-cultural differences as wide as these, though fascinating, always seem to lead toward tragedy. On the book’s final page, in the epilogue, in the last paragraph, at the last sentence, Asturias shows us the horrific result: a degraded world where corn men become ants. They work on utopian ant farms harvesting kernels of corn. The glory and the magic of living inside skin made of corn has been flayed away.

The thrill of being Corn Men, the joy of being a fruit-like part of the earth, is not even remembered. From now on, corn men are worker ants. It becomes all about the work. It’s all about producing corn, selling corn, eating corn, buying corn, maybe even popping corn. It’s no longer about being corn.

Or is it?

Gerald Martin, the translator, thought Asturias may have intended the last paragraph to show that in the distant future the Indians would actually triumph; their descendants would win their fight to be corn people by establishing a kind of worker’s paradise; a communal corn-based utopia; a society based, presumably, on communism, where they would toil like joyful ants.

Who knows?  Asturias never said.  His ending remains ambiguous, open to interpretation and discussion. Good literature is like that, it seems.

The dilemmas which Asturias described are thought provoking for sure, but what made me love Corn Men was Miguel’s way with language; the way he used language to paint the surreal internal realities of the many indigenous persons he described. The literary techniques and devices he employed to craft the landscapes, animals, people, and action in Corn Men are complex, varied, and thrilling to encounter and embrace, at least for me.

To my mind, Miguel’ s prose is amazing, wondrous, dense, and sophisticated. Gerald Martin, his translator, preserved and amplified it all in a resplendent English version in 1993, which is the one I read.

Below are my personal picks of phrases from the book, Corn Men, (my proletarian version of the title) to give flavor to uninitiated readers; to acquaint them with the astonishing author, Asturias. And, as always, please, feel free to click on the links in this post to learn more.

Billy Lee

What follows are assorted tidbits from a few chapters in the 1993 Gerald Martin translation of Hombres de Maiz, by Miguel Angel Asturias, first published in 1949.  Billy Lee hopes these vivid constructs will stimulate interest in the book for all those folks who like to write and read.   The Editorial Board

bunny rabbit with shiny eyes
…rabbits…turned into stars…

…word of the earth turned to flame by the sun almost set fire to the maize-leaf ears of the yellow rabbits in the sky…that planted themselves in the sky, turned into stars, and faded into the water like reflections with ears.

…rivers stagnant with wakefulness…

…he was swallowed by a toothless half moon which sucked him from the air, without biting him, like a small fish.

…ground sticky with cold…

…fingernails heavy as shotgun slugs…

…liquor…the water of war…

Gasper grew older as he talked…

His head fell to the ground like a flowerpot with buds of tiny thoughts.

His thoughts passed out of his ears…

…her hair combed by Gaspar’s teeth…

She shrank back like a blind hen.

A handful of sunflower seeds in her entrails.

Rio Sarstun Guatemala river
…river that…rots…for wanting to sleep…

…river that sleeps as it flows and opens its eyes in the pools and rots for wanting to sleep…

…the earth that falls from the stars…

…creamy skies and butter rivers running low…

…shadow hard as the walls…

…gun fully loaded with seeds of darkness…

…skin like old bark, his hair sticking out over his forehead like the tip of a sucked mango…

…dog dyed red with ringworm…

…face the color of vinegar scum…

…shadowy corpses scattering handfuls of maize down from the sky in torrents of rain…

firefly wizard
…firefly wizards…

…firefly wizards, who dwelt in tents of virgin doeskin…

…the mud gets more wrinkled year by year, like an aging face…

…sound of his breathing like water falling on porous earth…

…meat contorted in the fire as though the animals had come back to life and were being burned alive…

…boiling fat made rain bubbles in the tortilla dishes…

…men and women trembling like the leaves smacked by machetes.

…saffron colored mountains bathed in turpentine down to the valleys…

…baked puff-pastry faces…

…white root poison…

…sob chilled his nostrils…

old mayan man
…old fool…afraid of everything…

…his fears were just that, the tremors of an old fool who, because of his age, was starting to be afraid of everything.

…crawling children and warm legs…

Candy rosaries like sugared cartridge belts around young bosoms.

…a swarm of locusts on fire…like golden hailstones with wings…

…skeleton light of fireflies…

…deer like lunar sawdust in the fragile light…

…jaw trembling like a loose horseshoe…

…darkness streamed out of the anthills…

horseman in fire
…everything was on fire…like the light at the beginning of the world…

…everything was on fire, without giving off either flame, smoke, or any smell of burning.  The candle glow of the fireflies streamed down from his hat, behind his ears, over the collar of his embroidered shirt, over his shoulders, up the sleeves of his jacket, down the backs of his hairy hands, between his fingers, like frozen sweat, like the light at the beginning of the world, a brightness in which everything could be seen…

Without saying a word he started bleeding away inside.

…as his voice turned flesh and blood in the cartilage of his nose, mid sobs and thick snuffles…

Senor Tomas, who sat on his leather stool and sucked in his tears, with his back to the door…

…the fire followed on behind with a rush, like a shaggy dog wagging its tail of smoke at him.

…it’s dangerous to contradict what lunatics or lovers say…

Roads of white earth are like the bones of all roads that fall dead at night.  …They remain unburied to give passage to souls in torment…

fire like water
…fire is like water when it flows…

Fire is like water when it flows, no one can cut it off.

…smoke swirling like milk…

…his sigh dropped from the tip of his spurs like tears, almost like words.

…wrapped in their ponchos like mummies…

…the earth was a huge nipple…

The sun, blear-eyed, could hardly see.

Stones from agave slings hummed through the razor-sharp air in the sun-toasted silence of the ripened fields…

Through the tattered lip his incisors, like two enormous nose drips, thrust forward a ridge of cold laughter.

…gums nailed down with stumps…

Madmen and children speak the truth.

night thorns
…spines…hidden like jaguars…

…sarespino bushes, which by day seem to keep their spines hidden, like jaguars, and bring them out as it grows dark to wound those who pass by.

…echo of the bells that toll for the dead down in the town until they make everyone dizzy, tilan-tilon, tilan-tilon…

The hands of those who snap the maize plant so the cob will finish ripening are like the hands that break the sound of bells in two, so the dead person will ripen.

…the running of the rats, real persons to judge from the noise they made, as though they were moving furniture, were the last things she heard.

…lighter sneezed sparks as the flint struck the steel.

…sparks that sailed…like little partridge eyes to set alight the gold-starched clothes of dry sun and dry moon, dry salt and dry star, of the maize-fields.

…flowers like doomed flags crawling with insects…

…darkness in the clear light of liquor, a luminous liquid which coats everything inside you black as you swallow it, dresses you in mourning inside.

…spurs speaking to the stallion in telegraphic, star-like language.

Death is the dark betrayal of the liquor of life.

Two thin burned legs inside a petticoat of ash, a head with no ears and a small lock of hair, also of ash, and a few curled fingernails, was all that could be lifted from the ground where Vaca Manuela Machojon had fallen.

The waters of the river would cheep at the edges of the pools, like little chicks.

…speaking as though he were killing lice with his teeth…

old mayan woman
…her soul…pleading for relief…

…her soul bulging out of her aged, deep-set eyes, pleading mutely for relief…

…tidal waves of weeping that makes everything salty, because tears are salty, because man is made salty by weeping from the moment he is born…

…jasmine-colored teeth…

…a body that goes out of tune, my son, is no good anymore for this life…

…its blood of red citrus juice bathed the moon…

…the madman’s vision is like a mirror broken inside him and in the pieces he sees what he saw whole before.

…he turned his head with the eyes of a boiled crab…

Musus tried to control his horse, sitting up like a flea in the stirrups, buttocks-battered by the trot.

…hoofs echoed like pewter-pots…

…his eyes were fixed on a long serpent of trees which seemed to be crawling between the mountains with the sound of thunder.

Don Chalo…bellowed at him with his mouth open up to his eyes, and such force of lungs that the sound even poured out of his nose.

The sonorous blood clots of his laughter could not be heard, but it was joyful paint that splashed over his face…

red moon
…clotting blood of the red moon…

…the thick clotting blood of the red moon…

…dark forest which stank of horses…

…you could hear something like the boiling fizz of water produced by the stubborn flight of insects…

…flea-bitten nag which paid no heed to word or spur once it became stuck to the ground with the glue of weariness and the thin gum of darkness that was half a dream.

…his ears hummed as though he’d been dosed with quinine…

…silver-coin necklaces of clear water and mountains of leaves that woke at each disturbance, each gust of wind with the clamor of a swarm of locusts sandpapering the air.

…carpets of dry pine needles, rivulets which the shine of the moon turned into navigable rivers of white honey along bare hillsides surrounded by pine groves…

The stallion tossed its head as it felt the splash of large drops of white moon.

…sprinkle of limy light…

Pine cones like the bodies of tiny motionless birds, sacrificed birds petrified with terror on the ever convulsing branches.

two spiders 2
…hands…like spiders….

The hands of the second lieutenant looked like scuffling spiders beneath the play of lights and shadows.

The light and shade had awoken the itching of the mange between his fingers.

Air and earth, as the riders advanced, seemed to be folded in dark and luminous pleats, blinking, and the stones and black spinebushes gave grasshopper leaps.

…the brightness that was coming at them now, gropingly, mid a beautiful darkness, seemed more like a star in the sky forgotten there since the beginning of the world.

…they could hear the tinkling of stones as they sang beneath the horses’ hoofs.

The rocks, faintly orange in color, were reflected in the film of moon and water that covered them like the surface of a mirror…

…meteors falling with their tendons bleeding light…

…the collapse of a vegetable being which no longer has the will to resist the onrush of the wind.

They literally merged their necks with the necks of their horses, to offer the least resistance, and because contact with living, sweating animals which smelled like sacks of salt afforded them the vague security of companionship in the midst of danger.

…that man whose pale blue eyes shown like crystals of fire…

Squirrel in tree hole
…squirrels…chewed on cheerful thoughts…

…distant howling of coyotes in lunar syrup, squirrels gnawing with laughter as they chewed on cheerful thoughts…

The moon had fallen with its slow decaying light in a convex sky weepy with night dew.

Suffocating suphur fumes in which diseases seemed to float…

…whiplashing of the fierce wind…armed with razor leaves.

Black wasps smelling of hot cane liquor fleeing from honeycombs the color of excrement sown in the earth, half honeycomb, half ant’s nest.

Little streams of weeping, like brown sugar water, ran through the dust of the roads on his cheeks.

…it grows chill, like the fur of a dead animal, at night.

I picked you up and brought you back to life by blowing on you like a fire when all that’s left is a spark.

…fireflies played at little candles in the darkness. If only Goyo Yic could have seen just one of those small greenish lights, the color of hope, which lit up his pockmarked face, dry and expressionless as cow dung.

…sticks sounded like snapping guitar strings on the docile backs of the oxen…

To hear them speak was better than charity now, in his solitude, when to hear a voice in his house he had to talk to himself, and it’s not the same at all when you talk to yourself, it’s a human voice, sure, but it’s the voice of a madman.

crowd-at-the-market-in-Santiago-Atitlan-Guatemala-BG
…people…made from hillside earth…

People from the highlands smelling of wool, crags, and black poplars. People from the coast stinking of salt and sea sweat. People from the east, made of hillside earth, giving off an odor of tobacco, dry cheese, yucca paste and corn starch, and people from the north smelling of drizzle, mockingbird cages, and boiled water.

The blind man heard the sky palpitate like some feathered creature, and a strange itching troubled his groin and nipples, as if his sweat were eating away his courage as acid corrodes metal.

…time, which passes without us noticing: as we always have time, we don’t realize we’re always short of it, was how Culebro explained it to him.

…knees deadened from so much kneeling, hands dripping the white smallpox from the candles they held in bundles…

What color is weeping? he cried, stretched out on the ground, and in the same cry, with the very ache of his weeping, he replied, It’s the color of white rum!

White copal, which is the mysterious white brother to rubber, the black brother, the darkness that jumps.

amate flower
…a woman who is truly loved cannot be seen…

A woman who is truly loved cannot be seen, she is the flower of the amate, seen only by the blind, the flower of blind men, men blinded by love, blinded by faith, blinded by life.

…let himself be bathed, one of those moonlit nights when everything looks just as it does by day, in the tree milk that flows down from the machete cuts in the bark of the moon, that light of copal the wizards cook in receptacles of dream and oblivion.

The woman made a sound of splintering teeth, grinding them, and of bones straining in their joints, stretching out, curling up, crushing her face with tears, which interlocked the sorrow of sinfulness to her placid smile of contentment.

The sky moved.

Billy Lee

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HEY, GUEVARA…

Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, more than any other two people, were responsible for throwing the Mafia out of Cuba in 1959. White (i.e.non-black) gangsters ran Cuba, some may recall. Watch the second Godfather movie, anyone who doesn’t believe it.

Cuban attorney Fidel Castro and Argentine physician Che Guevara expelled organized-crime bosses from Cuba in 1959. The 1974 movie The Godfather Part Two featuring Al Pacino conveyed some of the dangers these men faced and had to overcome, not only in 1959 but for years after when the CIA and organized-crime joined forces on behalf of the United States to kill them both and undo their revolution.

Race relations were terrible. One-third of Cuba’s six-million people were non-white, poor, and disenfranchised. Beaches were whites-only. Restaurants, clubs, casinos, hotels, and other businesses were off-limits to black families.

Castro racially integrated the Revolution by asking blacks to play prominent roles, which some did — like the military commanders Juan Almeida Bosque and Calixto Garcia. Non-whites made up one-half of the volunteer-soldiers in the Revolutionary Army. Cuba became the first predominately non-black country in the Western Hemisphere to include black people in leadership.

Juan Almeida and Che Guevara
Juan Almeida Bosque stands next to Che Guevara. Juan Almeida was a Havana-born freedom fighter (and popular song-writer) who rose to the rank of General in the Cuban Army. He died on 11 September 2009 at age 82 of heart failure.

In the United States, the civil-rights movement lagged Cuba’s by many years. It was five years after the Cuban Revolution before black Americans got legislation to guarantee their right to move freely in public spaces and to vote. Some think our elites pushed the USA toward racial-integration to undercut propaganda advantages the issue provided the new Cuban government within the international community.

The move toward integration in the USA stalled after James Earl Ray assassinated Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968. One hundred and twenty-five cities erupted into racial violence during that summer. Today, 47 years later, large swaths of the United States of America remain largely segregated. Florida is the most egregious example. Florida owns the distinction for being home to the largest number of white Cuban refugees. It also protects the largest number of racially gated communities in the USA.

But Che had a different attitude than the present-day leaders of the state of Florida.  According to historian Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara surrounded himself with peasants and black people. He embraced racial, social and intellectual diversity and never let go of this fundamental principle of equality, which undergirded the Cuban Revolution.

Che Guevara, the Cuban doctor-poet, is the one person besides Fidel Castro whose leadership made the Cuban victory possible. An argument can be made — were it not for Che, the Mafia would still run things in Cuba and be stronger internationally than it is now.

It’s possible that without Che and the Cuban Revolution, our elites would not have felt the same urgency to address the problem of racial segregation in the USA, and we would be even more divided today than we still are. It’s possible that the feudal-system in the Americas practiced during the past century would have remained in place.

Anyway, the Cuban Revolution succeeded and the rest, as they say, is history.

guevara-02
”Che” as a child. Ernesto Guevara’s parents were members of Argentina’s ”royal” class.

 

Che Guevara in suit and tie
Ernesto Guevara spent the first twenty-five years of his life preparing for a career in medicine. He traveled the Americas and networked extensively. Through family connections and his personal charisma, Che was able to meet and interact with anyone he chose from the most exalted public figures to the most downtrodden peasants.

Who was Che Guevara?  Most Americans have no clue because they don’t read about Che, and television doesn’t do shows about him.

People point out that Che is better known and understood outside the United States. The reason is this: Che thought that the answer to why the people of Cuba, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America were destitute was because powerful people — many of them, citizens of the USA — impoverished poor people on purpose to enrich themselves. It was a simple idea, unacceptable to our elites.

Greed is an easy concept to understand and compelling to anyone who thinks about it for very long. It’s an idea our leaders don’t want ordinary people in the USA to think about too much. The memory of Che Guevara will never be celebrated inside the United States as it is in some other places in the world. In fact, our media has successfully trained most people to forget all about him.

Billionaires, like some members of the Kennedy family, sensed that Che was right (and said so), but they also knew from the inside what it took to create wealth. They understood both the technical and political sides of wealth-creation. Generating and accumulating vast wealth is a complicated, fragile, and sacred process, apparently. 

Revolution, they were sure, would screw things up big time. 

It took energy, planning and cunning to protect fortunes from governments, but it could be done because governments can be bought for a price. On the other hand, it seemed to the wealthy that protecting their empires from communists, if they ever took over, might be impossible. 

Communists believed wealth should be created cooperatively and then shared. It was a point of view opposite to that of our elites who believed wealth was best created by individuals motivated by profit. Riches were to be accumulated to purchase privileges, advantages, and the material pleasures of life for individuals, not society as a whole. 

Joseph_and_Rose_Kennedy_1940
Joseph and Rose Kennedy pose in the lobby of the Colonial Hotel in 1940. Joseph was Ambassador to the Court of Saint James (the United Kingdom). His 23 year old son John would become our 35th President; his 15 year old Bobby would become Attorney General. Ernesto Guevara, 12 at the time, and Fidel Castro, 14, would grow up to confront John Kennedy** and his brother Bobby in the nuclear show-down known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

The hatred some rich-folks felt for men and women who thought like Che Guevara was visceral. Ted Kennedy described in his book True Compass how his dad Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.  — who made his fortune in movies, then liquor imports — hated communists with a passion that seemed at times unreasonable bordering on insane.

Many wealthy individuals feared that someone who possessed the trustworthiness of a doctor — a physician, for example, who had healthy hair, white teeth and the sparkle of truth in his eyes — might persuade ignorant people to believe pretty much anything.

Che Guevara was that kind of person — a gorgeous communist who believed that any economic system that prevailed because rich people dominated and hurt poor people was an abomination; an evil, which led to a kind of hell-on-earth for just-plain-folks.

Che was dangerous, they decided; truly dangerous.

Che drinking tea
Che Guevara was a yerba mate tea-drinker.

It’s probably correct to suggest that folks in the USA know very little about Ernesto Guevara Lynch de la Serna because no one in leadership wants to feed Americans information about Che that can be easily understood and digested. Our billionaires would rather we forget all about Ernesto Guevara. I get that.

But a lot of time has passed. Yes, some old people are still left who knew Che. But most who knew him are now dead. Che has passed into the lore of ancient history, he really has.

The United States and Cuba established full diplomatic relations on July 1, 2015. The war between them and us is over. Yes, there are the details of making peace, like the embargo, yet to be unwound. But the war is over, it really is. 

Are there hard feelings about how things turned out? Yes, of course there are; on both sides. Some wounds may never heal. War is like that. It’s cruel.

It’s sad that so many got hurt on both sides. But it’s time, we all know it, to allow ourselves to understand better this historical figure, this man, Che Guevara; who he was, what he did, what he stood for, and what he believed.

What follows is a bullet-list of facts we collected about ”Che.”  Some facts, encountered for the first time, might surprise some people. Let’s hang onto our hats and keep an open mind. We are all adults here. We can handle the truth if we take the time to breathe deeply and not give in to fear or hate.

[For readers who may want to learn more about modern day Cuba from someone who travels there, click on this link. The Editorial Board]

Che
Che Guevara with his second wife Aleida March. Aleida was an urban guerilla who worked as a courier for the Cuban Revolution. Batista’s secret police referred to her as ”Scarface.”  An informer told them she had dog-bite wounds on her face.

Che was a human being — like everyone else. The difference is, he was a rare version of a human being; unusual and unique. His mother and his father, his wives and children have all insisted, Che was special. Aleida, his widow, said he was a perfect man. The people who would eventually murder him hoped to ensure that the world would never see another like him, perhaps to the end of time.

So let’s get started. These glimpses into the personality and skill-set that was ”Che” Ernesto Guevara Lynch de la Serna are in no particular order.

Antonio Nico Lopez showing how tall he was
Cuban ”Nico” Antonio Lopez gave Guevara his nickname: ”Che.”

— Ernesto Guevara’s close friend — known to many as the happy Cuban, ”Nico” Antonio Lopez — gave Ernesto his nickname because he thought it was funny that Ernesto always asked for people’s attention by calling out, che! — a Paraquayan Guarani word, which means something like hey you!  or better translated perhaps, hey, bro!

It should be mentioned that Nico — ebullient and larger than life — made the initial landing with Che and eighty other fighters near Cabo Cruz lighthouse, which marked the beginning of the military phase of the Cuban Revolution.

During the following week, Batista’s army hunted down and killed 60 members of the landing party. Che, who was shot in the neck, found refuge in a cave. Nico did not survive. Two years later, Che led the survivors and the peasant army he helped build into Havana. The revolution was won.

— Che once worked as a professional photographer. He covered the Second Pan American games in Mexico City in 1955 for Agencia Latina, the Argentine international news agency at the time.

— Che, during his med-school years, flew glider-planes to relax with his uncle Jorge de la Serna.

Mount Popocatepetl, a volcano
Che climbed Mexico’s Mt. Popocatepetl three times. He planted the flag of Argentina at its summit in 1956. He was 28 years old.

— Che was an accomplished mountain climber. He climbed Mexico’s Mount Popocatepetl (altitude: 17,900 ft.), three times. He planted the Argentinian national flag at its summit in 1956. He was twenty-eight years old.

— Che, it seems, could walk a tight-rope. He wasn’t afraid of heights, anyway, or of taking risks. A photo exists of him crossing high above a river-chasm spanned only by a connected series of drainage-pipes.

— Che traveled extensively. He took three trips on different routes from south to north through the Americas by horse, motorized-bicycle, motorcycle, truck, bus, train, boat, raft, commercial tanker, cargo-ship, and airplane before his 25th birthday. He even hitch-hiked when necessary.

The hopeless poverty of the common people he met shocked him. Eventually, he would vow to do something to try to change the unfair way things were administered by people of wealth who he also met and spent time with during his journeys.

— Che’s first traveling adventure was during the winter of 1951 at age 22, when he took a job as ship’s nurse and traveled 5,000 miles by tanker along the east-coast (the Atlantic side) of South America making stops along the way from a port in Patagonia in the south to the tiny island nation of Curacao in the north near the coast of Venezuela.

— Che, during extended trips in 1952 and again in 1953, explored the Amazon, Inca and Mayan ruins, and Machu Picchu. He toured copper and titanium mines and visited remote, hard to find leper-colonies where he sometimes stayed for weeks to provide sufferers with needed medical attention.

Machu Piccuh aerial view
Che loved archaeology and anthropology almost as much as medicine. He visited Machu Picchu in Peru several times as well as other Inca and Mayan sites. He wrote and published articles in magazines about what he learned.

— Che wrote daily in his diaries and journals for many years. He left behind an extensive and introspective record of his internal world as he developed his point of view and his place in history.

— Che published his first magazine article before age 23.  Later, he published research in medical journals.

University of Buenos Aires Medical School where Che Guevara graduated 2
University of Buenos-Aires Medical School where Che graduated April 11, 1953 at age 25. He specialized in allergy-medicine and pediatrics.

— After graduating from medical school at the University of Buenos-Aires in Argentina, Che completed his internship in Mexico at the Mexico City General Hospital where he worked in the Department of Immunology. He also worked as a researcher at the nearby Pediatric Hospital.

— Che’s second love after medicine was archaeology; he was an expert in the Mayan and Incan civilizations. He visited Palenque and scoured sites at Chichen Itza and Uxmal, which he wrote about extensively. He published articles describing the dig-sites he visited.

— Che vacationed in Miami, Florida for three weeks during his twenties.

— Che was a talented writer and poet. He published several best-selling books during his lifetime. He also authored several unpublished works, which some hope will be published after Fidel Castro and his brother Raul retire from politics.

— Che visited Guatemala in 1954 and witnessed first-hand the CIA overthrow of its popularly elected government. CIA seizure of media enabled it to create in Guatemala an Orwellian aura of inevitability, which disturbed Che and depressed him.  

Not to stray too far afield, but psy-ops in Guatemala should be of interest to US citizens for the simple reason that they were coordinated by CIA field officer David Atlee Phillips—later accused by discredited writers and some agency insiders of meeting with Alpha 66 founder Antonio Veciana Blanch and double-agent Lee Harvey Oswald to discuss details of possible assassination plots against both Fidel Castro and John Kennedy.  

Anyway, CIA contractors, in a final humiliation, forced the popular President Jacob Arbenz to strip naked in front of reporters before they expelled him from the country. Sickened by the incident, Che wrote: The United States is the enemy of humanity.

— Che’s mom and dad were both members of Argentinian ”royal” families.

Che Guevara reading a book 2
Che read constantly from an early age. Released CIA documents noted the depth and diversity of his literary interests.

— According to released CIA documents, Che was unusually well-read, especially in politics, history, philosophy, geography, medicine and psychology. A favorite book was the classic Argentine masterpiece ”El Gaucho Martin Fierro” by Jose Hernandez, published in 1872.

— After high school, Che read the entire 25 volume Contemporary History of the Modern World.

— Che spoke French and Spanish. He had an easy familiarity with English, though he refused to be interviewed using it. He also picked up a limited ability in Swahili, the lingua franca of Africa’s Great Lakes region, when he spent time there on assignment for Cuba. And the Soviet Union provided Che with a tutor who helped him become more proficient in Russian.

— Che was a skilled rugby player and coach. He founded and edited the short-lived (eleven issues) rugby magazine, Tackle.

— Che was a tournament-playing chess enthusiast.

— Che spent his high school years in Cordoba, Argentina, where his family belonged to the exclusive Lawn Tennis Club where Che learned to swim and play tennis.

— Che was a good golfer.

— Che passed a certification exam in civil engineering during high school. His first job after graduating was as a ”soils specialist.”  He analyzed soils for road building companies.

— Che’s asthma enabled him to avoid Argentina’s military draft.

— In 1956, Fidel Castro — the well-connected Cuban attorney who belonged to a wealthy land-owning family — shared a cell in a Mexican prison with Che that lasted a month. Fidel and Che — close acquaintances before — bonded; they suffered together as political prisoners.

— After Castro’s release, Che and Calixto Garcia (a black freedom-fighter who would rise to the rank of Brigadier General in the Cuban defense forces) remained in prison for another month.

Che’s uncle, the Argentine ambassador to Cuba, wanted to use his influence to free his nephew but Che refused the help until Mexico agreed to release his friend. In a case of truth-is-stranger-than-fiction, Fidel paid for the two men’s release with funds he unwittingly received from the CIA.

— Fidel soon realized that Guevara could be far more than the physician-poet he had hired to care for his men. On 12 July 1957, Fidel asked Ernesto to command the army he was building. His decision to promote Che created the momentum necessary to secure victory for the Cuban Revolution.

Che Guevara, 1959
This colorized photo shows a showered and cleaned-up Che following his triumphant entry into Havana, Cuba in January, 1959. He was thirty years old.

— Che was directly responsible for the success of the Cuban Revolution in this way: on 29 December 1958, his battle-group (the Eighth Column) ambushed and de-railed a key armored supply train loaded with weapons, munitions and troop reinforcements belonging to General Fulgencio Batista’s national army. Che and his guerilla fighters then took the city of Santa Clara, which was defended by a force more than ten times the size of their own.

This unexpected loss scared the Cuban dictator who fled the country two days later on New Years Eve (taking an entourage of over two-hundred people and the entire Cuban treasury with him).

On 2 January 1959, Che and his soldiers walked into Havana with their captured weapons and took control of government buildings and military bases without firing a shot. They seized a government that was 1.2 billion dollars in debt and running huge yearly deficits due in part to looting by Batista’s cartel.

— Che published the classic book Guerrilla Warfare in 1961. John Kennedy immediately read it.  Based on what he learned, he organized a few weeks later the Green Berets from units of the 77th Special Forces Group, which he renamed the 7th Special Forces Group.

— Che married twice. He fathered one child by his first wife, four by his second.

— After the revolution, Che became the object of a CIA manhunt. Che continued to travel freely because of a disguise he designed that fooled even Fidel Castro and his closest advisors.

— Che felt that Cuba’s relationship with the Soviet Union was one-sided. The Soviets didn’t provide the support in personnel and financial aid needed to offset the international embargo coordinated against Cuba by the United States. Che complained, and it created a flap between the two governments.

— After the Revolution, the new government lowered the age requirement for ministerial service from 35 to 30 and granted Cuban citizenship to Che (who was 30 and Argentinian) so he could legally hold a number of administrative posts. One of the most important was Minister of the Cuban banking system — a position he earned by his reputation for integrity.

Fidel once said that Che Guevara was honest to a fault. True to his reputation, the first thing Dr. Guevara did as Central Bank Administrator was halt the scheduled construction of a new Central Bank complex and use the money saved to build a badly-needed hospital.

— Che, after visiting the Soviet Union, expressed outrage to confidants about the lavish lifestyles of the Russian leaders. 

— When Cuba went to rationing after the United States impeded its right to buy food, Che insisted that his family receive the same food-coupons as every other family in Cuba. Despite his efforts, Russian officials later admitted that they smuggled food to his wife, Aleida, when he traveled outside the country.

— Che wrote privately to the Cuban minister of sugar, Orlando Borrego, that he believed — based on his observations of Russian society while visiting there — that the Soviet Union would fall back into Capitalism one day.

— Che returned all gifts showered on him and his family by foreign leaders while serving in Cuba’s ministries. Although the Cuban government provided him with a car, he used it for official duties only. He insisted his family use public transportation.

— When Che entered Havana for the first time, he wore a cast on one of his elbows; he broke it ten days earlier after falling off a wall in the city of Cabaiguan, one of the many towns that fell to his forces before the decisive battle of Santa Clara, which ended the military phase of the revolution.

Che drank yerba mate, a popular tea in Argentina.
Che drank yerba mate, a tea popular in Argentina.

— Although Che is often portrayed as a cigar-smoker, and sometimes posed with cigars, he suffered from chronic and severe asthma. He rarely smoked, or drank alcohol, because his health would not permit it. 

During the most dangerous phase of the fighting when Che wasn’t sure each day whether he would live or die he did smoke according to at least one credible historian. When victory came, he was hospitalized for pulmonary distress and spent several months recuperating.

— Che was allergic to seafood.

— Che’s favorite beverage was yerba mate, a caffeinated drink brewed from the leaves and twigs of a rainforest tree in the holly family. Popular in Argentina, it was thought to have medicinal properties at the time. Che may have used it to treat his asthma.

— Che was a good swimmer. He used vigorous swimming to help strengthen his lungs.

— The Cuban government gave Che an airplane and a personal pilot to use for government business. He often flew the plane himself because he loved to fly.

— Che taught French to the current president of Cuba, Raul Castro, during their time in the Sierra Maestra, before the Revolution was won.

— Alberto Korda took the iconic photo above of Che (by which the world now identifies him) on March 5, 1960. It followed the state memorial service for the one-hundred people who died in the terrorist attack on the French freighter La Coubre in Havana Harbor the previous day. Two-hundred people were severely injured.)

Because Americans were napalming sugar-cane fields and sugar refineries to wreck the Cuban economy (one plane had been shot down and the pilot, an American, captured), Fidel Castro in his address to the mourners blamed the CIA for the attack on the French ship while Che Guevara stood next to him wearing the iconic expression on his face that became his brand. 

Neither man knew at the time that in 13 months the United States would escalate the conflict by conducting a full-scale military assault on the island of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.

The CIA continued to attack Cuban shipping through 1964 before international outrage over the killing of the captain and two crew members of a misidentified Spanish freighter — it was also set on fire and almost sunk — brought sufficient pressure on the agency to change its policies.

Che Guevara a few hours before his execution murder
Che Guevara — a few hours before they killed him.

— In 1967, an 1800 man Bolivian Ranger Force trained in Guatemala by the USA hunted down Che in Bolivia and captured him. A small unit from this force tortured him by firing a half-dozen rounds into his legs, then executed him.

Those who murdered Che reported that he measured 5’8″ and weighed 155 pounds. These numbers are widely repeated on the Internet. The killers cut off his hands and sent them to Fidel Castro, then hid his body among six of his fighters in an unmarked grave. Some have wondered if truth was one of their core-values.

According to the killers, Che would have been seven inches shorter than Fidel, which doesn’t seem to match-up with the many photos of the two men together, including the lead photo in this essay.  Based on photos I’ve reviewed, Che appears to be 4 to 5 inches shorter than Fidel, who was 6’3″.  After reviewing photographs, my opinion is that Che was 5’10”.

Why Che’s executioners would misrepresent his height is anybody’s guess.

— The woman who fed Che a bowl of soup before his execution, Julia Cortez, said this about his appearance: He was an extraordinarily handsome man. He wasn’t the man depicted to us: black, ugly, evil.  His eyebrows, his nose, his mouth — all of his features were perfect.

— Captain Gary Prado of Bolivia asked Che: Why didn’t you give up?  Why didn’t you disband your unit and go home when you had the chance?  Che answered: Where would I go? 

According to Prado, that was Che’s dilemma in Bolivia. He was isolated, shunned by the international community of nations, and trapped. He had no place else to go.

Neill W. MacCauley
Neill W. MacCaulay, Citadel graduate, Korean War Veteran, and trainer of the Cuban expeditionary force led by Fidel Castro.

— Fidel Castro hired a number of American Korean War veterans — among them Neill W. MacCaulay and Miguel Sanchez — to train his expeditionary force. In 1956, MacCaulay evaluated Che, writing that he was an ”excellent” marksman with ”excellent” discipline, leadership abilities, and physical endurance. The only negative: Che smiled a lot, which MacCaulay felt was an inappropriate facial expression for a guerrilla warrior.

— Neill W. MacCaulay, Jr. entered Havana at Che’s side in his moment of total victory. Years later he would teach Latin-American history at the University of Florida as professor-emeritus. Before he passed in 2007,  Professor MacCaulay said in a filmed interview: Che’s troops knew what they were doing. They knew they had a good commander. They had Che, who was top of the line. They trusted him. 

As for the victory parade into Havana, Neill said, We were received as liberators; celebrated; I mean people ran out with bottles of rum. People went wild. 

— Six years and ten months after the Revolution on 3 October 1965, Che Guevara resigned his post as Minister, his rank of Commander, and his Cuban citizenship. He severed all ties to Castro and the country of Cuba. He followed the lead of every country in the Western Hemisphere except Mexico, which alone among countries resisted pressure from the United States to sever relations. Che turned his back on the protection offered by Castro and the Soviet Union.

No one to my knowledge knows for sure why Che made this break. What we do know is that Castro read Che’s confidential resignation letter on Cuban radio and television, perhaps without Che’s consent, and that two years later almost to the day — October 9, 1967 — Che lay dead in a Bolivian school house.

— Before the Revolution, Che’s fellow ”boot-camp” trainees, in a peer-review conducted by MacCaulay, agreed unanimously that Che possessed the skills and talents required to lead effectively at the highest level. His subsequent performance in the Cuban Revolution confirmed their judgment and propelled Che Guevara into the ranks of legendary warriors like Spartacus and Geronimo, who lost their lives fighting for hopeless causes and changed the world.

Billy Lee

Post Script:  Cuba buried Che Guevara with full military honors on 17 October 1997 after his remains and the remains of six of his fighters were discovered in Bolivia and returned to Santa Clara, the site of the battle he conducted to win the Cuban Revolution. Che’s wife, Aleida, and his children — at the sides Raul and Fidel Castro — grieved in a more private ceremony three month’s earlier in July.

Although the CIA had an agent present and trained and equipped — in Guatemala, of all places — the Bolivian Special Forces unit that killed Guevara, the agency has always insisted it tried to save Che’s life. The President of Bolivia at the time, Rene Barrientos, demanded Che’s execution; it was Bolivia’s war, the CIA argued, and not their call. 

They were powerless to save him.  

On April 27, 1969, Rene Barrientos died in a helicopter crash.
The Editorial Board

Che Guevara as clean cut James Bond 2
Ernesto ”Che” Guevara
James Bond in Che Guevara pose
Sean Connery

 

— Some say that Sean Connery parodied Che’s personality and adopted one of his ”looks” to create the movie character, James Bond, in the 1960s movie-series.*

 

 

Ronald Reagan Before
Ronald before.
Ronald Reagan After 2
Ronald after.


No one ever suggested that Ronald Reagan used plastic surgery to make himself appear more Che-like. But look at Ronald’s before and after pictures. You decide.

 

* We investigated the assertion that Sean Connery’s James Bond is a caricature of Che Guevara. It turns out Billy Lee said this, and maybe a couple of his imaginary friends. The Editorial Board 

Billy Lee’s Acknowledgement:
The most important source of information for this essay was Jon Lee Anderson‘s Che Guevara, a Revolutionary Life, published in 1997. The New York Times called it, the complete and definitive biography of Che Guevara. 

I cut the disturbing cover off the book in order to read it (it scared me), and willed myself to peer through the negative colors its author used to paint Che’s portrait on its 780 pages. I believe I found the truth Anderson buried there. 

Billy Lee

image
John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States. Here is a link to the quote below.

** October 24, 1963
I believe that there is no country in the world…where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies….  In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.

… In any case, the nations of Latin America are not going to attain justice and progress…through communist subversion. They won’t get there by…a Marxist dictatorship.

U.S. President John F. Kennedy
35th President of the United States
Assassinated November 22, 1963

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