The Kalends and Nones have passed and now the Ides have arrived.  In a week, I’ll start the last voyage around our star, Sol, of the eighth decade of my life on Terra.  A lot has been crammed into those almost seventy-nine years, much of it difficult, some unpleasant, too much perfidious, but I’ve seem to have somehow managed to cope with it all and, a great deal has been undeservedly positive, amazingly so.

It appears, at least to others, that I’m unusually healthy for someone almost seventy-nine years old, unusually active with unusual stamina.  I still play tennis and when I do (three times a week), it’s for at least two hours, sometimes followed by an hour’s walk.  And my hair, though streaked with silver is both plentiful and still dark.  After a long life in the United States, I’m back where I started, in a celestial city high in the central range of the Colombian Andes, living on the tenth floor of a large and comfortable apartment only a few miles from where I first entered this world.  Still, slowly and intermittently, strange aches are making an appearance and, in addition, strange observations are occurring to me such as that “Jack Bunny” (or perhaps “Bugs Benny”) would be a fusion of Jack Benny and Bugs Bunny, and would make an awesome character: as “frugal” as he was witty and droll while concurrently being penurious and ever so lightly pernicious.  I confess that I loved them both although those who remember them tend to be fewer every year.

I’ve succeeded in many things, many of them unexpected.  I’ve taught American History and Problems of American Democracy, among many other things, to citizens of the United States, observing to myself the irony involved in that being done by someone who started life as a young boy from Manizales and that, as a serious historian and researcher, I’ve found that, more often than not, what I taught as a young historian was utterly false.  Indeed, while many feel we’ve recently entered the post truth era, to me, it seems that we as a people have been there since we invented language.  Not something of which I am proud although I’m proud to now understand that history has little to do with reality but a great deal to do with ever-present propaganda, and that “news” reporting has a lot to do with that.  It’s not for nothing that journalism’s most prestigious awards are named after Joseph Pulitzer, an entrepreneur who felt that fiction, presented as news, was an extremely profitable art form and, in that, he was not the first.  Not by far.  Especially in the Anglo-Saxon mythos bequeathed to the United States by the United Kingdom.

Since the early 1970’s I’ve been focused on issues involving the blatant hypocrisy with respect to the two “world” wars of the twentieth century and the related so called “cold war”, as well as on the myriad invasions of foreign countries by the United States to enforce a colonialist economic system deceptively labeled capitalism, amazed at to how easy it’s always been in systems falsely labeled as “democracies” to deceive the populace into accepting what should be unacceptable.  Today, that is especially obvious as the purported victims of the Nazi “Holocaust” engage in a holocaust of their own, one against the Palestinian people, a holocaust fully supported by the United States, the United Kingdom and their NATO allies, a “project involving attempts to implement the Zionist goal of a “Greater Israel” throughout the Middle East and I have consequently come to suspect that too many of the lives lost on every side of most of the conflicts since the dawn of the twentieth century in one way or another involve that hideous Zionist project.  As a young man I was horrified by the Nazi Holocaust and reflected a great deal on what I would have done to protect its victims, had I been born a few decades earlier than my birth in 1946.  After a good deal of reflection I naively concluded that it would have been my ethical and moral responsibility to have done everything in my power to save as many of the victims as possible.  Well now that responsibility is squarely on my shoulders, on our collective shoulders but, no matter how hard those of us who seek justice, equity and peace try, our efforts are nullified by the worst among us and I am coming to understand how the German people, previously among the most moral, ethical and socially conscious people in Europe, indeed, the ones who most fairly treated Europe’s Jews, so permitted the perversion of their values.  It seems, as the old refrain goes, “the more things change the more they stay the same”.  What a depressing realization.  Perhaps that realization is what metaphorically led the Hebrew Archangel Hêl él (inappropriately identified with the Roman god Lucifer) to futilely rebel against the vicious YHWH.

In addition to history I’ve taught comparative mythologies and comparative religions, comparative politics, comparative political systems and comparative constitutions; I’ve also taught democratic theory, international law, human rights law, constitutional law and the history of political ideas.  And I’ve written and lectured as a political analyst and commentator about United States and Colombian politics and about international affairs, about justice and injustice and about the futility of the antithesis of Kant’s perpetual peace.  For a while, I practiced law in New York and then in Florida, admittedly not all that successfully, and I’ve engaged in political consulting devising unusual solutions to mundane problems.  Notwithstanding the foregoing, I’ve not really succeeded in those things that most mattered to me, in my personal relations, although, during the past five years I seem to have finally experienced domestic bliss.  Hopefully, this time is the charm.  I’ve lived with too many women, too many of whom I’ve hurt although, in at least a few instances, failed relationships have matured into warm friendships.  And, in at least one case, a special relationship has lasted for more than six decades.

Professionally I’ve enjoyed impressive successes and devastating failures although in neither case were the results deserved, not really.  I started my professional career after graduating from both the Eastern Military Academy (where I also taught) and the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, firmly convinced that our government was beneficent and that the sacrifices it demanded of our best and brightest were really for the common good in a quest for justice, equity and peace.  Unfortunately, as I eventually discovered, I could not have been more wrong.  I found that out when, being true to the honor systems in which I’d been raised, I sought to expose government corruption only to find that corruption is the rule and that it does not take kindly to being exposed.  

You know, naiveté, when it impacts others, is as much a problem as is corruption.  Still, on reflection, my setbacks are the things that most improved me as a human being, the experiences that evoked wisdom and growth and an understanding of the reality in which we live and brought me closer to becoming the person I always hoped I would be: a person focused on others, on justice and equity and fair play, on compassion rather than on conspicuous consumption (although the gravitational well of conspicuous consumption still exercises a strong draw on my fantasies).  In those fantasies I’d be immensely wealthy but dedicated to philanthropy, to providing shelter and food for the homeless, education and healthcare for all, and the opportunity for everyone to attain everything of which they are capable, I would manage to assure a world free of violence and to minimize suffering, although I would still live more than just comfortably.  I wonder how many of today’s greediest billionaires once shared similar fantasies.

In reality though, my greatest fantasy has always been to return to the past and to correct my errors, albeit a return preserving everything I’ve ever learned.  Not at all likely.  An unrealizable chance to have been a better son and a better brother and a better husband and a better father and a better friend and a better teacher and a better lawyer, but not to have been quite so naïve or so trusting, or, with women, not to have so often been so cavalier.  Still, I seem to have learned from my mistakes and while still far from the person I’d like to see looking back at me in the mirror, I’m now perhaps the best version of myself that I’ve ever been, and that’s something not all of us achieve as the years grow heavier on our shoulders.

I’ve written quite a bit during the past two decades since the demise of my marriage to the mother of my three sons and among the things I’ve written is that, if there’s a karmic afterlife along Abrahamic lines, something in which I do not believe, then in order to attain a paradisiacal afterlife, two things would seem necessary (and perhaps only two things), two things somehow echoing a portion of what has come to be known as the Lord’s Prayer: first, to have forgiven everyone who has wronged me or caused me harm, intentionally or not, and second, to have received sincere forgiveness from everyone who I’ve harmed in any way, intentionally or not.  Unfortunately, I fear I would fail in both respects.  Most of us, unfortunately, would which is why, if a heaven and hell exist, heaven would be tiny and hell enormous.

My atonement for such failure, in another nightmarish fantasy, would be to be left as the final guardian of the omniverse, to live on and on, alone, incorporating everything that ever was or ever would be, reliving it from the perspective of every being that had ever been or ever would be, over and over again, but absolutely alone, the only remnant of everything that had ever been or would ever be, but without the capacity to attain insanity.  To become infinitely bored and alone.  Totally and completely alone.

Yuck!

I sometimes speculate that, if the evil Abrahamic deity in fact existed, something I cannot believe, an experience similar to the afterlife I’ve just described had turned it into the vicious deity reflected in the Tanakh, the one against whom Hêl él rebelled, the one who revels in genocide and demands ritual castration of its male followers and seems to enjoy deceit and trickery and the blood of sacrificed animals and murdered human beings as well.  And if that were the case, I wonder how it escaped the punishment that turned it into what it became, speculating that perhaps the creation in which we find ourselves is just its nightmarish fantasy.  But then I wonder if it’s all my own nightmarish fantasy and I wonder if perhaps I’m not already serving my sentence as the final guardian of the omniverse.

I think not.  I certainly hope not.

I believe that I still have quite a while to live.  That’s something I’ve promised my much younger wife, my very special wife, my wife who seems the embodiment of everything positive, a source of beneficence to everyone with whom she comes into contact, the woman who somehow or other found me and seems determined to love me and even to admire me. To trust me and to have faith in me.  And that has made me a better person than I’ve ever been before even if it’s a lot to even try live up to.

What a strange life my life has been.  Like Pablo Neruda’s, although not as nobly, my life has been much too full and with quite a bit of time still apparently left.  Which leads me to wonder just who and what I am and what my purpose in having lived has been, and what purposes still remain to be fulfilled.

Anyway, ….

Seventy-eight bottles of beer on the wall, seventy eight bottles of beer … and still counting.  As a seventy-ninth bottle seems about to arrive.
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.