Category Archives: Sad

The Last Guardian: A Divine nightmare

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A mote in black on black.  An echo of a shadow of what once might have been once upon a time. 

He was the only thing that remained of the once infinitely expansive multiverse, everything else had withered and disappeared so many eternities ago, that an eternity was infinitely less than a grain of sand in everything that had ever been.  He’d volunteered to stay behind when both he and the multiverse were relatively young, knowing just how lonely he’d eventually be when everything, even time, was so long gone that it was impossible to recall that it had ever been.  But it had, and he remained.  And he recalled, there was nothing else.  The multiverse reduced to his own body or his body expanded to encompass the multiverse, it made no difference.  There was utterly and absolutely nothing else.  The body he’d worn so long ago somehow perfectly preserved and, despite the absence of air or water or sustenance or space, still fully, well, sort of fully, functional.  Despairingly so as it had no functions at all.  A relic.  A memorial of sorts.

His last breath had been an infinity of eons ago, the last trace of long forgotten gasses inhaled, and then, absolutely nothing.  No time, no space.  Just him.  Existing, and watching, although for what he’d no idea.  There was nothing else to see.  He was self-contained.  Only that which he was and would always be but had not always been, now and for very, very long, always conscious.  Eternities’ chosen scapegoat paying for long forgotten sins of long forgotten others.

There was no future, only a long distant past.  And a present out of time.  And the promise he’d made to stay behind so that everything else could end.  He recalled that on the day he’d turned seventy-six, he’d wondered for the first but not the last time, if divinity had once played the role he was now charged with assuming, the sole role at the end of time and space.  If so, that would explain a great deal, perhaps everything.  How could anything remain sane in any sense at all after being so utterly alone, and yet, knowing what awaited, he’d confirmed his commitment, which implied something about his sanity as well.

While still enjoying a normal life span, he’d watched as his contemporaries aged and passed on, and then his descendants.  He’d been there, albeit an oddity, a freak, as species, including humans, evolved and changed, and planets evolved and died, and as different species conquered space and even time, and then they too moved on, but he was cursed with anachronistic eternity, a never ending relic.  And on the last instant of time, everything was gone, everything but him.

The other side of panentheism.  The last guardian, long after the end of time and space.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2022; 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.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

An Objective Rant Pertaining to Abortion and other Issues

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Word games are tempting in a world fraught with apparently imminent disaster (or is that eminent), but they’re not productive by themselves, not if problem resolution is the goal.  Unfortunately, the only problem that really concerns our corporate media and political “leaders” is the maintenance of power, and that requires that polarization be heightened, which in turn requires the “creation” and maintenance of polarizing issues, not their resolution.

Abortion is a great example right now, given the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (No. 19-1392, 597 U.S. ___ [2022]).  The underlying issue seems to me to be irresolvable morally or ethically because it involves the clash of two fundamental social premises (not rights, the concept of rights is incoherent).  First, the purported sanctity of life (notwithstanding our addiction to perpetual wars and the death penalty); and second, the right of humans to control their own bodies (notwithstanding government interference in diverse health related issues, including recent pandemic oriented mandatory measures).  Law, however, is notwithstanding platitudes to the contrary, not bound to moral or ethical factors.  It merely involves the exercise of raw power over individuals based on collective decisions, though it is usually justified using arguments disguised as morality, ethics, justice, equity or pragmatism.  In reality, in fact, a great deal of law involves norms imposed in order to maintain a parasitic minority in permanent power.

For about half a century, the availability of optional abortion in order to eradicate errors of judgment by women was protected by the United States Supreme Court through usurpation of constitutional and legislative powers.  Not a rarity, unfortunately. Men, on the other hand, did not enjoy a related privilege in conjunction with support related obligations based on their own errors of judgment, and of course, embryos, well what the hell are they anyway but inchoate child rearing problems and drains on our personal economy, especially now that the family has broken down and there is no real tradition of progeny caring for their forbearers in old age.  Well, that’s one perspective.  The other focuses on the incoherence of state mandated reproduction without shared responsibility for the consequences, responsibilities such as guaranteeing sustenance, housing, education, freedom from violence and adequate employment.

That abortion was rendered conditionally immune from state imposed prescriptions by inappropriate judicial action did not impact the reality of the important social issues involved.  They should have been dealt with by the People through their representatives; through exercise of constitutional and legislative duties unfortunately abdicated based on fears of ballot box consequences.  They should have been dealt with through constitutional means at the federal level, or constitutional or legislative means at the state level.  Unfortunately, notwithstanding emotional angst and hyperbolic outbursts, those responsibilities were ignored and proponents of abortion on demand were too lazy to undertake the social campaign required to condition society to accept their sociopolitical premises, instead, they resorted to the antithesis of democracy, the unelected, life tenured judiciary to come up with an arbitrary solution.  But recourse to such strategy inherently involved the probability that the judicially crafted solution to a social and constitutional issue, a political issue, would eventually be undone by a future judicial coup de’ grâce, also circumventing democratic institutions and requirements.

The foregoing is problematic but not malevolent, it is merely lazy and inept.  What is malevolent is the use of an issue as important as abortion for purposes of political polarization, specifically, keeping it in constant play as a means to secure political fundraising and political power by those on both sides of the debate, rather than resolving it through democratic decision making.  The recent United States Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, while constitutionally sound, does nothing to resolve the issue, nor do purported opponents of the decision appear interested in taking any meaningful actions to legally resolve it in their favor.  Rather, they are merely using the case in order to salvage the disaster that seemed to await the political party that has made them its captives, its tools, in this autumn’s Congressional elections. 

A lot of noise and fury has been generated, albeit most demanding a continuation in power of a political party that traditionally betrays those who vote in its favor, and protests, a bit of violence and threats of violence, have been omnipresent.  However, no tangible efforts to legally and constitutionally attain that which they claim to be essential are being undertaken.  That would require reconciling diverse societal perspectives and convincing adversaries through education and logic, but we have come to perceive logic as a disease that afflicts an imaginary race we refer to as Vulcans, and education requires empathy, takes too long, and does not yield immediate and ongoing political dividends.  So, riots it is, perhaps with a bit of arson and mayhem thrown in, notwithstanding the platitudes and hypocrisy on display in the so called January 6 Congressional hearings.

And the purported victims?  The women who may be unable to obtain abortions and the unwanted children they will be forced to bear and perhaps raise?  Why, in an exact analogy to what is occurring to the populace and infrastructure of the Ukraine and the two self-proclaimed Donbass republics, they’re being efficiently used and abused for tawdry political purposes by politicians with nothing but disdain for ethics, morality, legality, democracy or constitutional government, caring only for the acquisition, maintenance and abuse of political power.

The foregoing is true regardless of which side of the abortion debate you call your own.  And the same is true with respect to the Second Amendment and gun rights; with respect to superiority hypotheses based on race, gender, sexual orientation, sexual identification, nationality, religion, ethnicity, age, etc.; indeed with any of the emotionally polarizing issues used by our unethical and ruthless elites and their minions to keep us divided and docile, too confused by our emotions (especially fear and hate) to defend ourselves from their predations.  The foregoing is true whether you’re a liberal, a progressive, a conservative, a libertarian or addicted to any other ideology.

The real issue today, as it has been through most of history, is the struggle between elite minorities who use their designees to abuse the concept of popular governance for their own greedy ends (today generically identified as “deep states”), and populists on every part of the political spectrum who seek liberation from those ubiquitous predatory parasites by eliminating their monopoly on political power.  Unfortunately, like addicts of all kinds, we are drawn to the issues that most effectively polarize us and are all too easily distracted from those that we really need to address, those issues involving real democratization of our political systems and processes and replacement of the political vultures who inhabit all current major political parties.  Issues we need to address so that we can civilly and efficiently resolve the policies that divide us, and, recognizing that our society is dynamic and our values variable, develop the ongoing mechanisms necessary for us to justly and equitable govern ourselves, permitting us each, individually and collectively, to realize our best potential.

Freed of our predatory political masters, perhaps empathy (the opposite of polarization) could again become a viable attribute in our political discourse and we could disagree without ridiculing and belittling each other and our respective belief’s, and perhaps we could, in good faith, understand that we all have valid points, and that legitimate democratic governance involves finding those perspectives we share, and granting our government the right to regulate them, but retaining individual autonomy with respect to those areas where a reasonable consensus is unattainable, rather than feeling compelled to always have our own way on every issue.  Perhaps someday, hopefully soon, we’ll awake from our induced traces and take our political responsibilities (they’re much more than mere illusory rights) seriously and vote for things in which we believe, rather than against illusory straw arguments crafted to confuse us; vote in favor of candidates in whom we believe rather than against those we’re manipulated into despising, and perhaps then we can cast “lesser evils” into the hells where they belong.  We would make mistakes and not always get our way, but at least it would be, “We the People”, governing ourselves.  We could not do any worse than the deep states that rule us now.

Something to at least think about.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2022; 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.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

A Dark and Dystopian Diatribe.  Again.  They’ve become the Norm

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An introductory query might go something like this:  Evil or merely inept? Which is worse?  In what combination?  An initial response might speculate:  Well, inept evil would probably be the least negative.  Unfortunately, evil and inept is what we have, with evil all too apt.  Would a less than perfect divinity find that funny?  Imagine Groucho Marx (or maybe just a grouchy Karl Marx) as God!

Another day, another trillion or so dollars; a few hundred thousand or so lives thrown into the pits needed to feed insatiable armaments industries, but we’re still giving birth to more and more babies so that’s all right: look at the newborns and weep but keep’em coming.  Fortunately (sort of, … at least for a few) there are still plenty of Ukrainians in the wings, and perhaps Lithuanians and Poles as well.  And of course, Muslims: a surfeit of Arabs and Iranians and Palestinians to dispel.  And when they’re gone, well, “first they came for ….” and there’ll be plenty left until, fighting among themselves, like Heinlein’s Igli, they eat themselves into oblivion. 

And then, merry Christmas and a good riddance to all. “Bah humbug”!

But till then we’ve got video games and Hollywood spectacles and Disney and Netflix, and new model cars and designer clothes, and aren’t the Yankees something this year and sure hope the Jets come through this time, perhaps God’s forgotten the promises we made during Super Bowl III.  The latest abortion decision has us up in arms (as did the first), that’s true, and murderous guns and bullets keep attacking our children in schools:  And inflation plus rescission, ain’t they depressing?  And gas prices rising are a pain (for some).  But still, all and all, ain’t life just sort of grand?  After all, we’re lucky to be Americans: the brave and the free (sort of, … at least in the movies and on television) who can solve any problem because we are so exceptional, except for the half that are too stupid to see the light (so sayeth each half).

Anyway, ….

What if synonyms and antonyms decided to have a war?  Or if verbs and adverbs formed a coalition of the willing against nouns and adjectives, with propositions and pronouns sitting on the sidelines confused, while social science majors removed all of those troubling and scary page numbers from their treatises and physics and math majors looked on with vacuous expressions on their faces wondering why mirrors had become anathema?  What would we get if all the odd numbers subtracted all the even numbers?  Would it be different if all the even numbers subtracted all the odd numbers?  And what about those prime numbers, all odd except the number two.  Interesting.  Is there a profound metaphysical meaning there?  Or at least some obscure symbolism?  And just what is a solipsism?

Where are we today anyway? 

Perhaps happily mired in banalities while in a real world, one on the other side of a looking glass, a one way mirror of sorts, sad eyed, lean and hungry people deal with our residue.  An image:  Insane mariners cruising on a ship of fools doomed to disembark onto quicksand flavored shores singing songs about how happy pigs are when they wallow in mud (or less desirable excrement oriented substances), collectively following piebald pied pipers playing merrily discordant tunes, vacuity become an art form.

But out there, rocking boats, a few just won’t let sleeping dogs lie.  The ones who, like that pain-in-the-ass (or is it arse) Cassandra, keep finding dark linings surrounding silvered clouds, insisting on freeing bluebirds from gilded cages, for some reason believing that it would be hard to imagine anyone or anything more troubling than the world around us, a world seemingly careening from crisis to crisis, … but profitably so.

Anyway, … again:

Is pure evil a tangible thing?  As tangible, or perhaps as intangible as truth?  Or are they both moronic oxymorons.  Or perhaps, they’re a curious blend reflected in the eyes of billions of confused beholders, beholden beholders, although beholden to whom may be a puzzle writ by an insane enigma following lemmings of a cliff in Dover.

I can’t really personally vouch for the existence or impossibility of absolute truth, although math seems to echo that something must be at least somewhat accurate, but as to absolute evil, the scent seems omnipresent, and it smells a great deal like rotting corpses doused in expensive perfumes.  Pure evil kind of sounds like an ambivalent oxymoron though, doesn’t it?  Oxymorons seem popular today.

What might it be like to drive to hell in a handbasket?  Perhaps Toto knows which may be why he barks as Momba (more recently renamed Evillene to avoid racist undertones), slowly melts, albeit soaking wet, bemoaning the world in which we live, and Dorothy laughs as Lucy once more pulls away the football and Charley Brown falls flat on his back wondering who the hell “Peanuts” is.

Do you think Biden will really win this time if he runs again against Trump?

Things on which to reflect or introspections to avoid?
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2022; 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.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Absence of Systemic Faith in Democracy:

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The Colombian and United States Experiences

Faith in democracy is at a nadir.  And with good reason.  Democracy today is at best dysfunctional, in large part, because of voter participatory apathy.  Perhaps it always has been.  

Widespread complaints? Absolutely.  But participation?  It’s subject to the same excuses an attractive woman makes to an undesirable suitor: “my hair, I need to wash it, … again; my period; my great aunt died again, … really”.  But systemic faith is something else.  It’s usually been reasonably strong, albeit deluded.  Perhaps we are just more aware today that electoral fraud of one kind or another is probable.  Gone are the days such as the fall of 1961 when Richard Nixon lost, because most of the dead in Chicago voted for his adversary, but declined to challenge the results for the good of the country, something the media and historians both studiously ignore, except perhaps, for good old Theodore White in his Making of a President series.  But if some of us are more aware nowadays, hypocrisy is still King.

In many parts of the world, a significant segment of the electorate does not believe in the reliability of their systems, either due to perceived ineptitude or, more frequently, a belief that it is manipulable and corrupt.  And for good reason, it all too frequently has been.  In the past though, there was a semblance of media objectivity that at least seemed to align it with vigilance over possible governmental improprieties.  That is no longer really the case.  Perhaps it never has been.  Especially in the United States and in the United Kingdom.  Actually, in much of the so called Western World.  The past two presidential elections in the United States are particularly instructive.

But first, a bit of good news, perhaps great news.  The Republic of Colombia just held presidential elections and despite a massive effort by the traditional elite, the corporate media, all traditional political parties and United States intelligence agencies, for the first time in Colombian history, an outsider won.  A Latin American trend continued.  For a while it seemed as though, the election might be “stolen, as has occurred on a number of occasions, especially during 1970.  The head of the electoral commission refused to permit an audit of the electoral software, as mandated by law, and the director of the national police warned that it would be out in force to deal with any post-election protests, an indicia that there might well be something about which to protest, but, despite such warning signs, the election went off without a hitch.  As in most of the world (except perhaps the United States), there are safeguards in place to minimize electoral fraud (given human nature, it can never really be eliminated): official, government issued identification including a photograph, fingerprint and signature is required to vote, with ballots issued at polling places directly to the voter, who must immediately complete them in a private booth, and then deposit them in a box in front of electoral witnesses representing the candidates.  Contrast that with the United States where, in too many states, ballots are mailed en mass, without required identification and returned by whoever wants to assume the task for deposit in unsupervised “boxes”.  That, my friends, is an electoral fraudster’s dream, but to approximately 40% of the voters in the United States, totally acceptable.  It should be.  It helps them magically morph into a majority should they decide that such sleight of hand is called for.  But if you dare to realize that, you are in big doo-doo.  That would make you a seditious, antidemocratic racist, or worse.  Seems strange to Colombians.  Actually, many all over the world refuse to believe that to be true, but, then again, the same can be said for many United States voters, even if they participate in elections under those strange parameters.

Anyway, now for a not-so-positive history lesson a bit to the north of Colombia’s borders. 

In 2016, despite an all-out media blitz and electoral shenanigans in favor of the pre-crowned favorite of the United States’ bureaucracy, especially the intelligence community, the financial community, the corporate media and of course, their masters, the billionaire class (popularly referred to collectively as the “deep state”), a blitz that steam rolled over the left’s popular favorite, Bernie Sanders, an irascible and improbable right wing anti-establishment populist won.  One who, of all things, had been induced to run as a straw candidate by his opponent’s husband.  The deep state was shocked but not immobilized.  A myth explaining the defeat was immediately concocted, paid for and set in motion: the election “had been stolen”, the loss was not legitimate, it would not be tolerated, the Russians were at fault and a resistance movement was immediately organized, set in place and mobilized!  A myth that the victorious GOP would eagerly bite into as they could always be counted on to fall in line behind anything anti-Russian (who knows why but that’s the way it is).  A putsch you might ask?  Of course, perhaps even a sort of “soft coup”.  Seditious you might ask?  Sure, but what the heck, a real democracy can absorb a bit of seditious shenanigans.  And anyway, when the corporate media’s on line, and all traditionalist politicians, regardless of party, and bureaucratic moles as well, … well, … can they all really be wrong?

The myth was taken seriously and investigated both in the Congress and by the Justice Department for three years at a huge expense in tax payer funds.  It succeeded in largely immobilizing what should have been the victorious candidate, but, after all, that was the point; delegitimizing him, delegitimizing the election.  Delegitimizing democracy.

At the conclusion of the investigations it became clear that it was a cynical scheme without any substance but with a whole lot of impact.  It facilitated a takeover of Congress in 2018 by the theretofore defeated Democratic Party, which then proceeded on two occasions to impeach the 2016 electoral victor in the name of, … wait for it, … “democracy”, and fellow deep state allies, especially in New York, launched a series of politically motivated criminal investigations designed to preclude Mr. Trump from being able to steam roll the deep state again. 

The predictable end result was a significant loss of faith in the electoral system which set the stage for a sort of political comeback for the deep state in 2020, with a huge amount of help from what now appears to have been a hyperbolically orchestrated response to a possible pandemic, which savaged the world economy but helped secure an electoral victory, even if, once again, the deep state party selected the least popular possible candidate.

In 2020, no chances were taken.  As in 2016, the corporate media engaged in a one sided blitzkrieg, first, against the populist candidates on the left, the collaborative Bernie Sanders, but even more so against a real left wing populist, an ideal candidate, a woman of color from an alternative religion and who was a military officer with experience in the Middle East but steadfastly antiwar, Tulsi Gabbard.   She was crushed through a conspiracy of silence which excluded her from most Democratic Party debates, even if it required a change of rules in mid stride, and then death by silence in the corporate media, which acted as though she was not in the race, notwithstanding polls or, internet search results.  But that was just the appetizer.

The heretofore described pro-electoral-fraud voting procedures were set in place in a number of critical states by Democratic Party governors, despite contrary constitutional requirements and over the objections of state legislatures charged with designing voting methodology.  It was done based on the claim of emergency dictatorial powers (in the sense that separation of powers was not respected) because of the “pandemic” which, in the name of democracy, apparently required facilitation of potential widespread electoral fraud, assuming that a sort of “honor system” would assure that absolutely no fraud would take place.  No ballots would be bought, sold or fabricated despite the lack of any safeguards because, well, that would not be honorable.  And the United States judiciary at all levels, federal, state and local agreed.  So obviously no fraud occurred, at least as far as the deep state and its followers were concerned.

Unfortunately, a large segment of the United States electorate refused to play along, and, having seen over the previous summer that rioting and arson and looting were appropriate vehicles for political protests, a few hundred zany kids (of all ages) turned a non-violent political protest in the nation’s capital (in front of the United States capitol, of all places), into a black-lives-matter like riot, but with very different consequences.  Strangely, the rioters seem to have been motivated and directed by embedded government agents charged with, well, who knows, purportedly monitoring to assure they would not riot.  One protester who invaded the nation’s Capitol, a place we all now know is reserved for politicians, was murdered by a police officer.  Apparently only black-lives-matter and she was only a non-black civil servant.  That police officer, unlike others charged with illegally slaying criminals in the act of resisting arrest during black-lives-matter protests, was deemed a hero.  Strange to some, but the corporate media and deep state made the difference stick, no explanation required.

While political dissidence, protest and resistance from November of 2016 through November of 2020 had been patriotism at its best, immediately following the 2020 presidential election, it became treason and sedition, and, instead of investigating allegations of electoral fraud and electoral meddling, as had been the case from 2017 through 2020, Congress instead, along with the Justice Department, decided it was essential to investigate the protesters rather than the alleged electoral fraud, protest now having become vile and evil rather than noble and courageous.

Amazingly enough, a huge segment of the population did not buy into the change in script, and refused to accept the results of what they honestly believed to have been a fraudulent election.  Videos of suitcases full of ballots surreptitiously introduced while polling places had been mysteriously cleared in Georgia seemed to have led them to believe that not all was as the deep state’s spokespersons assured them was the case, indeed, evidence of alleged electoral improprieties seemed omnipresent, but, legal and administrative actions seeking explanations were summarily rejected, thus, apparently, the refusal to investigate allegations of corruption was definitive proof that absolutely no electoral fraud had taken place.  So there!!!

Criticism of the 2016 presidential electoral results was characterized by the corporate media and Democratic Party as “patriotic, pro-democracy resistance but, … criticism of the electoral results four years later is anathema and actionable sedition and treason.  Go figure, … if you dare.  If you don’t mind being deemed a Big Liar.

Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin are both credited with having espoused the notion that, if a lie is big enough and repeated incessantly, in no uncertain terms, why, … it becomes the official truth.  The technique is popularly knows under the appellation of the Big Lie.  Interestingly, that tactic has long been favored by the corporate media in the United States and the United Kingdom.  After all, Freedom of the Press was established in the United States in two cases, several hundred years apart, the colonial Peter Zenger case in the eighteenth century, and the United States Supreme Court case of Sullivan versus the New York Times several centuries later.  In each case, the judiciary sanctioned and protected the right to calumny, to report false news, as essential to a functional democracy.  So, despite the irony, it ought not to be a surprise that the people who, whether they are right or wrong, firmly believe that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen”, including the deposed former president, are now accused vehemently, on a 24/7 basis, of being Big Liars, and televised, one sided Congressional hearings without any right to refutation, are being staged in prime time television, to assure the American people that any claims that the 2020 presidential elections might have been tainted by fraud or manipulation are just “Big Lies”.  I can sort of sense Hitler and Lenin chuckling, or perhaps guffawing.

Given the foregoing, one wonders what awaits the incoming administration of Gustavo Francisco Petro Urrego, the populist victor of the June 19, 2022 Colombian presidential elections.  The United States deep state was subtly involved in backing Mr. Petro’s opponent, as was its Colombian variant, but, as in the United States in 2016, they were unsuccessful.  Now, they are angry and determined to make Mr. Petro and his populist followers pay.  Plans are already afoot to destroy the Colombian economy through foreign manipulation (think of what was done to Venezuela and Cuba and Nicaragua, etc.) and internal elite manipulation of the local stock market and currency exchanges.  And Colombia’s version of Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post, Jaime Gilinski Bacal’s Semana, is already spewing a permanent stream of calumnies and distortions.  Thus, given the United States’ experience since 2017, some of us in Colombia who support real democracy and liberty and equity and equality and justice and free elections are a bit concerned.

But fortunately for us, Colombia is not alone in Latin America, a continent which at long last seems to be waking from a long nightmare of United States abuse.  Many countries have selected leaders who demand respect for their sovereignty and express support of their sister states.  And Colombia’s declaration of independence may resound a bit in Brazil in the near future, leaving the United States virtually excluded from the region, except for its recently purchased president in Ecuador.  Mr. Petro is no Donald Trump, indeed, his opponent was a meld between the worst qualities of Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden.  The only political similarity between Messrs. Petro and Trump is that both are opposed to armed conflicts and foreign intervention (which is what probably led to the successful, anti-Trump coup).  Still, notwithstanding how brilliant, ethical and motivated Mr. Petro may be, it will be hard to resist the combined power of two deep states, unless of course, the Colombian people are less gullible and less manipulable than the voters in the United States. 

And that, only time will tell.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2022; 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.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

An Ode to Estranged and Forgotten Fathers

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Fathers’ day is a mostly ignored holiday, a superficial holiday, one taken for granted and most good fathers understand and don’t take being mostly ignored badly.  Those that are recognized and treasured have an awesome reward.  But too many who deserve some sort of recognition are not remembered at all, or if remembered, remembered in ways that don’t do them justice.  Most great fathers don’t look for recognition or praise, they’re too busy doing.  Good and dutiful fathers who are there for their families.  But it’s a particularly difficult day for those fathers who would be there but for fate, for fathers estranged from their children, often as a result of family bitterness, manipulation and distortion.  And it’s a very difficult day for the forgotten fathers, those whose duty done, are pretty much discarded. 

I was estranged from my own father for most of my life and am now pretty much estranged from my own sons, two of whom are now fathers on their own.  And they’re great fathers I think.  I’ll be thinking of them all tomorrow, but I’ll also be thinking of estranged fathers everywhere.  

Freud once wrote something that comforts me in dark times, it went something like this: “in darker times there lived a man who thought as you do”.  For me, its meaning is that, regardless of how alone we feel in the quest for the right, if we recall that there were, are, or will be others in the same position, who also realize that there were, are, or will be others like them, a bond is formed among us and we are not really alone. 

So, to estranged and discarded fathers everywhere: “in dark times there lives a man who feels as you do, and doing so, remembers you today.”
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2022; 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.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Delusive Illusions – Freedoms of Expression and of the Press

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On May 19, 2022, Consortium News published an important article dealing with the dwindling light of truth available to us as another dark age seemingly approaches (see Consortium News, Volume 27, Number 138 — Thursday, May 19, 2022 “West’s Free Speech Threatened by Ukraine War”).  Please read it, … and please share it.

It’s probably worth noting that in the United States, freedom of the “press” has never been about accurate information.  The two major legal decisions that underlie United States journalism are the Peter Zenger case in the Crown colony of New York in 1735 and the 1964 United States Supreme Court decision in Sullivan v. The New York Times.  Both cases dealt with the inalienable right to slander with impunity.  While that sounds terrible, and perhaps it is, the idea was that the interchange of ideas, whether right or wrong, was essential to functioning democracy, and that no one should be trusted as an arbiter of the truth, other than the citizenry itself.  The ill-named Democratic Party in the United States has destroyed that concept in its efforts to attain and retain political power in the name of the Deep State and its conflict-based empire.  Conflict internally through racial, gender, ethnic and religious polarization, and externally through the antithesis of Kant’s perpetual peace, our history of perpetual war.  Only a few brave souls, real journalists like Julian Assange, the late Bob Parry, Chris Hedges, Joe Luria, Caitlin Johnstone, etc., stand in the way, and they are being bled to death with a thousand small cuts, not all tiny.  Among us, Julian Assange’s martyrdom at the hands of the United Kingdom and the United States stands out as the most egregious symbol of perfidy, but every citizen who votes for Deep State candidates, those villains or dupes who keep us in the dark, who have always kept us in the dark, … is an accomplice.

It is impossible to be an accurate historian in this context and I now question everything I’ve been taught and which I in turn once taught, other than those things I experienced in real time.  Things which, notwithstanding such experience, the corporate media and corporate historians, both nothing more than narrative managers specializing in destructive (as opposed to creative) fiction, assure us are too complex for you and I to deal with, so we should just trust them in the manner ridiculed by the old joke, “who are you going to trust, me or your lying eyes”? 

Real historians would leave nothing untouched, regardless of how vile and horrible it may have been presented as being, and regardless of the purported “facts” we have been “ordered” to believe.  The times in which we are living have taught me, as George Orwell once suggested, that yesterday’s monsters may be today’s saints, and tomorrow, who knows?

I find myself wondering what the real truth was about the two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century.  Even superficial history discloses that the United States Civil War was not fought to free the slaves (as is now taught as irrefutable dogma), and that the American Revolution was not fought to guarantee the right to democratic representation in legislative decisions.  It turns out that the sacred texts of the Abrahamic religions in which most of the world places its faith are largely based on falsehoods as well.  So what is left of those professions which purport to exist to glean truth from the chaff of the elitist propaganda which keeps the vast majority of us in a state of velvet lined slavery?

Well, at the very least, if nothing else, to support those who oppose censorship of any kind, and oppose with all our might those who seek to silence dissident voices.  And to do it now before it’s too late, although that Rubicon may already have been crossed.

Something on which to ponder and deliberate, but most of all, on which to act.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2022; 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.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Uncomfortable Reflections on an Easter Sunday

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Manipulable mass hysteria is the incoherent albeit pervasive characteristic of mankind’s collective consciousness.  It explains the power religions of any kind hold over their adherents, regardless of how illogical and incoherent their premises and how inconsistent with such premises their practices, both collective and individual tend to be.  A bitter illustration involves the pleas made to the same deity by opposing warring factions, both seeking divine intervention to rain death and destruction on their co-believers.  But it is far from only in the religious sphere were collective incoherence and delusion reign supreme.  Nationalism is a closely aligned phenomena, sometimes involving multiple individual states as part of a multistate collective, and within such states, multiple political associations vying for power in a perpetual quest to control governance.  For example, the Hispanic nation comprised of almost thirty different states and within each such state, myriads of political parties and movements.  Or the German nation where the same phenomena arises (i.e., Germany, Austria, and parts of other regions in Central and Eastern Europe), or the Slavic nation, witness the current intra-Slavic conflict between the Ukraine and the Russian Federation, historical Siamese siblings.

The United States is, in many senses, sui generis, an amalgam of immigrants from diverse nationalities that sort of coalesced on an ethnic, then regional, then religious, then racial, then gender basis into something similar to quasi-internal-polarized nations, perpetually at war with themselves but capable of uniting so as to be perpetually at war with outsiders (and of course, with the original indigenous population).

Yesterday (April 16, 2022) was “Holy Saturday, commemorating Yeshua’s brief sojourn in Gê-hinnōm (really around thirty six hours rather than three days as usually reported), and I chanced to read an article in Consortium News written by Patrick Lawrence entitled “The Great Acquiescence — Glory to Ukraine” (see Consortium News, Volume 27, Number 105 — Saturday, April 16, 2022).  As so often happens when I read that rare source of accurate information, it set me off.  The fact that such “holy” day is so ludicrously incoherent may have helped.  The article dealt with how easy it seems to be to manipulate the well-meaning among us in order to secure their support for anything under the sun, regardless of how antithetical and opposed to our purported values.  The case in point dealt with the Nazi reincarnation in the current Ukraine which the United States is not only vigorously supporting, but which it in fact gleefully orchestrated with the unwavering support of its corporate media (i.e., the 2014 Ukraine project orchestrated by Obama’s assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland as recorded in her infamous call to United States Ambassador to the Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt; see transcript provided by the government owned British Broadcasting Corporation  at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957).  As Clinton supporting Arkansas hog farmers might exclaim, “Soooeey!”.  Their own sweet sonata, to which we might add the qualifier, “generis”.

The omnipotent if hardly independent and certainly not free “corporate media”, a consolidated branch of the United States entertainment industry that operates not so much for fun as for the “profit” of those whose brainchild it is.  A brief historical lesson is probably in order.  Hollywood, the California version, was turned into an arm of United States and British intelligence during World War I (the War to End All Wars) by George Creel on Woodrow Wilson’s instructions, and it never really looked back.  We are a thoroughly manipulated People, not only through Hollywood but through every aspect of our culture, education and sports, all of which both direct our perception and emotions and distract us from the realities under which we live and which we help impose on others.  And I say that as a Yankees and Jets fan (they tend to balance out) who has come to realize that the energy I expend on sports as a fan and as a participant desensitizes and distracts me from realizing serious goals, such as my autonomy, my quest to do what is correct and honorable, my quest to separate truth from the narratives to which all of us are constantly subjected.

So!  Paraphrasing Yakov Smirnoff “what a media!”  It can accomplish almost anything.  Think of it, by labeling opponents to their manufactured narratives, almost always false, as “Big Liars” and their honestly held assertions as “Big Lies”, both terms repeated constantly, they deflect meaningful evaluation, and, by censoring any other opinions, they hide uncomfortable truths (e.g., the misadventures of the Biden and Clinton and Obama families, most recently staring Hunter and Jimmy and the Big Guy).

Can you imagine if the original Nazis (or any of history’s worst villains) had enjoyed the benefits of today’s Deep State narrative managers?  Why, if they’d wanted to, they could have founded a Zionist Nazi Party in Israel, although there are those who believe they did.  We Americans have been bred not to question the carefully crafted narratives we are fed on a 24/7 basis.  Bred and trained like Pavlov’s dogs, the stimulus of choice, not a bell, but our mass-produced pseudo culture.  In our Hollywood, no ties to any sort of reality are worthy of respect and that philosophy has been successfully transplanted to the fecund territory of our news media a/k/a pseudo journalism.  Or perhaps the transplantation evolved from the opposite direction, after all, the purportedly free-press in the United States was founded on the precedent established in the famous Peter Zenger trial held three centuries ago in the Royal Colony of New York, a decision premised on the absolute right to calumny and defame (truth being merely an inconvenient irrelevancy; ahhh, the joys of liberty. Ring that bell!!!). 

We have been bred to accept without question the incredible profits available as a result of massive violence, domestically and abroad, perhaps a residue of the ancient Viking glorification of pillage and rape as a valid economic model, but in our case, oxymoronically fused with delusion and denial.  Consequently, as Patrick Lawrence observes in the cited article, most of us are indoctrinated to reject reality and are thus virtually oblivious to our record levels of incarceration, oblivious to our record levels of local mass shootings, oblivious to our record levels of foreign interventions, oblivious to the hundreds of millions of resulting deaths.  To us, they are all irrelevant abstractions or justifiable collateral damage.  Compared to our penchant for pillage and slaughter hidden in plain sight, the Vikings and their Nazis descendants were pikers.  But we came about it honestly, the British taught us how to do it, the British of the infamous Opium Wars, and of course, of our own quasi-Revolution.

For us, the denizens of the “Land of the Free” and the “Home of the Brave” (epithets made famous by that famous champion of slave owners, Francis Scott Key), “mass murder” is and has apparently always been a growth industry (just ask the original inhabitants of our continent).  It is our most important crop, a gift that keeps on giving.  We sow death and profitably so.  We glory in armed conflicts at home and abroad, but without the disadvantages of victories which might insure accursedly unprofitable peace; that would devastate us.  So we need to keep our enemies at least on life support lest we have to go to all the trouble of creating new ones.  That may explain why our country has not won a war since World War II, with the notable exceptions of the invasions of Grenada and Panama; but it also explains why our government cynically created and funded Al Qaida terrorists in the Middle East, terrorists we created to fight the Russians but whom we eventually found to be useful allies, kind of like the Romans with the Visigoths, etc., albeit those proved to be alliances they eventually very much regretted.  That explains the 2014 Ukraine project orchestrated by Obama’s assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland; a “project designed to assure the 2022 Russian Special Military Operation, the bonanza that we needed for pillage based economic survival.

Of course, not all our leaders have wanted to be mass murderers.  During my lifetime, two United States presidents refused to play ball with the evolving Deep State, that military industrial complex against which Ike warned in early 1961.  But both were overthrown, even if what passes for history and news portrays their demise very differently.  One was forced to resign to avoid impeachment, and the second, well he was impeached twice but conviction was unsuccessful, nevertheless, well, you know about the 2020 election, the first perfect, absolutely no fraud election in United States history, despite evidence that would seem to indicate otherwise (given all the technocratic meddling, the “pandemic”, etc., the free flowing ballots everywhere, where the “honor” system worked to perfection to assure the absence of sales and related fraud, but, after all, we are a capitalist society).

Despite their character flaws and insecurities, in both cases reflected above, it was the inclination to work towards a world without war and specifically their desire for positive relations with the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union, now the Russian Federation, which proved anathema.  In each case, the presidents appeared to enjoy widespread public support for such policies, but rather than insulate them, that exacerbated the “problem”, rendering the situation intolerable to those who really run our “Western” world.  Thus, today, we are blessed with the ultimate good old boy as “president”, the ultimate Deep State crony, a guy who, if you pay him (or his family) stays bought because that is his unwavering concept of honor (ask the credit card industry, or well, … the Ukraine).  And of course, hurray for the Ukraine, that bastion of liberty and democracy, notwithstanding the imprisonment of all political opponents and closing of all “unpatriotic” media outlets and slaughter of 14,000 residents of the Donbass.  Hunter, in any case, is ecstatic.  Lucky that Obama made the Big Guy proconsul there.

And of course, again referring to the Ukraine, now we have the great little war we needed after the Afghan fiasco to assure the economic welfare of the very few who rule us, one where we are not directly involved, except for the massive defense expenditures being authorized in what now looks like a perpetual stream.  As planned, “defense” industry stocks are zooming so who cares about the rest of the markets and the economy and inflation and scarcity, or Ukrainian lives and infrastructure, so long as the Russians are debilitated.

We the People of the United States, especially those who ironically believe that they share liberal and progressive values and abhor violence, racism, sexism, uncomfortable history and uncomfortable journalism, are just fine with plenty to criticize in order satisfy our need for faux moral outrage against others (which makes us feel good), but without really rocking our comfy boats or changing the way things are, the way we’ve been indoctrinated to believe they should be.  The way things will remain as long as we keep finding troublesome people against whom to vote, even if we have to settle for “lesser” evils like Joe Biden, the Obamas, the Bush family, the Clintons, etc.  One wonders what plans Hunter has for a future presidency, after all, he has huge experience in avoiding the consequences of past mistakes and still remaining in good standing as an honorary victim.  The latter being essential today.

Just some things on which to reflect as another Easter flows by, flows by obliviously, a holiday in honor of the Prince of Peace in the name of whom so many, many wars have been fought and so many, many lives have been crushed, and in the name of whom so many people have been and continue to be enslaved.

If Yeshua (the purported Christ) has truly risen after his brief sojourn in Hell, what might he be thinking? 

Probably that it’s as if he’d never left his former colleagues in Gê-hinnōm. And probably wondering, somewhat confused, about Easter eggs and chocolate bunnies.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2022; 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.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Ecce Homo

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“Ecce Homo”!  The phrase purportedly uttered by Pontius Pilate on the first “Good” Friday as he presented Yeshua to a crowd allegedly demanding his execution for blasphemy, unsuccessfully washing his hands of all responsibility for what was to follow.  Perhaps it is even more fittingly a phrase for our times and for what we have become: oxymoronically incoherent, awash in orchestrated poetic orthodoxy belittling empathy and keeping us chaotically in line.  “Ecce Homo”!  The collective image we would probably see were there a mirror large enough to encompass us all. 

A mirror that would reflect fear and hate in the name of love and tolerance.  Race, religion, ethnicity, gender, nationality, class, history and philosophy all perverted in order to divide us and set us at each other’s throats in orgies of faux self-righteous indignation.  Exuberant hate exalted.

The price of our folly in declining to exercise our better judgment, permitting ourselves instead to be manipulated through fear rather than embracing the courage of our convictions.  Bacchanalias deifying purportedly lesser evils.  Illusions of a democracy we’ve never attained.

Another message from Cassandra’s archives.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2022; 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.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.

Maundy Thursday

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Maundy Thursday represents a transitional day in the Yeshua myth, legend or history, depending on your perceptions and perspectives.  A day full of humility, generosity and a sort of nostalgia and melancholy on the one hand, and perhaps betrayal on the other.  Although rather than betrayal it might have instead involved fulfillment of a terrible task imposed by destiny, one that led not only to Yeshua’s passion and death but to millennia of anti-Semitism.  Anti-Semitism Yeshua would obviously never have countenanced.

What does that say about destiny’s prescience?  Or that of destiny’s purported author, יהוה (yodh, él, waw, él; to whom we refer as YHWH”?  Or what does it say about us?

Something on which to reflect during this strange annual epoch of pain and sorrow imposed by יהוה on innocent Egyptian families to punish their autocrat, and imposed on Yeshua as a human sacrifice, and then imposed for millennia on the Jewish people as a whole, but celebrated joyfully by all three branches of the Abrahamic faith in one way or another.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2022; 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.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.

Filthy Feet of Clay

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This morning, April 13, 2002, Scott Ritter published another important article.  “Twitter Wars—My Personal Experience in Twitter’s Ongoing Assault on Free Speech” (Consortium News, Volume 27, Number 101 — Tuesday, April 12, 2022).  “Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of [weapons of mass destruction]”.

As usual, Scott’s article made me think and reflect, both on the current history we are busy making and concurrently distorting, and on the history which I, as a young academic, once taught.  The phrase “the Deep State’s own Twitter” popped into my mind, a kind of parody of the way British regiments are named, “the King or Queens own” followed by the name of a subjugated people; oxymorony at its best.  The article led me to imagine myself as a “real” historian in the future, one realizing how utterly false almost everything the United States government proclaims turns out to be.  For some reason I wondered how, assuming there will ever be “real” historians with access to accurate data, they’ll view the Second World War.  Clearly the narrative concerning Japanese perfidy was utterly distorted if not outright false.  It’s turned out to have been very much like the situation today with Russia and the Ukraine.  In the Japanese analogy, the United States and the United Kingdom schemed and manipulated until the Japanese were left only with the choice of attacking or being attacked themselves.  The United States National archives contains a telegram instructing MacArthur to either goad the Japanese into attacking or attacking them himself as the United States needed an excuse to gain popular support for a war the People did not want (see John Tolland’s “The Rising Sun”).  Pretty much the same scenario was used by young Winston Churchill in the First World War, then known as the War to End All Wars, when as First Lord of the Admiralty, he arranged for the sinking of the USS Lusitania in order to draw the United States into that war.

It made me wonder what really made the administrations of Richard Millhouse Nixon and Donald John Trump so despicable and whether it wasn’t Watergate (mow the norm) or Russiagate (an orchestrated farce) but Nixon’s Glasnost and outreach to China and Trump’s desire for a non-interventionist foreign policy and decent relations with Russia and China all of which were the unforgivable sins which farsighted Ike warned would not be tolerated by the Deep State he foresaw?

Given our own experiences with reality turned inside out and upside down, can we really take for granted all we’ve been told about things now as orthodox as the evils of Germany and the Nazis?  Remember, demonology was an invention of the Catholic Church, as it turns out.  It is illegal in most countries to question official narrative as to World War II which to real researchers, ought to make it all the more questionable.  It is devastating to even consider that much of that narrative may not be wholly accurate, but even if it is, how “credible” will it remain given the postwar conduct of the United States and Western Europeans and their corporate media.  How much of the history we’ve been spoon fed can we believe if gathering accurate information critical to learning from the past in order to avoid its errors is our goal.  Not everything a liar says is necessarily a lie, but it all certainly becomes suspect when we realize that someone in whom we believed turns out to have had no value for the truth.  The little boy who cried wolf, on a massive scale.

I recall watching “cowboys versus Indians” entertainment genre as a young boy, where white hatted cowboys were always the good guys, before, as a historian, I learned of President Andrew Jackson and the Cherokees’ Trail of Tears.  Or when Columbus Day celebrated something positive, rather than physical and cultural genocide.  Or when the United States invaded and occupied countries all over Latin America to make the world safe for democracy, but democracy turned out to be the United Fruit Company, a practice expanded worldwide starting with the Spanish American War in 1898.  I even remember when watching television “Father Knew Best” and “Amos and Andy” were just happy go lucky friends.

Oh what a twisted web we’ve woven!  I wonder what its ultimate price will be.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2022; 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.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.