Category Archives: Sad

Rethinking Delusional Popular Governance

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The concept of democracy in conjunction with governance seems a sacred cow, unfortunately, a dysfunctional sacred cow given that the concept of democracy is neither understood nor respected and that what is required for the constitutionally guaranteed “public welfare” is efficient, transparent and honest governance with the capacity for long range planning and for providing its constituents with the opportunity to fully realize their capabilities and to lead peaceful, comfortable, happy and fulfilled lives.  That is certainly not what exists anywhere today.  Rather, we have self-perpetuating systems built on pillars of omnipresent corruption implemented through corrupt mass media and administered by corrupt entrenched bureaucracies.  Human rights, as the long-term Israeli genocide in Palestine supported by the United States and NATO makes clear, are mere delusions.

There are two principal poles for what is considered democratic governance, presidential systems with legislatures elected for fixed terms, and parliamentary systems which meld legislative and executive functions for variable terms, the exact length depending on how well the executive, which stems from the legislature, and the legislature are able to function collaboratively.  The latter is both more democratic and more coherent, but has its own internecine flaws.  In addition, there are forms of governments that require voters to participate (or else), generally in uniparty Communist systems, the most successful being those in the Peoples Republics of China and Vietnam, but according to the western press at least, they apply serious restrictions on personal liberty.

Looking at the most efficient governments, those most able to function strategically as well as tactically, it appears that long term executive leadership is essential, leadership such as that demonstrated in Germany during the long chancellorship of Angela Merkel and in the Russian Federation during the Putin era and the aforementioned Chinese and Vietnamese systems.  Of course, corrupt and inept long term leadership, such as that in Egypt, is awful.  Trusting that a majority of the people make the best electoral decisions has proven a fallacy, largely because the “people” are not free to select candidates, that function in reality being effected through a partisan filtering system controlled by purported elites and now, imposed in countries like the United States through blatant judicial manipulation as well.  In addition, the resulting disinterest results in lack of participation so no candidate is likely to ever receive more than 50% of the eligible vote, the quintessential aspect of democracy.

If the foregoing is accurate, then perhaps we need to consider how to implement a meritocratic rather than democratic method of selecting our leadership on a long term basis, but a method subject to earlier democratic revocation for misfeasance or malfeasance and with significant personal penalties in the case of any such revocation.  It could, for example, involve, in the first instance, a selection process embodying the philosophy of the original Electoral College in the United States, with a democratic revocatory process exercised both periodically, say every five years, or on the spot if invoked by a significant portion of the electorate dissatisfied with the results of the incumbent leader.  Electoral participation by the citizenry would, as it was in ancient Athens, be a duty and not a right, with serious consequences for shirking it or exercising it in a corrupt manner (e.g., selling or renting it).  It smells a bit too much like the fascist ideal of an overall, all-powerful leader, except for the revocatory mechanisms but those make all the difference.  Admittedly, the concept needs to be polished a bit with a check and balance mechanism such as a negative legislature, an elected body charged with political control functions and the ability to veto executive decrees (which would replace traditional legislative functions), but not responsible for enacting legislation.  A multi cameral negative legislature would be best, one chamber being selected democratically, one based on pluralistic concepts and one selected meritocratically based on expertise in diverse areas but all three chambers voting as one.  Of course, an independent judiciary would be essential, but not one charged with constitutional control or review, as would an independent body controlling the electoral system, perhaps a body selected by the legislature.  The most serious penalties under the penal system would be reserved for violation of political and judicial duties, pretty much the way it is today in the People’s Republic of China.

If it ain’t broke don’t fix it is a saying reflective of a great deal of common sense but one that does not apply to our current models of governance.

Something to at least consider, although implementation in the face of the entrenched and ruthless deep state makes any kind of real reform improbable.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; 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 is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  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).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta 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/.

Or So They Say

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Alabaster and indigo, or is it, … “or” indigo.  Negative entropy blues, anyway.

It’s said, albeit in an all too unreliable source, that “for everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven”.  Perhaps there’s a bit of truth there.  Perhaps not.

It’s approaching the Ides of December in an odd-numbered year, a year preceding one in which February will be a day longer.  An illusion of course, as are all months in a solar year.  But, at any rate, it’s at least a metaphorical season, a season for memories as another galactic solstice approaches.

A season for melancholy and nostalgia, for yule logs and the revels of Saturnalia and little drummer boys not yet blasted to shreds; a season for wistful bagpipes and for sanguine guitars, Arabic music melding with Keltic.  A season for reflecting on the pasts we’ve lived and on those we might have lived, for good or ill.  A season for introspection and for reflection on feelings of love we’ve shared and for speculation on loves we should have shared but let slip away, and perhaps, for regretting some that might best have been avoided. 

A season, perhaps, for discarding enmities and hatreds, although that’s all too often much too hard to do.  A season for remembering friends who’ve passed beyond the veil and for regretting the time not found to spend with them.  Perhaps a season for wondering whether there’s a state of unity that might make everything worthwhile (if, in fact, “for everything there [really] is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven”) or, a season for lamenting that the purported prince of Peace was an illusion.

Introspective reflection is as dangerous as it is beneficent.  Perhaps more so.

Reflections are all too often more bitter than sweet.  So many regrets, so many mistakes, so many paths not taken.  So many twists and turns into obscure shadows, flashing echoes drawing us further and further into a dark abyss where terror dwells as others, thundering, warn us away.  Cherished memories more and more quickly fading; more and more tarnished with each passing day as things in which we once took pride turn out to all too often have been mere delusions.

Here and there, barely noticed and all too often ignored, unexpected rainbows play with fireflies and tiny birds buzz in place sipping sweet nectar from flowers blooming in myriad tones and hues.  Clouds form shifting tapestries on azure fields above swirling waves of peaks changing from greens to greys then from blues to purples and, every once in a while, tipped with gleaming cones of winter’s bright white; peaks interspersed with golden fields and silvered river valleys, all doing their best to ignore intrusive asphalt roads and cement cities.  Transient monuments to imagined triumphs slowly but surely returning to the dust from whence, like us, they came.

The Ides of December are upon us, … again.  Then the solstice will arrive, winter in half the globe, summer in the rest.  Cycles continue.  Divergent rites of passage form myriad wakes woven into strange tapestries by disinterested fates, one a crone, another a mother and the third barely a lass.  All the while, Alekto, Megaera and Tisiphone, the Eumenides, curious but patient, continue to watch, certain that all things, good or ill, will come to those who wait.

Or so, the ubiquitous “they”, say.

Alabaster and indigo, or is it, … “or” indigo.  Negative entropy blues, … anyway.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; 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 is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  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).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta 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/.

Vincent, an Ode to Van Gogh

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If this is not the most beautiful song ever, there are none more beautiful: Don McLean’s Vincent, an Ode to Van Gogh.  More beautiful as poetry than as music and, set to prose it might read like this:

Starry, starry night, paint your palette blue and gray, look out on a summer’s day with eyes that know the darkness in my soul.

Shadows on the hills, sketch the trees and the daffodils, catch the breeze and the winter chills in colors on the snowy, linen land.

Now, I understand what you tried to say to me and how you suffered for your sanity, and how you tried to set them free.  They would not listen, they did not know how; perhaps they’ll listen now.

Starry, starry night, flaming flowers that brightly blaze, swirling clouds in violet haze reflect in Vincent’s eyes of china blue; colors changing hue, morning fields of amber grain, weathered faces lined in pain are soothed beneath the artist’s loving hand.

Now, I understand, what you tried to say to me, how you suffered for your sanity, how you tried to set them free.  They would not listen, they did not know how, perhaps they’ll listen now.

For they could not love you, but still your love was true and when no hope was left inside on that starry, starry night, you took your life as lovers often do.  But I could have told you, Vincent, this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.

Starry, starry night, portraits hung in empty halls, frameless heads on nameless walls with eyes that watch the world and can’t forget, like the strangers that you’ve met; the ragged men in ragged clothes, the silver thorn of bloody rose lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow.

Now, I think I know what you tried to say to me, how you suffered for your sanity, how you tried to set them free.  They would not listen, they’re not listening still, perhaps they never will.
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Lyrics set to prose copyrighted by Don McLean.  Observations and commentary, © Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; 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 is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  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).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta 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/.

A Beautiful Day in the Central Range of the Colombian Andes, As the World Burns

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It’s a beautiful, sunny Saturday in the city in the sky.  The one set among snow clad peaks and thermal springs near an adjacent volcano or two and the remnants of several glaciers.  The one set atop the central range of the Colombian Andes in the midst of a sea of mountains dressed in diverse verdant shades.  It seems summery although in the Northern Hemisphere, the part of our planet in which this part of Colombia is set, it is late autumn, just short of winter.  But then, this close to the equator, seasons tend to meld and shift and be measured in hours rather than months.

The world seems as bad as it’s been since the second war to end all wars a bit over three quarters of a century ago, all the lessons it purportedly taught at best unlearned but more they were probably just fictitious attempts at justifying unjustifiable terminal follies.  Again.  After all, the second war to end all wars took place less than two decades after the first war to end all wars ended.  And wars?  Well, they’re just fine, in fact, perhaps healthier than ever.

Still, … as individuals here and there, life plows on, life: full of interpersonal challenges and triumphs, its own interpersonal beauty and mystique artfully masking our own errors and mistakes.

The Global South (which ironically includes Russia and China and Iran but definitely not the Ukraine) seems to be making headway in its quest for liberation from the constant abuse, humiliation and looting that flows from the North.  But not without severe challenges as the Global North has no intention of brooking what it considers insolence by lesser species.  By people almost but not quite human. 

Notwithstanding the hypocritical “woke”, condescension still rules. 

Still, … there is a scent of a different sort of future and lingering echoes seem to wonder whether such future will be better or just filled with shadows from the past, and whether the images we’ll see in our future mirrors will reflect who we’ve been, or we claim to have been, or who we wish we had been, or who we’d like to be, or who we’ve been forced to become.  Hopefully the images that stare back at us will not be too much like those of those who for so long have oppressed so many.  Wishful thinking, I know, but “if our reach does not exceed our grasp, then what’s a heaven for”, as Robert Browning wrote.  But then, he was a poet, not a politician, a journalist or a historian (the illusory professions).

Omnipresent, dystopia seems to rule.  We seem to be a people in transition, greedily tearing down the past without any agreement on what will replace the corrupt social institutions that have been decaying, putrefied for millennia.  Decaying but refusing to die.  That confuses and polarizes us as we’re manipulated by the worst among us, the Northern hegemonic wannabe leaders who refuse to let go and definitely decline to share, but who still exercise almost total control.  Yet, “almost” is an optimistic harbinger, a qualifier that hints at possible changes, perhaps even beneficent changes.

Who can tell? 

But we can hope. 

Especially on a beautiful sunny Saturday in early December, one in which at least some of us are safely ensconced among some of those we most love, … at least for the day. 

The carnage, genocide and ethnic cleansing underway in Palestine by the worst cultural descendants of the tribe which, after looting Egypt, went on to plunder and murder every man woman and child in ancient Jericho, continues unabated despite popular condemnation in the Global South and even, among an enlightened minority in Europe, the United States and even Israel, although, from here in the heights of the Andes, as in the United States and Europe, to some, that all seems very far away.  Far enough away so that the screams of pain and dying gasps and mourning and lamentations are barely audible and thus, perhaps, at least for them, can be sanitized and washed away.

Or at least shouted down and obfuscated through carefully crafted rhetoric, with reckoning postponed, if not for ever, at least for another day.   

After all, who mourns for ancient Jericho today?
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; 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 is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  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).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta 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/.

Reflections on Thanksgiving Day, 1621 – 2023

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Another strange Thanksgiving Day is on the horizon.  They’ve all been strange though.

It’s always been a day in which descendants of European colonists enjoy gorging themselves in banquets and eventually, watching football games, but one in which indigenous people in North America reflect on how their generosity was repaid with ethnic cleansing and genocide.

North American indigenous people can probably empathize with Muslims who sheltered and protected Jewish people for over a millennium but were then rewarded with the theft of Palestine and, of course, with ethnic cleansing and genocide as well.

Thanksgiving Day will probably be remembered this year by indigenous people everywhere, remembered but not celebrated.  Indigenous people whose lands were stolen and who were subjected to ethnic cleaning and genocide, a day like Columbus Day.  One in which to reflect on the hypocrisy inherent in colonialism, whether in the Americas, in Africa or in the Middle East.

Today, this year, 2023, it’s a day on which to reflect on the hypocrisy associated with the phrase “never again” and with other days remembering holocausts.  Holocausts as ancient as Jericho and as new as the one during World War II.  Or the one that has been occurring in Palestine since 1948.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; 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 is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  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).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta 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/.

Hiraeth

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Nostalgia for primordial places to which we can’t return;
for long lost times.  For things that might have stood but never were;
for lost loves and loves that might have been.

Echoes from long lost places in our souls for which we mourn.

Wind and rocks and waves.  Trees and cliffs, flowers and blades of grass.
Willows o’ the-wisp.
Omnipresent nowheres lying in wait.

Ubiquitously melancholic whispers yearning wistfully for a home that never was.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Inspiration thanks to Carl Butler of the Dark Poetry Society.  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 is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  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).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta 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/.

Not in our Name

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Israel, the land of nine million Eichmanns who can’t grasp that Palestinians rightly feel for them the emotions that survivors of the Holocaust felt for the worst of the Nazis, and that those feelings are spreading to people all over the world, but especially in the Global South.  And that those feelings are not expressions of antisemitism but of disgust with Israeli genocide, mass murder and ruthless ethnic cleansing.

Too many people of Jewish descent respond to criticism of the new holocaust, the one perpetrated by Israel on Palestinians, by asserting that only Jews can understand the justification for what are to others obviously crimes of lesse humanidad, but how would they answer a Nazi sympathizer who made a similar claim to a Jew, that not being a German Nazi, a Jew could never understand the justifications for what the Nazis did. 

Too many people of Jewish descent may feel that way but far from all as a resounding echo answers loudly from far and near: “not in our name!”
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; 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 is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  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).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta 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/.

Jericho and Gaza, Bookends of Sorts

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Today, the destruction of Gaza and the mass murder of women and children, the aged and the infirm by people from whom one would expect empathy and decency based on their own experiences appalls the decent among us.  But who speaks for those who suffered the same fate over three millennia ago from the ancestors of those today committing genocide?  From those who had purportedly just escaped from slavery in Kemet. 

Who grieves for the ancient but brutally murdered denizens of ancient Jericho? 

Who reflects on the reality that divinely inspired genocide was as acceptable more than three millennia ago as it is today for those from whom, based on their censorious sacred books, one would have expected at least a semblance of decency instead of barbarity, murder and mayhem.

One wonders if there were any descendants of Abram back then who recoiled at the atrocities committed in their names, as so many decent Jews do today.

Evidently though, for too many, the more things purport to change, the more they’ve stayed the same.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; 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 is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  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).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta 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/.

Ennui

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Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Humpty Dumpty on the wall before he had a great fall, the Queen of Hearts seems heartless, at least as far as Alice is concerned and fair weather friends are best in the late Spring, definitely not in late Fall.

It was in 2005, as he remembered it, although it might have been in late 2004.  Approximately eighteen years had elapsed, enough time for someone to have been born and then attained majority.  One would think a great deal had happened during that interim, and it had, but still, he felt as though he’d stepped on a tread mill, and that there he’d stayed.

His marriage had failed through duplicity, perhaps self-induced, as so many marriages then tended to end.  Something which has not changed.  But ironically, that failure had led to liberation.  It had led to what, at first blush, seemed exhilarating freedom and new horizons.  Among other things, he’d finally felt that he’d become a poet: there’d been plenty of inspiration in superficial sorrow and contrived despondency, not because of his wife’s betrayal, not really, but because so much that he’d loved, especially his family, had to be surrendered if he was to move on, if he was to regain the momentum he’d foregone for so long.  There’s a price for most things under the sun and beyond the stars, perhaps for everything.  And it seems to bear compounded interest.

Of course, his experience was not unique, it had become commonplace, almost a rule.  Except, perhaps, for the bit about poetry.  But even that was not unusual.  And it was not his first experience at starting over after a failed relationship.  That too was no longer infrequent.  Transience now seemed the rule.

There was a melody he’d come across as his life was becoming undone, one he’d listen to constantly, one that seemed to translate what he felt and what he perceived he’d feel in the future, a melody more accurate and more complete than mere words.  It started out forlornly, then became reflective, perhaps introspective, and gradually, it became joyous, even festive.  It was an instrumental ballad, nouveaux flamenco played primarily on a Spanish guitar but accompanied by diverse forms of percussion, perhaps by violins as well.  He still payed it regularly.  Over time, it acquired additional meaning as different women passed through his life, a growing list of unsuccessful intimate relationships each of which he’d ended when he realized that, notwithstanding his aspirations, they were going nowhere and that he was impeding the ability of his paramours too find the truly meaningful long-term spouses they deserved.

His life seemed to parallel that special music: streaked with melancholy and nostalgia but also, unaccountably, because it had no rational justification, stained with tedium.  Too often his decisions seemed to become based on overcoming boredom rather than anything truly positive.  Monotony, bred, not by a lack of things to do, but by repetition. 

He was accomplishing interesting, even important things, he was writing and publishing a great deal, and his counsel was sought on a variety of issues by interesting people who took his opinions seriously, as a result of which, he’d attained the respect and affection of a new set of peers, but his life seemed to lack substance somehow, as though it was bereft of flavor and aroma, as though it were set in a colorless rainbow.  He was doing reasonably well, apparently growing, apparently happy, but those appearances lacked the dimensions he craved.  He felt that he just “was”.

Lumps comfortably resting on logs all too frequently came to mind.  Although sometimes, he’d imagine that the lumps might be enchanted princes in frog form.  Or even better, princesses. 

He missed his sons, who’d become estranged and were living their own lives in another continent, one that might just as well have been another planet, but that was not the problem.  He realized that they had their own lives to live, their own goals, their own aspirations and their own new families in which his role was, at best, minimal, but as long as they were happy, or at least satisfied, he was too. 

After a number of almost satisfying albeit unsuccessful intimate relationships he’d remarried, and his new wife embodied almost everything for which he’d ever hoped.  More than he could reasonable have expected really, more than he probably deserved.  Thus, his domestic life was tranquil and, to an extent, almost fulfilled.  But still, he felt hollow.  Hollow but ironically full of clamoring echoes calling for something he couldn’t divine, something that he couldn’t define.  

He’d hoped for hummingbirds and butterflies and dragon flies but had gotten flies and mosquitos instead.  They smelled of boredom, but then, what was boredom anyway?  Ennui perhaps.  Ennui is a bit more classy and complex than mere boredom.  And he wondered if he’d attained the point, as Fernando Pessoa had once supposed, where tedium had become his most reliable and constant companion?

Not a good trait for someone with expectations of immortality.

Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Humpty Dumpty on the wall before he had a great fall, the Queen of Hearts seems heartless, at least as far as Alice is concerned and fair weather friends are best in the late Spring, definitely not in late Fall.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; 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 is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  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).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta 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/.

A Cease Fire is Not Enough

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The ubiquitous calls for a ceasefire in Palestine miss the mark.  What is required is the fulfillment of the promises hastily made at Nuremberg following the second war to end all wars as victors vengeance disguised as justice took its toll and a promise was made: “Never Again!”  A promise which immediately proved impossible to keep as the most prominent of the Nazi’s victims, those whose vengeance was extracted at Nuremberg, almost immediately became the victimizers, exalting in the memories of the fate of ancient Jericho and seeking to duplicate it in Palestine. 

What is needed is accountability and implementation of the rules of law established as res gestae at Nuremberg.  Mass murder seeking genocide and ethnic cleansing, crimes of lesse humanidad, must be punished and the appropriate punishment was established at Nuremberg.  Mass murderers, whether few or many, must be held to account, whether directly involved, as in the case of Israel (and other countries), or indirectly as in the NATO countries that supply and resupply Israel with the means to engage in the mass slaughter of innocents in clear violation of International Law, of Humanitarian Law, of the laws regulating what is prohibited in armed conflicts or during occupations, even if the occupation is three quarters of a century old. 

A cease fire is not enough.

The Palestinian State already recognized by civilized countries, one within the borders established by the United Nations in 1948, or at least those existing before the “Six Day War”, must be universally recognized and protected, and such Palestinian State must be sovereign and independent, free to ally itself with whomever it will, but subject to the res gestae that purportedly governs us all.   

And the Palestinian dead and maimed during the past quarter century deserve the same memorialization as do the victims of Nazi concentration camps, gas chambers and crematoriums, as do the victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  And the Palestinian State and the descendants of the Palestinian dead and maimed deserve reparations in the hundreds of billions of dollars from Israel and those NATO countries that enable Israeli crimes of lesse humanidad. 

It is time to take the promises made following the second war to end all wars seriously, and to shun all those that refuse to do so in every way possible.  The BDS movement is not enough.  Remember, as the justices at Nuremberg proclaimed (albeit hypocritically, no allied personnel engaged in comparable crimes were judged): “following orders is no defense”, and as they should have added, “voting to elect those who facilitate crimes of lesse humanidad, anywhere, is no better”.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; 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 is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  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).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta 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/.