It is standard-issue humor amongst education professionals

As a teacher, I enjoyed every minute of my summer vacations, not to mention my winter and spring breaks and, since I worked in New York City, a Jewish holiday or two every few months, even for the goyim. Go Purim! But since we did have to spend some 9 months of the year in contact with the students, it helped if you enjoyed their company, too. And for the record, I really did.

I taught high school, so the kids ranged in age from 15 to 18, with the exception of a few outliers who couldn’t quite seem to graduate before their unemployment checks began rolling in. I loved teaching that age and could never get my mind around teaching the really little ones. All the drooling, the paste eating, the odd classroom vomiter, the crying, the cubby holes and the lice… Eggggghhhhh. Not in this lifetime, Bub. Even worse was the idea of taking on a middle school classroom. Not a chance; not even with reincarnation.

The late teens, however, is an age range when the hormone-to-humanity ratio starts to click back into a range of tolerability, but also before the reinforced fears of being judged by other people have hardened like concrete around their souls. I knew a number of colleagues who either didn’t give a damn about the students, or actively disliked them. They were the teachers who claimed that, “You can’t teach these kids anything,” which was total bullshit. If you paid attention to their lives, if you listened to their needs and didn’t give them grief about their diction or their previous life decisions, then they were generally cool with learning a few things. Some of them even worked at it. The elusive key was actually caring about their lives.

In my department there were a few teachers that really did love their kids, and we tended to gravitate towards one another. In fact, a few of us created a kind of bi-weekly ritual we called “Great Kids Nights.” Those nights, typically at a local dive bar in either Brooklyn or Manhattan, always picked us up. Matt and Brendan and I would get together and talk some shop, but as we’d managed to ferret out the downers of our department who would just rag on the kids no matter what, we’d end up trading stories about some of the funny or brilliant stuff that our kids came up with that week. The night got its unofficial name when we noticed that almost every story started with one of us asking the others, “Hey, do you know so-and-so? Great kid. Great kid.”

Those “Great Kids Nights” always put me in a better mood, and as it’s been a pretty rough month or so down here in Antigua, I could use a better mood right about now, so let me introduce you to Lady Macbeth Rios. I changed her last name in a pretty lame attempt to protect her privacy, but the Lady Macbeth part is completely true. She had a brother named Hamlet and another named Shakespeare. I don’t know why. Maybe the parents were admirers of the Bard. Maybe they were functionally illiterate and thought that the big ole book on the shelf was the Bible and they just pulled names at random. I can’t say, I never met them. You might say they were like ghosts.

The road to Media Luna is twelve kilometers of thick banana trees

When I was twelve years old, I would sit across Neftalí, my Tío Nefta, from his round kitchen table in his small one-bedroom trailer in North Carolina doing my homework as he stared out the cheap lace-trimmed window over my shoulder. He would sit in the pose I remember him most — right leg crossed over left like two stalks completely parallel to one another — and stylishly bend his back and upper body to rest his elbow on his knee. Sometimes it reminded me of a praying mantis bending over a rock. His eyes would grow big and distant and he would begin to talk out loud to himself in a seamless monologue, not even noticing I was there. He would rock back and forth in the chair while holding his knee and then slowly get up to get milk, pour it into a glass, boil some eggs, doing one thing at a time and all the while chatting with himself.

Tired of it, I would look up from my homework, see his back turned to me and as adult-like as I could I would say: “Shh, tío! I’m trying to do my homework!” Surprised by my sudden presence, he would laugh in that playful manner of someone who is caught in a mischievous act. “La Carol! La Carolina!” he would say and would go back to talking to himself, stirring the water until it boiled.

In pictures he would smile only with the right side of his mouth, a half-smile so you couldn’t tell if he was smiling, his wispy mustache meticulously trimmed into an upside down “V”. Right hand on his hip, his thumb behind his belt and the other fingers extended like a fan in front of his pocket, he would bend his leg in and stare directly at the camera. He always looked taller than he was in real life: slim, graceful and his clothes perfectly coordinated.

As the guard inches closer to the driver’s seat the engine begins to hum from the air conditioning turned on high to fight off the heat of a fast approaching noon. My husband, Brad, lowers his window and the humid blanket of air unfurls as do the guard’s fingers on the door. He looks inside the car suspiciously. Inside it’s my American blonde, blue-eyed husband, smiling broadly, me with my digital camera on my lap, a dismantled bicycle with the wheel spinning in the air in the back, and my aunt squeezed tightly against the right back window. Brad signs the clipboard and the guard raises the yellow wooden bar, waves his hands like a broom and we pass. The days of rain have created deep potholes, so we weave along the empty road.

We pass destroyed barracks with graffiti and torn clothing rolled up with mud and trash on the floor that used to be the cement of living quarters, cracked playgrounds, schools and basketball courts that belonged to the United Fruit Company but are now overgrown with weeds, broken asphalt rising like cracked petals in the relentless sun. My family lived here once, picking the bananas, putting them in the trolleys, putting the stickers on as my mother did, boxing them, shipping them out to Puerto Barrios, the armpit of Guatemala, and to the United States to someone’s table. It wasn’t until I lived in the United States after the age of seven that I actually tasted one of those perfect yellow bananas that my family picked.

One day during a reporting trip, I call my mother. She tells me I’m doing it for nothing. “Vas a ver que no va salir nada de eso, y es puro gasto de dinero.” Nothing will come of it, it’s just a waste of money. I am calling from Guatemala, where I have lived for the past ten months doing a fellowship, to her home in Florida. She hates Guatemala, she tells me this often, and if it wasn’t for her sister and now me, then she wouldn’t even bother to land in this cursed country every seven years, which is still too often. Worse still is that I am now wasting my time and money and theirs on Tío. “¡Es un puro sinverguenza! He made his bed and now he can sleep in it.”

Fuck. I needed some money.

My stomach growled. “Fuck you, stomach,” I said.

I went to the kitchen. There was the end of a piece of Italian bread on the counter. The cockroaches and mice did not even want it. It was as hard as a rock. It was the only thing to eat. I drank three glasses of brownish tap water and ate the bread. My stomach growled again. I pulled up my t-shirt and looked at it. The hair on my indented white belly looked like a mass of spider legs.

I had not worked for a blissful month and had not been worried because I was scheduled to have a good paying gig on a movie shoot as a production assistant. I had timed my pauperism to the millisecond, knowing I’d be completely penniless the day the new job started. But then one of the lead actors dropped out and filming had been put on hold indefinitely. That was over two weeks ago.

Now I needed work badly, but was caught in one of those downward, gasping spirals of slow-death cause and effect. I had no money because I was not working. I had no food because I had no money. I had no energy because I had been eating almost nothing for days. I did not look for work because I had no energy. I could not call anyone and inquire about work because the phone had been cut off. Add to that I had no real skills that the workplace was screaming for. A real Horatio Alger success story.

My mama would have been proud.

I needed Divine Intervention. It came. The buzzer to the apartment buzzed.

“It’s Karim.”

“Come on up,” I said.

I opened the door for him.

“You look like shit,” he said.

“Nice to see you, too,” I said.

Karim always looked perfect. He was a young Swiss artist with a Persian father. He lived off a stipend provided by the Swiss Government and supplemented his income with random part-time jobs that miraculously flowed to him through the art world. He was dashingly handsome in a casual, threadbare European way. He had blue black hair and olive skin. He was Byronesque in his brooding and as deep as a dime. He loved chocolate, croissants, and cigarettes. Women swooned for him at first blush.

He was also a terribly dull conversationalist, and loathed work. That was the quality I admired most in him.

His art project, which the Swiss government was paying for, consisted of gray pencil lines on a note pad. Every day Karim would make geometric drawings of straight lines on a little 3 x 5 note pad. He’d usually draw them while in bed. He’d make 3 or 4 of them a day and tear them from the pad.

He was to have an exhibition of his work at the Swiss Embassy in NY in a few months where his entire little note pad opus would be taped to a wall. TAPED! This was art. He called them Meditations in #2 Pencil. The Swiss Government was paying him to do this shit. God, I wished I was an artist.

What a gorgeous con.

“I just quit a job,” Karim said.

“Really,” I said. The longest I ever knew him to hold a job was six days.

“Yes, it was interfering with my art,” he said.

He reached in his shoulder bag and took out a piece of chocolate. He broke me off a piece. I put it in my mouth. It was dark, expensive, divine. It tasted like Persian jewels in a Swiss bank account. The spider-leg hairs on my belly danced. My toes tingled

“I told the owner you could take over for me. He seemed relieved because he had no one else.”

“What is it? When does it start? I’ll do it.”

“Today,” he said. “You’ll be moving paintings from museums to restorers, from galleries to art warehouses, from private collectors to auction houses. Yesterday I moved a DeKooning and a Klimt.”

“Really? Wow. A Klimt, cool,” I said. “What’s it pay?”

“$110 in cash per day, off the books,” he said. “The owner’s name is Tim DeLong.”

Karim continued to give me the background. Tim apparently was getting his Ph.D. in Art History at Columbia. He had been getting it for the last 12 years. He had a nervous breakdown writing his thesis and did not entirely recover. He lacked in social skills and was prone to violent outbursts. He was obsessive. He was a perfectionist who worshiped art, artists, and the snobbier end of its social milieu. This little niche he had created for himself: the transportation and temporary storage of fine art, got him close to his Gods.

Karim handed me a folded piece of paper with directions. “You should be there now,” he said.

He gave me another piece of chocolate. He had to get back to his artwork, he said. I thanked him and raced upstairs, showered, shaved and put on an almost clean white button-down shirt. I dashed out the door to the street. The heat hit me like the wet tongue of a giant, rabid dog.

I clawed my way across town toward the address on the paper:  7th Street, East Village, between B and C, only Blue door. I found it. The paint was peeling from the door. There was no buzzer. I knocked. The door opened and a large head with greasy hair appeared. “I’m a friend of Karim,” I said.

He lurched around the doorjamb and stooped over to look at me. “You’re late,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and he grudgingly invited me in.

I was standing in a dingy room made very narrow by racks for paintings of all sizes. Some were wrapped in bubble wrap. Others had zippered sleeves around them. Others were uncovered. A fluorescent light gave everything a sallow hue.

“Do you have a valid driver’s license?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you know anything about art?”

“A little. I go to museums a lot.”

“Who is your favorite artist?”

“Ahhm…”

“Quick, tell me!!!”

“Ah, Egon Schiele,” I said.

“Your second favorite!”

“Ahh, I like Francis Bacon.”

“Interesting,” he said.

“Tell me who you think is a complete phony.”

“I hate Jasper Johns,” I said.

“At least you’re not a complete idiot,” he said.

I was close to telling him to fuck off, but I needed the money. I bit my tongue.

“Read this,” he handed me a legal pad with a bulleted list of do’s and don’ts.

Before I could finish, he handed me a clipboard.

“Here is the route,” he said. All the paintings you have to move can be handled by one person. I’m going to demonstrate how you pick up a painting.”  He showed me. Then he demonstrated how you put a painting down. He inhaled as he picked up the painting and exhaled as he put it down. I wondered if that was part of the process, if I should inhale and exhale. He showed me the papers each client was to sign.

“Here’s your walkie-talkie. Check in after each pick-up. Keep it on at all times in case there is a change of plans.”

“Ok,” I said.

“Come with me.”

Throughout the 1980s,

Jean-Marie Simon was one of those very few journalists who chose to live here, and in 1987 she published, Guatemala: Eternal Spring / Eternal Tyranny (W.W. Norton & Co.) The book is a moving and enigmatic presentation, often in the form of short vignettes of text and image that give the reader the sensation that the war, itself, is growing around them from a thousand different points in time and space. Reading this book is as important to understanding the Guatemala Civil War as reading The Art of Political Murder by Francisco Goldman is to understanding how its howling still echoes down canyons of impunity to this very day.

In June of this year, for the first time, the book was published in Spanish and is finally available to a wider Guatemalan audience. La Cuadra was fortunate enough to secure an interview with Ms. Simon about her experiences living in Guatemala during the war, and the creation of a book which captures those years in ways that no other work has done.

—–

MT: Jean-Marie Simon, welcome and congratulations on the re-publication, in Spanish for the first time, of your book, Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny.

JMS: Thank you, I am glad to be here.

MT: To start, I have a direct question: were you a reporter during the time that you were writing the book?

JMS: Yes. There were lots of us here. There were many good reporters here, but the problem is that most of them just came and went. For example, Marjorie Miller of the L.A. Times, who I consider a great reporter, she couldn’t spend a month in Guatemala.

MT: Right, helicopter in, helicopter out.

JMS: Well, yes, but her helicoptering in was good. There would be these pilgrimages to Guatemala for elections and coups, and every once in a while, if something bad happened, they’d arrive en masse from the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. They’d do their interview with the Commander of some region. Maybe they’d go up to Nebaj for two days. But as a photographer and journalist that just didn’t attract me.

As I said last night [at an event celebrating the book's release], I started out just wanting to be a photographer, a great photographer. I wanted to be a big name and go from place to place and shake the world with my images; then I got sucked into Guatemala. And I decided, while I wanted to be great, it’s more about being useful. I thought, well, I speak Spanish. I can talk to people and I’m a pretty good photographer and I learned to be a good listener to people here. They’re such good storytellers. But I decided that my utility was combining the photographs with testimony because I was hearing much more than I could express in a photograph.

And the reason I was hearing it was because Aryeh Neier, who was with Americas Watch, which became Human Rights Watch, learned that I was in Guatemala and that I was talking to people and there were no reporters here long term. So he put me to work writing reports on Guatemala, and I started to enjoy interviewing people. And then it became an identity crisis. Do I take the picture? Do I photograph people? And the photographs probably suffered for it because, maybe, I could have taken the photography to another level if I’d just stuck with that and jettisoned the interviews, but it just wasn’t that useful to do that here. Beautiful pictures of a war are not going to do much for a country. But reporting, I think, did.

So I wrote Human Rights Watch reports on Guatemala from 1982 to 1987. And after some time there were so many people showing up in my hotel room, my little hotel room on 6th Avenue and 12th Street in Guatemala City, which is now a narco-hotel. I lived there for six years. And people would come to my hotel. Peasants aren’t going to go look for you in Zone 10.  But they will look for you in Zone 1. Because they get off the bus where the terminal used to be in Zone 4 and then they’d walk to my hotel. And Zone 1 was such a melting pot of people that they’d fit in, and they’d come up to my room, bring a coffee and we’d talk.

MT: And they’d seek you out because they knew you were there and they knew you were telling their stories?

JMS: They really trusted me because they knew who I was working for. And it was like a chain effect where someone trusted me, and then they told their friends and they told their friends and so on.

MT: Okay, so here’s the reason I asked if you were reporting during the war: you were a known entity in Guatemala. The positive side being people came to seek you out, looking for somewhere to tell their story. The other side is that the military knew who you were, too. Did you ever feel threatened? Was your life ever in danger?

There’s a strong case to be made

“We’re not here to save the country from itself, just to get the job done.”

My traveling companion snapped those words at me as we worked to “smooth out” some auto paper “irregularities” at the border. Upon hearing them, I had to stop and reflect, even though in the past I’ve bribed my way from Syria to China, surely lesser nations morally. Maybe we ‘holier-than-thou’ foreigners casting aspersions in Guatemala, and innumerable places like it, are missing the point on bribery.

Before moving to define the issue in depth, I’d like to dismiss a silly argument that always seems to crop up at the beginning of an otherwise serious debate: “How dare you be so hypocritical as to discuss corruption elsewhere when your own country (the United States) is corrupt?”  Of course the United States is corrupt; all nations are. Just because Transparency International concludes that the Scandinavian countries are “clean” doesn’t mean that they are free from corruption, it just means that T.I. hasn’t yet figured out how they are corrupt and how to factor that kind of corruption into the rankings. If there are 215 countries, there are 215 corrupt countries, Q.E.D. Rounding out the top of T.I.’s “clean” list are Sweden, Norway, and more recently Iceland, all of whom in recent history have experienced total banking system collapses, and we defy you to show us a financial system blowup that wasn’t catalyzed by some particularly effective grease somewhere in the system, usually at the top (see Sachs, Goldman, et. al. under the “Current Events” heading in your favorite news source).

In the U.S. there is officially almost no corruption, unless you happen to be anywhere in Illinois, or Louisiana, or California’s 50th congressional district (also known as whitebread San Diego), or the Puritan state of Rhode Island, or happen to know one of the 14,000 registered federal lobbyists (U.S. Senate alone), or one of the 6,000 U.S. corporations employing lobbyists. But the point is this: on any given trip to the local Department of Motor Vehicles, it is highly unlikely that someone will approach you in line and say something to the effect of “You know, there is a much quicker way to get this done, if you’ll just follow me into the parking lot.” Your correspondent’s personal experience stuffing envelopes with $500 each to get an occupancy certificate in Baltimore notwithstanding, there remains very little official corruption of what we’ll call the “petty” kind, as opposed to the embedded and apparently socially and ethically acceptable “institutional” kind, in the United States.

Maybe there should be more.

Before professing your knee-jerk distaste for petty corruption, ask yourself this basic question: “Would I rather go through an official process that lasts up to two days but costs little or nothing, or pay an expediter $50 to turn it into a 20-minute seamless exercise in efficiency, with the same result?” In Guatemala we have that choice, but in the U.S. and other parts of the civilized, western world we do not. We are forced to take a number and stand in line for three days while the large woman behind the counter paints her nails and discusses her loveless life. Social utility. And we all know that Guatemala is a country with vast difference of degrees of wealth. If Robin Hood could understand the social utility of wealth redistribution, why can’t we?  In the case of a few well earned Pesos or Quetzales pressed into the palm of an obliging public servant, officially subsisting on the grandiose wage of $300 per month, it’s simple redistribution according to the will of the first-person distributor – rather than the whims of a politically fickle central government.

In the United States, speaking of ‘holier-than-thous,’ foreign corporate practices are governed by spurious enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or FCPA, as snickering corporate executives refer to it. Written (probably during those wondrous, morally unambiguous and nationally disastrous Jimmy Carter years) to try, by beginning at home, to regulate the moral behavior of the world’s corporations. And because of that act we were just stung again, this time by those wily French with a bid to snake, successfully, General Electric out of a nuclear reactor contract in the notoriously uncorrupt Philippines. But the FCPA triggers a boring annual lecture by an otherwise incompetent corporate lawyer once a year to parse “Pay them to do what they should anyway, but don’t pay them to do what they shouldn’t.” In case the bottom feeders who inhabit corporate lawyers’ slots can’t figure that one out, some clear thinker — or maybe my kind of wag — when the FCPA was written, even referred in the written legislation to “grease payments.”

With all the current hand-wringing about the national economy in that august and incorruptible body called the United States Congress, maybe it’s time we adjust our Western attitudes toward corruption of the petty kind. Talk about export-led growth: “Hey China, how about a couple of new American-built (non-weaponized) nuclear reactors at $10 billion each?  Just walk with us out to the parking lot and we’ll slip a couple of spare F-16s in your pocket.” Let’s see the haughty French “outbid” us on that deal. Economic utility.

Should we bribe in Guatemala? Well, my border critic got the “job” done, and we made our Mexican hotel in time for the NCAA basketball final (possibly the best ever), re-crossing the border the next day with suspicious celerity, despite the customs officer’s initially Heller-esque protestations that by our passports we were already in Guatemala, so we couldn’t possibly be coming back. Talk about social utility of the very highest order.

But I still have this lingering Calvinistic notion that I am one step closer to Hell.

Guatemalans call their mayors and Congressmen “diez porcientistas” or “ten percenters”, charging 10% on anything with numbers attached that passes within signaling distance of their fiefdoms. There’s a trend, when their duly elected officials get too close to the trough, not to re-elect “veinte porcientistas” or twenty percenters, so the process is self-regulating. This phenomenon also guts the argument that goes “Well, the Maya did it,” since the Maya used base 20, and there is no known glyph showing anyone losing his head over receiving 21% instead of just losing the ball game.

Our car example may have had no wider consequences save that we got to enjoy every second of a particularly good NCAA final, and the tip jar at our favorite border crossing had a little less air in it, but there are also strong social and economic utility arguments in favor of petty bribes. Let’s examine the case of rice. Rice in Guatemala is about US$1.25 a kilo. Rice in Mexico is about $.80 a kilo. It is illegal to import Mexican rice into Guatemala. Is it therefore corrupt to bribe a Guatemalan official to look the other way when a container 20,000 kilos of Mexican rice “avoids” customs on its way across a man-made totally artificial line on a map to beleaguered consumers? I say “No!” The guy looking the other way may have a new 42 inch flat screen TV, but the stretched Guatemalan households at the container’s destination will save $5,000. Corrupt? Or just possibly a moral decision? I say it  provides immediate economic utility of the most beneficial kind — direct to the consumer. And national social utility. This logically airtight argument extends to gasoline, eggs, Coca Cola, Colgate and all those other items so essential to our lives here in Guatemala, especially beer. Beck’s and Heineken cheaper than Gallo?  Now there’s an area that could use a little large-scale cross-border grease.

What exactly is a bribe, anyway? When Caterpillar slips an Illinois congressperson an envelope full of cash to vote to keep out French (those wily French again) construction machinery, is that a bribe?  Or is it precisely what he was elected to do?  Henry Kissinger is adamant that nations do have interests, which, not just coincidentally, is why they are called national interests. Even a lawyer might accidentally grasp that one. Actually Kissinger, perhaps the most practical person ever to have been Secretary of State, is just articulating a mammoth worldwide argument for the primacy of the social utility of grease.

“To bribe or not to bribe?”

Even Shakespeare apparently totally missed the point when he wrote in Julius Caesar, “Shall we now contaminate our fingers with base bribes?”

Come on, Will baby, lighten up and join us at the Mexican border.

Working with kids means that you will, at times, find yourself in difficult ethical positions. Or simply positions that could be wildly misinterpreted by the headline writers of America’s leading tabloid.

I remember flashing through  alternate futures when I came out of the teacher’s lounge one day and saw a crazy-eyed kid sprinting full-steam down the hallway with two police officers in pursuit.

The ethical quandary: “To clothesline or not to clothesline.” If I did, I might be hailed a hero! “Terrific Teach Tackles Teen Terror!!!”

Or it could end up more ambiguously. Maybe he was a gangbanger, but my considered clothesline would have snapped his neck, “Teach’s Reach Cripples Crip!”

Or, possibly, he was leading the police to the scene of a crime and I would have just prevented them from stopping a math teacher from being tossed out a fourth-story window. “Tallon’s Call Means Math Man Falls!”

The probability of a New York Post Headline loomed large. I let the wild-child pass and probably for the best. It turned out that the student, not a minor, was an 18-year-old who had just been released from jail on Riker’s Island. Still, he had the right to a free public education and had ended up at F.D.R. High School after bouncing through four other schools in a week. He was only at F.D.R. for a few hours, during which time he caused about $1000 of physical damage to the school and scared the hell out of our incredibly sweet and charmingly incompetent 64-year-old school nurse by running into her office, grabbing a fist-full of the condoms she was required (scandalously, she believed) to keep on her desk, then paused from his marauding for half a beat, looked down at the rubbers in his hand, blew her a kiss and growled, “I’ll be back for YOU later,” before proceeding to make more mayhem in the hallways.

But there were other times when the cost / benefit analyses of potential intervention weren’t as clear-cut. And while in the case at hand I’m pretty sure I didn’t commit a crime, I most certainly could have ended up on the front page of The Post.

It all started one afternoon, while I was grading papers in my office. I’d keep my door open, in case any of the kids who wandered by wanted to talk. I hated grading papers. My students knew that, and everyday kids came by to talk about college essays, get help with homework, to shoot the shit, or — as often as not — to ask for advice or help with some issue fully unrelated to school.

I had a great relationship with most of my students. I was one of the teachers they felt comfortable with. One of the ones they really liked. One of the ones who was definitely at the bottom of the list for getting dangled out of a fourth-story window. And in Brooklyn, that security was a welcomed relief.

I was proud to maintain that status. I really loved my kids, and took it as a calling to help them out whenever I could. Because of the trust, I was on the receiving end of  more lunacy than most of the other teachers. I was one of the few teachers who heard about the suicide attempts, the domestic violence, the weed smoking, the losses of virginity and the need for subsequent trips to the doctor to get the appropriate testing or medications.

I was the teacher who heard about the bizarre parents, like the one father who saved his pee in peanut butter jars for a month and then took a bath in his own urine on the full moon. I consciously had to force myself to push down a massive case of the willies in order to shake his hand at graduation that year. I was the teacher who got the very odd questions after class. To this day I’ve not figured out what it was in our lesson about the War of 1812 that inspired one of my students to ask me when, in her menstrual cycle, she was most fertile. On the counsel of my mom, I bought her a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves, which she kept hidden in my office so she could sneak in and read it without catching hell from her conservative, Muslim parents.

I heard so much weird shit that I became really good at presenting a calm and protective visage. The students would open up about deep pains, troubling questions or just the whacky stuff that comprised their lives, and I’d look back like a loving, streetwise Sphinx. Then we’d find a way to solve the problem.

I also became really good knowing when a kid needed to talk, but couldn’t quite get it out. Their body language screamed it. They way they’d hang out, playing with papers on my desk, without saying a word, but also not leaving, let me know when I had to push a little to get them to open up.

That’s how it started with Andy.

He came to my office door and said, “Yo, what up, T?”

“Chillin’. Why ain’t you at practice?”

“Awww . . .  I got some shit goin’ on . . .  But it’s cool. I got it.”

Then he just kept standing there. Kinda wavering in the door.

“The fuck you got goin’ on? Close the door and sit your ass down. Spill it, bitch.”

“Nawww, T. I got it.”

“Cool, you got it, but tell me what you got. Else I’m gonna call Coach and have him sit your ass next game for missin’ practice for some bullshit.”

“You buggin’, T?”

“I ain’t buggin. You spill or I shout.”

“Fuck it. But you don’t wanna know . . .  Remember I told you that . . . ”

He paused, then said, “I got jacked last night. Cop took my shit.”

“You got locked up?”

Tell you what: I’ll buy the next round if you shut the fuck up for five minutes.

Angry, stupid, übernationalist white people have been grumbling the same fucking thing ever since somebody made the mistake of enfranchising people you didn’t think deserved it, who then proceeded to commit the crime of voting for shit you disagreed with. And every time they do, scary shit tends to happen.

Hell, in the early 1930s, an upstanding Wall Street executive named Gerald MacGuire went to Europe explicitly to study angry, stupid, übernationalist white people, primarily World War I veterans pissed because they had been sent into the bloodiest meat-grinder in human history because some inbred aristocrats wanted to make sure other inbred aristocrats didn’t rape more of Africa and Asia than they did. This, of course, is a perfectly respectable reason to be angry, but that’s not the point. The issue is not the validity of your anger — it is the persistent and apparently generational stupidity you employ in directing it.

MacGuire conducted his research on the Croix de Feu and Italy’s Blackshirts on behalf of some of the most influential men in the U.S., the veritable captains of industry.  Their plan was to employ MacGuire’s findings in a plan to build an army of American military veterans to oust Franklin Delano Roosevelt from the presidency, nip FDR’s New Deal in the bud and thereby enact a heroic Restoration of the U.S. Constitution. So when conservative online enclave Newsmax not long ago wishfully envisioned a coup d’etat against Obama, or when a flurry of Real Americans for a year loudly suggest weaponry might be a solution to the results of an election, you might see where these aren’t really new ideas, nor have their proponents been recorded as historic champions of liberty.

One immediate problem occurs: that we seem to be operating on two different definitions of “liberty.” As used by the Tea Party “movement” in the U.S., or the coup plotters in the U.S. in 1934, “liberty” is like the American flag; its zealous defenders have become so entranced with the thing as an icon, they no longer remotely suss the meaning behind it. For them, for you, Mr. Proud Tea Partier, “liberty” doesn’t refer to due blessings bestowed upon humanity by the social contract of a democratic republic. It is about how those blessings get divvied up and who, by their measure, is owed more.

In the U.S. in recent months, much of white übernationalist anger has been in defense of the liberties of rapacious, Malthusian health insurance and banking companies, whom Obama and the Congress have been attempting all too timidly to rein in. That’s the conversation we’re having over here in Reality. Through a right-wing filter, however, problem-solving seems to translate as “forwarding a Hell-programmed heresy writing the preface to Armageddon.”

The real crux behind this apparent epoch-making, life-or-death struggle is that, of course, it has been engineered wholesale. You did not join spontaneously in a great crusade of Restoration. You, like that great unformed army that might’ve slain FDR, have been recruited by American corporations who do bad things and want to go on doing them unchecked by society. They need you to make it look like their doing bad things has broad support, or any, as what exists of it isn’t broad. You are the loud, annoying evidence of the kind of bad things they are willing to do to keep doing bad things.

That’s all you’ve ever been.

Gerald MacGuire worked for Grayson Murphy, owner of a brokerage house and director of one of the banks owned by superfinancier J.P. Morgan, the most powerful man in American business. In the summer of 1934 MacGuire, also an officer in the American Legion, solicited two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner and retired Marine General Smedley Butler to lead an army of 500,000 Legionnaires to Washington, where they would wrest the government from Roosevelt, murder him, or reduce him to figurehead status.

It seemed a tall tale even to Butler. Fortunately, the general knew the American Legion’s imprimatur, that it had initially been financed by American capitalists, including Murphy and Morgan, to re-purpose U.S. military vets as strikebreakers and had long aped its bankrollers’ reactionary politics. In 1923, Legion commander Alvin Owsley publicly drew parallels with Italy’s nascent Blackshirt government. “The American Legion is fighting every element that threatens our democratic government — soviets, anarchists, I.W.W., revolutionary socialists and every other Red,” he told an interviewer. “Do not forget that the Fascisti are to Italy what the American Legion is to the United States.”

Back when I was a teenager

“Hey, when you look at blue and I look at blue, how can we know if we’re seeing the same thing?”

“Well, because… um… yeah, wow. That’s cosmic.”

“Wait, how would you describe red, like, if you couldn’t call it red?”

“It’s hot. Blue’s cold. But still… you could be seeing what I’d call green or purple and still say that. To really know I’d have to be inside your head. Or you’d have to be inside mine.”

“Man, that’s cosmic.”

Or then there was the time that Kathy — after holding a long hit of Leroy St. Purple — exhaled and said, “Infinity is… Incredible.”

At which we all weed-giggled, then conceded it was, in fact, “Cosmic, Kathy. Cosmic.”

Or then there was her observation one summer day at The Reservoir when she declared that “the only way this could be better would be if it were spring time and we were cutting school.”

We laughed at Kathy a bit then, too, but had to accept that, to the very grain, her observation was “cosmically true.”

And, you know what? Those moments were cosmic. They were times, however hokey in memory, when the brain took a leap beyond where it was to where it could be, even if it occasionally crashed down into the shark tank like Fonzie with a bad carburetor. Those were the moments when the mind broke out of the linear nature school tried to inflict upon us. And while I feel a bit foolish to remember once being that Cosmic Kid, I have to admit that those experiences were far more central in creating my character than entire years of CliffsNotes, chemistry class or calculus.

But the one early cosmic realization that stands out above all others happened years before I had ever heard of Kathy or Craig or smoked any chronic.

In the summer of 1979 I went on a weeklong canoe trip with my brother, Jay, and his Boy Scout troop on the Saranac Lake Chain in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York. We were four nights into the trip and our Scout Master, Paul LeBlanc, had just whipped together a dinner that I’ll always remember as one of the best of my life. He called it Wheat-a-Moo Stew and it had it all – both wheat and moo. It was spicy. It was filling. It was shared around a campfire with my closest friends, and most importantly for a 12-year-old boy, it possessed the essential attribute for culinary perfection: the prodigious production of late-night, tent-bound farts.

After dinner, and before the poison-gas wars were to commence, the Patrol Leaders told some of the younger kids under their charge to police the campsite for any garbage that had been dropped and others to search for fallen wood to fuel the fire for the night. I wasn’t officially in the troop as I was a year too young, so having no Patrol and being a bit of a turd, I decided to sneak away and avoid any unwanted chores.

Like an Iroquois of my imagination, I crept out of camp and stalked the 100 yards from our campsite down to the water’s edge, trying to avoid stepping on twigs that might snap or breaking branches on trees that could give away my position. At the edge of the island, I found a big, flat east-facing rock. It angled towards the shore and away from my troop. I settled in, out of sight from Mr. LeBlanc, my brother and everyone on the island. Feeling satisfied with my successful escape from work, I kicked out my legs, scraped up some moss for a pillow, laced my fingers behind my head and lay down.

And then it happened.

I saw, right there in front of my eyes, the moon rise for the first time. Of course I’d seen the moon before. I’d seen it risen. But never had I actually watched it climb. I had never seen anything like it. Never had I witnessed a beauty sing itself into existence. And from the first note, the first glimpse of its white crown, I was stunned, enthralled. It moved perceptibly, it didn’t hesitate a second. For an hour or more I watched it rise, arc-second by arc-second above the High Peaks, not daring to wiggle a finger for fear of unsettling its progress. There was something about the near perfect stillness around me — just the water washing the shore, just the crickets’ legs and bats’ wings — that further illuminated the magic inherent in the moment.

A few decades back, Isaiah Berlin

Berlin applied this tale to the different minds of men. He noted that there are those, the Hedgehogs of human existence, who bury themselves in a fortress of fundamental belief, convinced of the surety of their one big idea, and the conviction that everything in the world must conform, or be made to conform, to that worldview. The Foxes of the intellectual world, on the other hand, don’t have “one big belief,” but they “know many things.” They are natural pragmatists who look to find solutions through observation, trial and error — and an understanding that nothing is ever going to be perfect. They know the world is far too complex to fit into any one idea, and try always to be on top of their game — understanding, most likely, that they stand a better chance of outliving, or out voting, the Hedgehogs of this world than changing their minds.

Berlin, expounding elsewhere on this theme, observed that the Twentieth Century was a “Century of Final Solutions.” A century of Hedgehogs, if you will. The inflection of the plural was poignant and purposeful, coming from a Russian Jew who lost many members of his extended family to both Hitler’s ovens and Stalin’s gulags. Whereas we all know that Nazism offered a Final Solution, and Hitler was clearly a Hedgehog, Berlin wanted us to reflect that it was only one expression of a certain type of linear, unitary and ahistorical thought which brooks no opposition to its fundamental truthfulness. To Berlin, Italian Fascism was as much a Final Solution as German Nazism, even without the sheer number of death camps. Market Fundamentalism was as much a final solution as Soviet Communism, even without the state forced labor. To Berlin, Christian Fundamentalism carried with it as much a final solution as did Radical Islam, even if the methods to achieve its ends were dramatically different. In his view, the Final Solution of Hitler wasn’t only the gas chambers and the mechanized murder of millions, it was the belief that the world should be something that it is not; and furthermore, by the application of force, that it can be made to take the imagined form. To Berlin the final solution of Nazism lived in the dogma that told a party member that he or she was justified and right to fulfill Nazi doctrine. To Berlin, all final solutions are formed in a mind that says “I am not cruel to do this; I am an agent of a higher righteousness, and it must be so. God, or the world, wants it to be so; I am just an angel of revealed truth.”

The same could be said of stalwarts of the Washington Consensus or the Soviet International. And it can be said of many supporters of the new law in Arizona, which demands that the police request to see the papers of anyone, if they have a “reasonable suspicion” that he or she might be in the United States illegally.

There has been much written in the past weeks about the new law in Arizona, and I was reluctant to take it on as a column for La Cuadra, as it has received so much attention elsewhere. But the need to do so crystallized while watching a video of California Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter, sounding every bit like a man who holds, deep in his Hedgehog heart, a “final solution” of sorts.

Hunter said, in reference to the issues around illegal immigration into America, “There can be no amnesty, that’s a given.” Further, he observed, “It’s not complicated, you just need the political will to [end illegal immigration] and we’re gathering that political will now and this Arizona law is a fantastic starting point.”

Then, when asked if he would support the deportation of children, born as legal citizens in the United States to parents that were undocumented, he declared, “I would have to say, yes.” Further noting that people might think, “You’re a mean guy. That’s a mean thing to do. That’s not a humanitarian thing to do,” Hunter defended himself by saying, “We’re not being mean, we’re just saying that it takes more than walking across the border to become an American citizen. It’s what’s in our souls.”

As noted by an earlier reviewer of his work, Silvia Herrera, the faces Barrios paints “chase the image” of the subject that inspired the work. That may be the key.

While representational, these images are also deeply suggestive of the emotional ties that unite us all. The paintings, be they watercolors or oils, “chase” the deeper truths of what it is to be human. In them we see deep melancholy, a reverence for a past long gone, and yet still living in our most silent and cloistered inner chambers. We witness an adoration of the beauty that resides within – and gives form to – all life, be it our own or the fading representational color of the plucked flower or the bird on the wing. These are the stones his work touches, and these are the stones he makes sing in a harmony beyond the mundane.

Surely, there are as many uniting themes of our collective existence less beautiful – avarice, hoarding, anger and hatred. And as such, Barrios’ work points us to the inherency of the choice: In what light shall we see one another?

To see more of Cesar Barrios’ work, please visit www.artintheamericas.com.