Midas was about to die of hunger, thirst, and loneliness.
Dionysus took pity on him and dunked him in the Pactolus River.
From that point on, the river had a golden bed, and Midas, who lost his magic touch but saved his life, had donkey’s ears poorly hidden under a red bonnet.
ORIGIN OF CONCENTRATION CAMPS
When Namibia won its independence in 1990, the main avenue of the capital city still bore the name Göring. Not for Hermann, the Nazi, but in honor of his father, Heinrich Göring, one of the perpetrators of the first genocide of the twentieth century.
That Göring, who represented the German Empire in the southwest corner of Africa, kindly approved in 1904 an annihilation order given by General Lothar von Trotta.
The Hereros, black shepherds, had risen up in rebellion. The colonial authorities expelled them all and warned that any Herero found in Namibia, man, woman, or child, armed or unarmed, would be killed.
Of every four Hereros, three were killed, by cannon fire or the desert sun.
The survivors of the butchery ended up in concentration camps set up by Göring. And Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow pronounced for the very first time the word “Konzentrationslager.”
The camps, inspired by a British forerunner in South Africa, combined confinement, forced labor, and scientific experimentation. The prisoners, emaciated from a life in the gold and diamond mines, served as human guinea pigs for research into inferior races. In those laboratories worked Theodor Mollison and Eugen Fischer, who later became the teachers of Josef Mengele.
Mengele carried forth their work as of 1933, the year that Göring the son set up the first concentration camps in Germany, following the model his father pioneered in Africa.
ORIGIN OF THE WILD WEST
While every movie revolver blasted more bullets than a machine gun, the real towns where Westerns were set were makeshift little places, where yawns drowned out any shooting on the sound track.
Cowboys, those taciturn gents on horseback riding tall through the universe rescuing damsels in distress, were starving peons with no more female company than the cattle they drove through the desert, risking their lives for a pittance. They looked nothing like Gary Cooper or John Wayne or Alan Ladd, because they were black or Mexican or toothless whites who never knew the marvels of makeup.
And the Indians, condemned to working as extras in the role of the worst of the bad guys, were nothing like those feathered, war-painted, inarticulate retards who howled as they circled the stagecoach and peppered it with arrows.
The epic of the Wild West was the invention of a handful of immigrants from Eastern Europe with a keen eye for business. In the studios of Hollywood, Carl Laemmle, William Fox, the Warner brothers, Louis B. Mayer, and Adolph Zukor cooked up the most successful universal myth of the twentieth century.
BUFFALO BILL
In the eighteenth century, the colony of Massachusetts paid a hundred pounds sterling for every Indian scalp.
After the United States became independent, scalps were priced in dollars.
In the nineteenth century, Buffalo Bill Cody was crowned the greatest scalper of Indians and greatest exterminator of the buffalo that gave him his name and his fame.
Not long after the sixty million buffalo had been reduced to less than a thousand, and hunger had driven the last rebellious Indians to turn themselves in, Buffalo Bill took his grand show, the Wild West Circus, on a world tour. In a new city every two days, he rescued stagecoaches harried by savages, broke indomitable colts, and shot bullets that split a fly down the middle.
The hero interrupted the tour to spend the first Christmas of the twentieth century with his family.
Surrounded by loved ones and in the warmth of his home, he raised his glass, offered a toast, took a drink, and fell to the floor, stiff as a board.
In suing for divorce, he accused his wife, Lulu, of trying to poison him.
She confessed to having put something in his drink, but claimed it was a love potion, Dragon’s Blood was the brand, that a Gypsy had sold her.
THE AGES OF SITTING BULL
At thirty-two, baptism by fire. Sitting Bull defends his people against an enemy attack.
At thirty-six, his Indian nation elects him chief.
At forty-one, Sitting Bull sits. In the middle of a battle on the banks of the Yellowstone River, having walked toward the shooting soldiers, he sits down on the ground. He lights his pipe. Bullets zing like wasps. He remains immobile, smoking.
At forty-three, he learns that whites have found gold in the Black Hills, on lands reserved for the Indians, and their invasion has already begun.
At forty-four, during a long ritual dance, he has a vision: thousands of soldiers fall like grasshoppers from the sky. That night a dream tells him: “Your people will defeat the enemy.”
At forty-five, his people defeat the enemy. The Sioux and the Cheyenne, united, give General George Custer and his troops a tremendous thrashing.
At fifty-two, following years of exile and prison, he agrees to read a speech in honor of the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad. At the end of his speech, he sets aside the papers, faces the audience, and says:
“I hate all white people. You are thieves and liars.”
The interpreter translates:
“We give thanks to civilization.”
The audience applauds.
At fifty-four, he gets a job in Buffalo Bill’s show. In the circus ring, Sitting Bull plays Sitting Bull. Hollywood is not yet Hollywood, but tragedy is already being repeated as farce.
At fifty-five, a dream tells him: “Your people will kill you.”
At fifty-nine, his people kill him. Indians wearing police uniforms bring an arrest warrant. In the gun battle, he dies.
ORIGIN OF DISAPPEARANCES
Thousands of unburied dead wander the Argentinean pampa. They are the disappeared from the last military dictatorship.
General Jorge Videla and his henchmen used disappearance as a weapon of war on a scale never before seen. He used it, but he did not invent it. A century beforehand, against Argentina’s native peoples, General Julio Argentino Roca employed the same masterpiece of cruelty, which obliges each victim to die and die again and go on dying, while his loved ones lose their minds chasing his elusive shadow.
In Argentina, as in all of the Americas, the Indians were the first disappeared. They disappeared before they even appeared. General Roca called his invasion of Indian lands the “conquest of the desert.” Patagonia was “an empty space,” a kingdom of nothing, inhabited by no one.
After that, Indians continued disappearing. Those who surrendered and gave up their land and everything else were called indios reducidos: reduced to the point of disappearing. And those who did not surrender and were defeated by gunfire and sword blows disappeared into numbers, becoming the nameless dead of military body counts. And their children disappeared too: divvied up as war booty, called by other names, emptied of memory, they became little slaves for the murderers of their parents.
TALLEST STATUE
At the end of the nineteenth century, bullets from Remingtons brought the clearing of the Patagonia to a close.
As the few survivors of the killing departed, they sang a lament:
Land of mine do not leave me,
no matter how far away I go.
During his trip through the region, Charles Darwin had already warned that the natives were dying out not by natural selection but due to a government policy of extermination. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento believed that savage tribes constituted “a danger to society,” and the architect of the final safari, General Roca, called his victims “wild animals.”
The army undertook the hunt in the name of public security, but the Indians’ lands were also tempting. When the Rural Society congratulated him on his mission accomplished, General Roca proclaimed :
“Forever free from Indian domination is this incredibly vast territory that now offers astonishing promise
to immigrants and foreign capital.”
Six million hectares passed into the hands of sixty-seven landowners. When he died in 1914, Roca left his inheritors sixty-five thousand hectares of land stolen from the Indians.
During his lifetime, not all Argentines appreciated the dedication of this warrior for the fatherland, but death enhanced his stature: now his is the country’s tallest statue and thirty-five other monuments commemorate him, his figure graces the highest-denomination bill, and a city plus numerous avenues, parks, and schools bear his name.
LONGEST STREET
A massacre inaugurated Uruguay’s independence.
In July 1830, the constitution was approved, and a year later the new country was baptized in blood.
About five hundred Charrúa Indians, who had survived centuries of conquest, persecution, and harassment, were living north of the Negro River, exiles in their own land.
The new government summoned them to a meeting. The chiefs came accompanied by their people. They were promised peace, jobs, respect.
They ate, drank, and continued drinking until they passed out. Then, by sword and bayonet, they were executed.
This act of betrayal was termed a battle. And from then on the gulch where it occurred was called Salsipuedes—“Get out if you can.”
Very few men got out. The women and children were shared around, the former as flesh for the barracks, the latter as slaves for the posh families of Montevideo.
Fructuoso Rivera, Uruguay’s first president, planned and later celebrated “this civilizing mission to put an end to the raids of the savage hordes.”
Foretelling the crime, he had written: “It will be grand, it will be beautiful.”
The country’s longest street, which cuts across the city of Montevideo, bears his name.
MARTÍ
A father and son were strolling along Havana’s flower-filled streets when they ran across a bald and skinny gentleman hurrying as if he were late.
And the father warned the son:
“Watch out for that one. He’s white outside, but on the inside he’s black.”
The son, Fernando Ortiz, was fourteen.
Some time later, Fernando was to rescue, from centuries of racist denial, the hidden black roots of Cuban identity.
And that dangerous gent, the skinny bald man in a hurry, was José Martí. The most Cuban of all Cubans, a son of Spaniards, was the one who decried:
“We were but a mask, wearing underwear from England, a vest from Paris, a frock coat from America, and a cap from Spain.”
He repudiated the false erudition called civilization, and he demanded:
“No more robes or epaulettes.”
And he stated:
“All the glory in the world fits inside a kernel of corn.”
Shortly after that sighting on Havana’s streets, Martí headed for the mountains. And he was fighting for Cuba when a Spanish bullet knocked him from his horse.
MUSCLES
José Martí announced it and he denounced it: the young nation in North America would become a gluttonous empire, its hunger for land insatiable. It had already devoured all of the natives’ territory and half of Mexico’s and it would not stop there.
“No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumph of war,” proclaimed Teddy Roosevelt, who received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Mr. Teddy was president until 1909, when he gave up invading countries and went off to fight rhinoceroses in Africa.
His successor, William Howard Taft, invoked the natural order of things:
“The whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally.”
MARK TWAIN
Some months after invading Iraq, President George W. Bush said he had taken the war to liberate the Philippines as his model.
Both wars were inspired from heaven.
Bush disclosed that God had ordered him to act as he did. And a century beforehand, President William McKinley also heard the voice from the Great Beyond:
“God told me that we could not leave the Filipinos to themselves.
They were unfit for self-government. There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate them, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.”
Thus the Philippines were liberated from the Filipino threat, and along the way the United States also saved Cuba, Puerto Rico, Honduras, Colombia, Panama, Dominican Republic, Hawaii, Guam, Samoa . . .
At the time, writer Ambrose Bierce revealed:
“War is God’s way of teaching us geography.”
And his colleague Mark Twain, leader of the Anti-Imperialist League, designed a new flag for the nation, featuring little skulls in place of stars.
General Frederick Funston suggested Twain ought to be hanged for treason.
Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn defended their father.
KIPLING
Unlike Twain, Rudyard Kipling was enthralled by wars of conquest. His popular poem “The White Man’s Burden” exhorted the invading nations to remain on invaded lands until their civilizing mission was complete:
Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
The poet, born in Bombay but raised as an Englishman, saw serfs as too ignorant to know what they needed, and too ungrateful to ever appreciate the sacrifices their masters made for them:
Take up the White Man’s burden—
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard—
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light . . .
SWORD OF THE EMPIRE
At Wounded Knee, General Nelson A. Miles solved the Indian problem by shooting women and children.
In Chicago, General Miles solved the worker problem by sending the leaders of the Pullman strike to their graves.
In San Juan, Puerto Rico, General Miles solved the colonial problem by pulling down the Spanish flag and raising the Stars and Stripes in its place. And he nailed up posters all over town that said, “English spoken here,” in case no one had noticed. He proclaimed himself governor. And he explained to the invaded that the invaders had “come not to make war, but on the contrary, to bring you protection, not only to yourselves, but to your property, and to promote your prosperity, and to . . . ”
CIVILIZED RICE
From the beginning, the redemption of the Philippines enjoyed the invaluable support of the ladies of charity.
Those good souls, wives of high officials and officers of the invading forces, began by visiting the Manila jail. They noticed that the prisoners were markedly thin. When they toured the kitchen and saw what the wretches were eating, their hearts sank. It was primitive rice: grains of all sizes, opaque, dark, with the husk and germ and everything still attached.
They implored their husbands to do something, and their husbands did not pass up the chance to do good. The next ship from the United States brought a cargo of civilized rice, all the grains alike, husked and polished and shining, whitened with talcum powder.
From the end of 1901, that is what the prisoners ate. In the first ten months, 4,825 of them fell ill, and 216 died.
American doctors attributed the disaster to one of those microbes that propagate in the poor hygiene of backward countries. But just in case, they ordered the prison kitchen to go back to the old menu.
Once the prisoners were eating primitive rice again, the plague disappeared.
ORIGIN OF DEMOCRACY
In 1889, Brazil’s monarchy died suddenly.
One morning, monarchist politicians woke up as republicans.
A couple of years later, the constitution esta
blished universal suffrage. Everyone could vote, except women and the illiterate.
Since nearly all Brazilians were either female or illiterate, practically no one voted.
In the first democratic election, ninety-eight of every one hundred Brazilians did not answer the call to the ballot box.
A powerful coffee baron, Prudente de Moraes, was elected the nation’s president. He moved to Rio from São Paulo and nobody noticed. No one came out to greet him; no one even recognized him.
Now he enjoys a certain renown as the main street near the elegant beach of Ipanema.
ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSITY
In colonial times, those Brazilian families who could afford the luxury sent their sons to study at the University of Coimbra in Portugal.
Later on, several schools were set up in Brazil to train lawyers and doctors: few of either, since potential clients were scarce in a country where the many had neither rights nor any medicine but death. Several schools, but no university.
Until 1922. That year Belgium’s King Leopold III announced plans to visit the country, and such an august presence merited a doctor honoris causa, which only a university could bestow.