che

In my optimistic phase freshman year of college, I hauled my tentative derriere from the dorm to hear a speech by Inga Muscio, self-proclaimed feminist author and activist. I spent most of her speech allowing my mind to wander off to section dynamics and how to cultivate friendship, but I perked up when she started talking about the power of names. She focused on W. Bush, on how a trace of negative energy and power leaked to him with every mention of his name, no matter the context. She called him Arbusto (Spanish for 'shrub') to avoid the unintentional reinforcement of her own theory. I thought it was a bit extreme, but an intriguing idea: each time our name is mentioned it affects us and the world around us in some way.

Her idea came back to me today as I continued to push through Empire's Workshop. It's in the shimmer of certain names, their oily sheen or their beatific glow. Every time I read the words Oliver North I feel like I shrink inside my own skin. Bush's name produces a narrowing of the eyes and an occasional cynical burst of laughter as each mention confirms my feelings. The strongest impression I've gotten of late, though, came from Grandin's treatment of Ernesto "Che" Guevara. I should almost say 'lack thereof.' In the whole history of Latin American resistance to U.S. involvement, the Argentine-doctor-turned-guerilla-revolutionary-turned-pin-up-boy-for-rebels-who-don't-do-their-research merited only one paragraph. And my reaction to that one paragraph only proved the wisdom of that choice. Guevara has become sheer magic realism. His name means something entirely different from what he actually did with his life. Have you seen The Motorcycle Diaries? I watched it for the second time last weekend. It paints a stunning picture of an honorable, gruff young man struggling as his idealism overtakes his ties to the bourgeois world in which he's grown up. The soundtrack is masterfully concocted and composed by Gustavo Santaolalla, the fellow behind Brokeback Mountain, which tells you a bit about its tendency toward sweeping. Have you walked into a bookstore in Central America? Every shelf is heavy with Che, Che, Che. He's grander than Fidel because he never calcified, and more immortal than Allende because he fought with guns instead of politics and therefore remained untinged by diplomacy. You read his name and sigh with the envy of any socially-conscious member of the upper middle class for one who followed his idealism through to its lowest common denominator, you see his face emblazoned on the red t-shirt or incongruously pasted across the rasta-colored flag and long for the courage to achieve the same glory, regardless of whether his life actually confirms the values he's come to represent. It Doesn't Matter. He is fiction. That is why, I think, Grandin spent so little time on him. A book devoted to exposing the uncomfortable scope of ugliness in Latin America has no room for such dewy hero-worship, but were he to try to ground Guevara's story in quotidian unmagic realism he would alienate a large portion of his readership. So Che gets his paragraph and then fades behind the Allendes and the Castros and the Pinochets and the Kirkpatricks and the Montts and the Somozas and the Sandinistas and the Norths and the Robertsons and the Carters and the whole mess of mixed figures that villainize and manipulate one another for months upon months. And I'm left running his name through my fingers, trying to decide if it's one that belongs on the world's lips.

There are things on my mind tonight. They're perching, some digging claws into tender bits of my medulla oblongata, others swizzling their feathers across the cerebral cortex. (And only Catherine will really ever be able to tell me if those are relevant brain parts or not. I just like the way they sound.) I feel like my mental capacities went into some deep, self-centered hibernation over the holidays, and have emerged only this week, hyperactive to compensate for their long slow introspection. Now they flit and flaunt on mangoes, on the "Good Neighbor" policy, on ceramics techniques, on recipes for mole, on Guatemalan celebrities and political parties, on pageantry and the top 2% of the population, on Pablo Neruda and how thoroughly I love him, on dreams ripe with meaning and those that linger more in realms of spectacle and shock, on tamalitos, on seasons, on value judgments and my judgment of their value, on the U.S. public education I received up to eighth grade... Will I sleep tonight? Only if I grant these thoughts some ballast, which is what I'm attempting here. This list is every bit as flitty as the thoughts that inspired it, though. Let me see.

One thread here's the political one. When I was in Mexico two years ago there was an enormously important election in the Senate and the House. The whole day it took place I haunted the library, refreshing my news pages at every opportunity, breathlessly awaiting the judgment I felt would come through. This time, this trip, it was the presidential election. I stayed home and planned a lesson. This was an election I'd followed with urgency at home, an election for which I'd wriggled through hoops in order to be able to vote, and yet when the day rolled around I couldn't be bothered to walk the fifteen minutes into town. I didn't even find out the results until the next morning, when my German friend and fellow volunteer, Barbara, informed me of what she'd found out the night before. The same was true for the day of the inauguration. My mom called from her post by the television, reporting her feeling of overflowing hope and tearful joy, and I had actually forgotten the significance of the day. I'm not sure exactly what this means. One possibility is that I've actually become stuck in here in a way that I never did in Mexico. I'm doing something that fills much of my time and my mind, gesturing at an actual concrete (if miniscule) change, and therefore less caught up in the pageantry (told you that word was on my mind) of politics. It's also a trace of cynicism, I blush to confess in this moment when the world is supposed to be flushed with a restoration of the right to hope. I've just picked up this book, Empire's Workshop, by Greg Grandin. Its thesis is that U.S. foreign policy was conceptualized and tested in relation to Latin America, that the foundation for our diplomatic interactions with Europe and Japan and our violent imposition of "order" in the Middle East was laid in our use of soft and hard power in our own hemisphere. It is not exactly inflating me with optimism. It has led me into two sweeping political conversations in the last two days, one in Spanish (which makes me absurdly proud) and one in English, one after coffee and one after kusha, the local firewater that gets served periodically in Itzapa. In each I found myself forced, if not into defense of the U.S., at least into tempering the disgust people feel at the mention of our country's name with some sense that it isn't all that way. Two points keep returning. One is that we are so enormous. The day a governor of any sort cannot know all his constituents is the day that power begins to corrupt, I think. As soon as the people in power cannot directly witness the outcome of their decisions, they start to disbelieve in the reality of the effects of their decisions, like kids slaughtering aliens in video games-- like Ender, convinced he's being trained in battle techniques only to learn at the end of his supposedly imaginary campaign that each triangle he blew up was a real ship and each circle a real planet. With a lack of accountability comes a lack of understanding that is born, not out of spite or inhumanity, but out of a genuine inability to comprehend the figures in terms of real lives, real poverty, real illiteracy, real hunger, real deaths. This is a crap excuse; it's no excuse, but it does make it a bit easier to imagine a politician as a real human being beneath the trappings and uglinesses of power. The other point is related to size as well. It's the homogeneity problem. Many of my fellow volunteers are from scattered regions. My first political engagement was with Dario, a curly-haired volunteer from Italy who's been traveling around Latin America for the last several months, and Irene, my housemate and fellow intern, who's from Spain-- Catalan, to be precise. They were both deeply surprised that I'd learned to question and even criticize my government in public school. Though I don't pretend to know every mistake the U.S. has made since it existed (oh god, the size problem in yet another manifestation-- I doubt the most gifted historian has the capacity for that information) I've been marveling at our misguidedness at least since first really learning about slavery in fifth grade. In those days I read history in a constant state of us vs. them, trying to ascertain which side held the virtue and which was to be condemned, dreading the possibility that California might have tottered between North and South in the Civil War, dodging any association with our 'dark past.' I have an even older memory of being in the front seat as my mom drove across the Golden Gate Bridge and saying "I'm so glad we live in a time when there aren't any more wars." I must have been six or seven. That would make it '92 or '93. Civil war was going strong in Guatemala, for damn sure, 30+ years after it had started. El Salvador would have just signed the pact to nominally end their civil war, though fighting would continue for another ten years or so. Bosnia and Herzegovina had declared independence, initiating (well, as much as one act ever initiates anything-- catalyzing?) absurd bloodshed in that part of the world. Israel and Palestine were doing their thing. The Rodney King riots went down in L.A. That was a tangent. Back to fifth grade, and onward to eighth grade. Mr. Butler had us engaging in debates for and against the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and I was supposed to argue in favor of it, and I came up with some brilliant point and felt myself split utterly in two: the victorious part that felt enormous satisfaction in my abilities and the horrified part that could see what would happen, what had already happened. Even knowing the outcome I could sit there in front of the class and make my point. It was the beginning of my enjoyment of playing devil's advocate, not just as an intellectual exercise but as an urgent desire to show that there are infinite sides to any story, to knock each and every speechmaker off of the pedestal or soapbox he or she had chosen. This battle to force some kind of dialogue came to mean a lot more to me than any specific political cause or issue. That's still what I'm doing, I guess. But I'm doing my research now too. It's haunting, and distracting from the present, and discouraging to watch one admired or at least respected politician after another (JFK? bye. Eisenhower? so long) lose my faith, but the fact that I had any faith to lose means something. Does that make some sense? It means I do defend the U.S., if very very hesitantly and carefully. It means I do want to come back. Just not until I have a slightly better sense of what it is that invites my return.

I had a good eight other streams of consciousness to dump at your feet tonight, but it's getting to be time to sleep, ballast or no. I'll re-read all this later and see if it makes any sense. In the meantime, I'll dream things I can't explain at all, which might be refreshing.