Luchita Hurtado. Untitled, 1971.

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by Rafaël Newman

In the summer of 1977 my father invited me to tea at the Hotel Grande Bretagne in Athens. I had turned 13 that spring, and instead of a bar mitzvah, prohibited by matrilineal descent and an antipathy to organized religion, my father and I were en route to Israel, to visit the kibbutz where he had worked in the mid-1950s. We had flown from Vancouver to Amsterdam, proceeded by train to Rome, and continued by rail across Italy to Brindisi, by ferry to Patras, and by coach to Athens. From there we would eventually embark, at Piraeus, on the crossing to Haifa; for the moment we were enjoying some sightseeing in the Greek capital.

We were by now already several days into a three-week trip and I was slowly adjusting to the oddness of being alone with my father in unfamiliar territory. At our first stop the exciting absurdity of the canals in Amsterdam had made up somewhat for nine hours of jetlag; my New World teenage composure, however, was tested by the shared bathroom on the corridor of our Dutch hotel. It was the first of several jarring encounters. On the train bound south from Holland we were interrogated at the German border by a customs guard, who had entered our sleeping compartment and, at the sight of a youth with an older man, their journey having originated in Amsterdam, had me roll up my sleeve so he could check for tracks. Later, in the dormitory of the youth hostel in Rome in which my father’s salary as an assistant professor had billeted us, I awoke in my bunkbed to see a fellow guest naked in the middle of the room, gingerly applying salve to his posterior. Read more »

by R. Passov

I had hand-written a simple essay: My father is in prison, my mother works, welfare helps and I got a 1310 on my SATs. The letter of acceptance from UCLA was short  – we’re happy to let you know….

The hill leading to the main quad of the UCLA campus is terraced into three landings by flat, wide brick stairs built in the late 1920’s, depression-era stimulus. By the time I got there, Bel Air, Beverly Hills, and Westwood surrounded that hill.

An old Daily Bruin lay on the ground. Past the comings and goings of Bruin Life, blond and blue, basketball, tennis and good teeth, I found a classified ad: Wanted, cook for a professor’s family, free room and board, walking distance to campus.  

I can cook, I thought. Walking distance was a plus. I found a payphone, heard age in the voice that answered along with an English that came from afar and was invited to interview.

I found the house a few blocks into the hills above Sunset Blvd. Dr. Mommarts was tall, slender, newly old, easy. His white-blond hair fell uncombed. His soft brown eyes, protected by wild eyebrows. He spoke with an accent, in proper English, yet his words lacked edge, one ending after the next began.

He assumed I would not have responded to the ad without having knowledge of cooking. I got a brief tour of a modern one-story home anchored by a single hallway whose wall was a long stretch of glass, rimming a flat yard. “Here’s the kitchen,” he said. There were two rooms, one with a sink, counter space, stove, oven. And a second with cabinets, a second sink and a wide wooden table. “And the preparation room.”

From the kitchen we walked down the hallway, past the end of the windows, to a small room with a single bed and a dresser, located near to a bathroom. “Here’s where you’ll stay,” he said and that was it. I was a cook. Read more »

by Philip Graham

I’ve long been partial to Portuguese culture, so when Portugal transferred its last colonial holding, Macau, back to Chinese rule in 1999 , a friend surprised me with his marveling reaction: “Portugal had an empire? Who knew?”

Perhaps his reaction shouldn’t have surprised me. In the United States, steeped as we are in the history of the United Kingdom’s “empire on which the sun never sets,” few are aware that the Portuguese accomplished the first European globe-spanning empire, beginning in the 15th century.

When I lived in Lisbon for a year, I noticed that my Portuguese friends wrestled with the legacy of their country’s history. They felt pride at the achievements of their intrepid ancestors’ global reach. But they also felt shame, because while all empires break too much before they reshape the chaos they created, Portugal’s empire was especially bad.

The Portuguese initiated the transatlantic slave trade in 1444, which has bedeviled and tormented much of the world ever since. Sixty years later, the Viceroy Alfonso Albuquerque expanded Portuguese power not only as exploration for economic reasons, but as a brutal crusade against Islam. By 1580, the empire extended from Brazil to Africa, from India to Malaysia and on to the Indonesian island of Timor.

So what happened to this Portuguese empire, which now no longer exists? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Eric J. Weiner

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now. —James Baldwin

Before the pomp and circumstance of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s inauguration officially framed the white supremacist insurrection at the Capitol on January 6 an outlier of U.S. history, an affront to American Exceptionalism, and a brief pause in the Nation’s moral progress, there was a lot of talk about the “big lie” that precipitated it. I expect, with the impeachment trial scheduled to begin next week, that we will again hear quite a bit about the “big lie” and its power to change water into wine. Historically, the big lie, lobbed in concert with many smaller lies, is the one that tips the scale of reason, fuels delusional thinking, and provides the foundation for all kinds of violence and hate. Hitler knew it when he perpetuated the big lie about Jews running a global cabal. And Trump knew it when he repeatedly told the big lie about a rigged and stolen election. Timothy Snyder, the Levin Professor of History at Yale University and author of On Tyranny (2017) says, “There are lies that, if you believe in them, rearrange everything…a big lie is a lie which is big enough that it tears the fabric of reality.” When enough people believe in the big lie, and their beliefs have time to ferment and spread, the big lie becomes a spectacle.

“The spectacle,” as Guy Deborg explained, “is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images… It is a world vision which has become objectified.” Right-wing corporate media and social media platforms, during the past five years, have helped to construct and disseminate the spectacle of the big lie, turning facts into a matter of perspective and words/images into weapons of mass delusion. From the ashes of “the real” arise the rational irrationality of relativistic thinking. The Trumpist cult of mass delusion, aided and abetted by corporate and social media, is unified by the spectacle of the big lie while becoming an integral part of it. But however dangerous the spectacle of the big lie is to democracy, it is not the most pernicious and dangerous lie in America. In fact, Trump’s big lie could not have become the spectacle it did had a bigger lie not preceded it. Read more »

by Bill Murray

Politics as the family business works out better for some than for others. Last year Turkish President Erdogan had to fire his son-in-law Finance Minister. And the Trumps, well … you know. But things are working out pretty well for the Rajapaksas of Sri Lanka.

The President is Gotabaya Rajapaksa, nickname “the terminator.” The Prime Minister is Mahinda Rajapaksa, his older brother. Basil Rajapaksa, “Mr. Ten Percent,” their younger brother, is a former MP. Their other brother Chamal, a former speaker of Parliament, is a cabinet minister, and Namal Rajapaksa, Mahindra’s son, is an MP and Minister of Sports, representing the next Rajapaksa generation.

When we left our story (Read part 1 here) it was six o’clock in the morning, election day 1999 in Nuwara Eliya, a highland tea-picking town south of Kandy, Sri Lanka. Two loudspeakers played the call to prayer, mounted atop a glass-enclosed Buddha statue just by the traffic circle. The sun hadn’t cleared the hills but it was set to be a glorious morning, birds and dew run riot.

At this hour, Nuwara Eliya served mostly as a regional bus station. People queued for rides and a few stores pushed open their doors. At a milk bar (that’s a name for convenience stores, here to New Zealand) I bought toothpaste and remarked how it would be a nice day. Dazzling smile: “It is election day, sir!” Read more »

by Bill Benzon

Elizabeth from Knoxville

We haven’t yet settled on a name for the event. I do see “1/6” being used here and there, a formation parallel to “9/11.” However reference to 9/11 is common, well understood, and routine, while the use “1/6” is sporadic. But then the bombing of the World Trade Center is almost two decades old while the certification riots happened only yesterday. We’ve not had time to understand and assimilate them.

We don’t even know what to call them. I just used the word “riot”, but is that what they were? What does that word imply? What about “protest”, “insurrection”, “putsch”, or as Elizabeth from Knoxville said (see the video clip above), “revolution”? One might answer, “semantics, mere semantics, we all know what you’re referring to.” Well, yes, we’ve got the reference. But figuring out just what those events were, that’s not a matter of mere semantics. The legal and institutional implications of those words are quite different. Riots happen all the time, as do protests, insurrection is quite different, no?

Nor do we know just what happened. We’ve seen the videos, we recognize some of the people – how could we forget the Q-Shaman, with his skins, buffalo horns, and face paint? – and we know that five people died. But all those people and events have connections. How far do those connections reach? Who planned to storm the Capitol ahead of time with specific objectives in view and who just went along with the flow? Who talked with whom? Do any of those communication chains reach into Congress or the White House? What did Donald Trump know and when did he know it? What did he intend?

We have a nation divided against itself. Read more »