Armorer/Corporal YD-038 recording

Page Seventeen:

Tom Paine Maru by L. Neil Smith

Repression spares us the memory of birth, along with the painful remembrance of many agonies of childhood or adult life, but it has unfortunate side-effects. It creates the subconscious, which is simply a repository of repressed data. According to the praxeologists, a sane person would have no subconscious. It lowers effective intelligence by tying up physiological hardware, intellectual software, also, physical energy.

Worse, by separating the process of cognition from sensation, repression separates the human “life” — which suffers any number of painful experiences daily — from the human mind, in a misdirected attempt at protecting it. The mind — which evolved for billions of years to control a life — naturally looks for other lives to control, instead. The life, because it must, looks for other minds to control it.

The is the essence of the authoritarian personality, inclined to be as fully submissive as it is to be brutally domineering. The praxeologists believe the drive for power is inversely proportional to the remaining operative intelligence, which explains why individuals, climbing up the ladder of society, appear more stupid the higher they get.

Religion serves many functions in a culture. It gives supreme leaders the comforting feeling that there is a controlling mind above them.

According to Confederates, the happiest non-sane human being is a mid-level bureaucrat with lives to control below, minds above for guidance.

I would have to think about that one.

It certainly matched my experience.

– L. Neil Smith, Tom Paine Maru

We had been there a couple of times already during our two weeks or so in the city. Antigua itself is beautiful, up in the high country, filled with classic colonial-period architecture, lots of neat little shops, and plenty for the tourist. Just to the south, Volcán de Agua towers some 12,000 feet above everything. As Guatemala goes, you couldn’t ask for a more serene, lovely place.

Volcán de Agua, Antigua, Guatemala

And the restaurant was lovely too, with an indoor courtyard with tropical trees, a lively bar in the back and a menu worth sampling again and again. Though at the top end of the scale for Guatemala, the prices were quite comfortable for bearers of United States dollars looking for great food in a nice setting. The clientele were generally foreign tourists, with the occasional group of darker-skinned, upper-class guatemaltecos appearing as well.

A couple of people walk in and start making for the back of the restaurant, where there might be some tables available. They approach us, as we’re sitting at a table against a wall along the route to the back. A young man, perhaps 19 years of age, followed by a middle aged man, presumably his father. Both guatemaltecos.

My eye is caught for some reason. Something isn’t right about the youth’s gait. In an instant, I see why: his arm ends in a short stump just below his shoulder. And then I notice his father behind him, with a prosthetic arm slung over his shoulder.

Tragic. What horrible accident must have led to this. I can’t even imagine what life would be like, less than physically complete, not to mention the sensations, the horror, the feelings that must come of losing a limb. The folks who live in the countryside and till the land in Guatemala have hard lives, and accidents must be common.

I turn my attention back to my shrimp cocktail, quickly, as they approach our table.

But something is still not right with the young man’s gait, and I turn as they pass, perhaps impolitely, and look again.

And it is then that I see that the father carries not one, but two prosthetic arms slung over his shoulders. And that his son’s other arm is also mostly missing, ending in a slightly longer stump than the other.

What do you call a young man with no arms?

Victim.

Perhaps I drop my fork as the realization hits me: this young man walking past me, just entering adulthood, was not the victim of an accident.

Silence on the Mountain

Right up until the end of the bloody 46-year Guatemalan “civil” war in 1996, state-sponsored gangs roamed the countryside, striking targets of opportunity and instilling fear into the populace, in hopes of crushing support for the guerrilla resistance groups. A favorite tactic, described in Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala; Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala and elsewhere, was for the terror squads to attack small, rural villages suspected of sheltering or supporting the guerrillas. Everyone in the village was forced out of their homes at gunpoint, assembled, and segregated: men over here, women over there, children here. The villagers watched as soldiers and police raped their mothers, sisters and daughters. Those who resisted were simply shot. Those surviving now watched as some of the children, boys especially, had one or both of their arms or hands hacked off with machetes. And then most of the men were executed. Still more were led away from the villages, bound and at gunpoint, enslaved or slaughtered and never to be seen again: los desaparecidos, the disappeared.

The armless young man who just walked past me, without doubt, was one of those children in the villages in the early- to mid-1990s — mutilated, crippled by the criminal violence of state agents in the service of an inhuman ruling class, and left to live as a reminder to those who would challenge their privilege.

I tried several times, in conversations with guatemaltecos, to ask about the war, and how it had touched their lives. None would speak of it to me — perhaps because I am a white man, but without question because they want to forget.

Why?

Dunno. It occurred to me. I used to have this “friend”, see, who in between loading the three-foot “weed eater” for the next bong hit would occasionally belt this one out. An odd thing, perhaps, for a Jew to sing.

And no, we really didn’t have any good friends who just happened to be black… or communists… or Christians.

Let’s hope he got it from someplace… someplace pure. Someplace like The Doctor Demento Show, for instance.

Anyone know who wrote this piece of Ameri-horror-cana?

Speaking of random thoughts which crawl out of the depths of one’s mind late at night… anyone remember the scene from Airplane! where the well-dressed, polite boy comes to sit next to the well-dressed, aristocratic little girl on the plane, bearing a tray of beverages?

“Coffee?”

“Yes, please.”

“Milk?”

“No, thank you. I take it black. Like my men.”

Yeah, I thought you did.

Stand up and be counted, show the world that you’re a man
Stand up and be counted, go with the Ku Klux Klan

We are a sacred brotherhood, who love our country true
We always can be counted on, when there’s a job to do
We serve our homeland day and night, to keep it always free
And proudly wear our robes of white, protecting liberty.

Stand up and be counted, show the world that you’re a man
Stand up and be counted, go with the Ku Klux Klan

[trumpet solo]

The Bible, cross, Old Glory, too, our symbols of a man
A sword and water, robe and hood portray our noble Klan
In search of peace and liberty, we pledge our hearts and hands
We must defeat the communists to save our Christian land

Stand up and be counted, show the world that you’re a man
Stand up and be counted, go with the Ku Klux Klan

Stand up and be counted, show the world that you’re a man
Stand up and be counted, go with the Ku Klux Klan