ODYSSEUS

In Africa, four million years ago, in what is known today as Laetoli, Tanzania, the Sadiman volcano  erupted.  Three Hominids escaping the devastation inadvertently left their footprints preserved in the scorching volcanic ash; one of them a female with an infant.  Those footprints eloquently communicate the tragedy, because they indicate that one of them stopped and looked back toward the east at the cataclysm; the earliest prehistoric evidence of the perpetually chaotic, dolorous odyssey of Man.

(i)

The Old Jew, Leopold, arrived on the only public transportation available; a third class, notoriously unpunctual bus belonging to the single transportation system exclusively licensed to operate in the state and owned by the governor’s brother in law.  The antiquated, rusting buses of the transportation system were purchased by the brother in law with a loan from the state government, approved by the governor himself, which, it was confidentially understood, would never have to be repaid.  The brother in law paid less than one third of what the bill of sale indicated was the purchase price of the vehicles, the other two thirds being divided equally with the governor in cash; less a small commission the brother in law surreptitiously charged the grateful seller of the obsolete buses, which he covertly pocketed.

The muffler less bus roared and bucked like an untamed stallion on fatigued springs and worn out shock absorbers, negotiating the treacherous, narrow mountain road to the remote village once each week.  On frequent occasions it would stall.  The men were then required to descend from the vehicle and push it to a downward slope, from where the driver would be able to again start its engine as gravity rolled it downhill; the passengers running swiftly from behind to overtake it and re-board.

On the downhill sections, the driver would accelerate savagely, his foot attempting to push the steel gas pedal through the floorboard in an effort to recoup some of the time lost in the agonizingly sluggish uphill portions of the terrain, additionally seeking revenge by irresponsibly hurtling the bus around those drivers who had caused him to lose face by passing during his impotent ascent. 

The bus drivers were not professional chauffeurs, having learned their trade behind the wheel of the vehicles they drove.  They had exchanged a nominal gratuity for a license, and depending on the percentage of their salary kicked back to the company dispatcher, they were assigned a commensurate route.  Sometimes, the excessive downhill speed would plunge a bus off the cliff and into the deep ravines that bordered the steep curves carved into the mountainside, without the benefit of guard rails.

Leopold was following the sanguinary, anthropophagic Cyclops, the Nazi torturers of his people, the most renown of the insidious genocidal annihilators in the scrapbook of modern history; those now mutilated giants who had elevated the concept of racial purging into a profane doxology.  Ultimately defeated in combat, in abject panic for their lives, the more fortunate and privileged of those assassins secretly crossed the ocean from the east to that other continent in the west, which the effete Europeans disdainfully consider less sophisticated; uncivilized.  For an eagerly received monetary inducement, the authorities of the New World, some themselves accomplished perpetrators of homicide, provided sanctuary.

There was suspicion that the Jew’s hunt for the Nazi criminals had been relatively successful, that several names on his list were eliminated through his personal intervention, but given the lack of economic incentive, no one was sufficiently interested to investigate further.

“They have corrupted themselves, their spot is not the spot of His children: they are a perverse and crooked generation.” (1)

(ii)

When the European Jew first stepped on the soil profaned by the Spanish Conquistadors, he was nonplussed and surprised.  The pale old man with the faded blue numbers tattooed on the wrinkled, almost transparent skin of his forearm was once again offended by the blatantly racist insinuation implicit in the greeting of one another by the local population: “Raza!” “Sangre!”  An exultant salutation conspicuously distinguishing their genetic pool from that of the “Other”; the antithesis of the racial slur, notwithstanding that it proves synonymous in evoking an alienating, separationist ideology.

ChinkBeanerGookGreaseballGringoGuineaJapKikeKrautMickNiggerWop.

Jew.

Although not precisely considered a racial insult, the very mention of the word Jew evokes millenarian passions.

The Pharaohs of Egypt referred to the Jews in their midst as the “abomination of the gods.”  For centuries afterward, the word Jew was used to identify the outsider regardless of his origin.

Considering themselves “gente de razon,” the Spanish Conquistadors instituted a harsh caste system for their offspring in the Americas.  Revisionist historians, pseudo scholars, and apologists pretend the Spaniards practiced an enlightened, egalitarian homogenization after exterminating most of the indigenous population.  In actual fact, they instituted a policy appropriately designated as “Limpieza de Sangre” a depuration of the blood, which organized the society according to shades of skin pigmentation. 

Additional noteworthy criteria in the effort to classify racial purity, a theory later refined in the Third Reich, were cranial shape, body structure, nose width, lip thickness, eye color, and hair color and texture.  The continuing miscegenation from generation to generation resulted in physiological differences within the population, requiring an ever increasing vocabulary:  At the apex of the community were the elite Peninsulares (Spanish), and the Criollo (descendants of Spanish), followed by the masses, the mixed bloods:  Albarrazao, Cambuyo, Chino Negro, Coyote Mestizo, Mestizo, Mulatto, Mulatto Blanco, Mulatto Prieto, Mulatto Lobo, Morisco, Negro, Pardo Negro, Indio, Jibaro, Salta Atrás, Torna Atrás, Tente En El Aire, No Te Entiendo, Ahí Estas, Zambo.

The Conquistadors mulatto children, born to black mothers who were purchased from the Muslim slave traders in Africa, were integrated into the slave population.

Incogitantly, there exists to this day, erected in the center median of  what is considered the longest highway in the world, a thoroughfare that originates at the Canadian border and ends in Tierra del Fuego; a monumental sculpture commemorating insistent racial singularity, titled “Monument to the Race.”  There would appear to be an incongruity in its realization, however, for it is sculpted from unblemished white marble, notwithstanding it is a celebration of the genetic union between the indigenous population and their Spanish conquerors, resulting in a new race considered by them to be bronze: “La Raza de Bronze.” (2)

 (iii)

Leopold stepped hastily off the bus along with the other passengers who forcibly restrained the protesting chickens and pigs they were bringing to the weekly market; everyone relieved to have finally arrived unharmed at their destination.  He stood a tall, lean and pale figure, monochromatic in his wrinkled dark suit, shiny from countless hand iron pressings, and a tie less white cotton shirt, surrounded by the lush extravagance of limitless brilliant color.  His was a world of pure blacks and whites, theirs one of bewildering Byzantine intricacy; complex enigmas obfuscating candid meaning.

He meticulously cleaned the lenses of his wire frame glasses with the edge of his prayer shawl, pushing away the hanging, twisted threads of his ostentatious tzit-tzit.  He then removed his black felt hat to solemnly adjust his yarmulke, conceivably to assure himself that it was still there.  A Jew, the product of an Odyssean Diaspora, enveloped in what the appropriately surnamed Jose Vasconcelos (3), in his racist brainchild, the Mein Kampf of Latin America, designated as constituting the Cosmic Race.  Vasconcelos conceived of himself and his compatriots as being the inhabiting remnants of a long lost Atlantis, whose destiny is to triumph over all others.  His vision encompassed a fifth race, and a Pan-Hispanic, Catholic continent; rabidly non-Anglo, non-Caucasian, aspiring ultimately to world domination.

“For not only one enemy has risen against us, in every generation men rise against us to destroy us.” (4)

“Every Body Wantsto Rulethe World,” the Old Jew hummed sardonically under his breath as he sauntered away from the disorderly, raucous haggling of the marketplace.

Leopold was hungry, but he couldn’t allow himself the time for a meal; perhaps after finishing his business.  Kidneys were on his mind.  Pork kidneys and bread to sop up the thick gravy.

(iv)

Leopold had left Dublin some time ago, already a man advanced in years.  He had abandoned the women of Nighttown; the daughters of Pharaoh.  He also left behind the Shulamite woman, the one who had lured him in his youth with her long, slim fingers of slow pleasure. 

Marion, was this Jew’s Shulamite, his Unaizah, his wanton Shiksa; the one he affectionately called Molly.  Molly, his woman of Eire from County Galway.  Molly, the demimondaine black Irish rose whose Faith, legend has it, was plucked by her forefathers from the splintered debris of a broken empire, floating on a life giving salty sea from the Pillars of Hercules, that barren outcrop known to the Muslims of Dar-al-Islam as Jabal Tarik, to eventually crash upon her rocky, barren shore. (5) 

Promiscuous Molly, for whom he had metamorphosed his Star of David into a Cross.

“If thou do forget the Lord thy God, and walk after other gods, and serve them, and worship them, I testify against you this day that ye shall surely perish.” (6)

SATYRUS THE PERIPATETIC

A BURLESQUE

CHARACTERS:

THE JEW

THE SHULAMITE WOMAN

DANCERS

CHORUS

SCENE:  A desert oasis surrounded by undulating mountains of sand, flaming with sunlight.  Date palms dominate the desert scenery; dancers perform in front of them.  The Jew and the Shulamite woman recline beside a small waterfall cascading into a shallow pool filled with lilies.  They are surrounded by pheasants, does and gazelles.  His left arm under her head; his right arm embracing her.

The Shulamite woman has thick makeup covering her face; dressed in the revealing veils and extravagantly bejeweled outfit of a belly dancer.  She is barefoot, the toes of her feet adorned with rings studded with semi-precious gems.

The Jew is dressed in a black suit, black laced shoes, white socks, white tie less shirt and a prayer shawl.  He wears a broad brimmed, flat crowned black felt hat to which are attached, on either side, long curly locks of hair that reach to his chin, one gold, the other silver.  He also wears large designer sunglasses that cover a good part of his features and holds an ostentatiously decorative silver and gold capped walking stick; an outlandish caricature of a playboy.

A Chorus stands stage right and left dressed in the garments of the period.  They play harps, tambourines and flutes.

 SHULAMITE:               Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth-
                                 for your love is more delightful than wine.
                                 Pleasing is the fragrance of your perfumes;
                                 your name is like perfume poured out.
                                 No wonder the maidens love you!
                                 Take me away with you-let us hurry!
                                 Let the king bring me into his chambers.

Two groups of dancers cross the stage with rapid, mincing steps from opposite directions, intersecting center stage. 

CHORUS:                 We rejoice and delight in you ;
                                we will praise your love more than wine.

JEW:                          How beautiful you are, my darling!
                                Oh, how beautiful!
                                Your eyes are doves.

SHULAMITE:         How handsome you are, my lover!
                                Oh, how charming!
                                And our bed is verdant.

JEW:                           The beams of our house are cedars;
                                our rafters are firs.

SHULAMITE:             I am a rose of Sharon,
                                 a lily of the valleys.

JEW:                            Like a lily among thorns
                                 is my darling among the maidens.

The Shulamite woman sensually belly dances downstage, her writhing fingers clapping metal castanets.  She stops at the very edge of center stage and displays to the audience a sign, the glowing, fluorescent text recorded in colorful, bright neon light.  It reads: “Distraught at the long wait for him to return, Molly threw the cards, and unlike Penelope, she finished her weaving, abandoned the Jew, and went to Blazes.

The Shulamite woman, the Chorus, and the Dancers exit.

The Jew sits alone in the oasis, disconsolate, cleaning his designer sunglasses with the edge of his prayer shawl.  The walking stick lies abandoned at his feet.  A single spot light illuminates him.  The background is a black night sky filled with myriad stars and a crescent moon traversed by the silhouette of a date palm.  He sings softly under his breath.

JEW:                   Come back, come back, O Shulamite;
                         Come back, come back, that we may gaze on you!  (7)

(v)

The first time Leopold opened his mouth to receive the Host, he heard a reproaching voice call to him, emanating from the innermost depths of his spirit, the Divine Presence filling his heart:

“You are of the Jewish Kingdom!”

But time heals all wounds, and memory is defensive in nature; imperfect.

Leopold.  The assimilated Jew.  The sometimes Jew.  The Apostate Jew.  The baptized Jew in the sacred waters of Christianity.  The bastard Jew.  The uncircumcised Jew, born of a Gentile mother and therefore not considered a genuine Jew, attempted to once again embrace in solidarity what he now considered to be his own menaced tribe.  He consummated the hubris of arrogance to witness Armageddon; initiating a pilgrimage to look upon the twisted face of the Apocalypse.  Everyone was fleeing the Belly of the Beast; he wanted to smell its dank and fetid breath.  To wallow in its odorous vomit.  In its vile excrement.  There rose up in his breast a gratuitous and unjustifiable pride for the Chosen People’s refusal to be sucked into that vortex of unremembered extinction suffered by the Arameans, the Babylonians, the Edomites, the Hittites, the Moabites, the Zidronians.

He sought to be reunited with his Old Testament God from Whom he had averted his face; with Whom he had quarreled.  He became once more Shomrai HaBrit, a Keeper of the Covenant; that Contract he had earlier considered nefarious because one unreasonably wagered, on faith alone, a palpable Reality in exchange for the promise of a questionable, unverifiable Eternity.

Leopold left Dublin for the Continent on November 11, 1938.

Once there, his tribe scorned him, and would not receive him; he was not considered a Jew.

Would the Beast dare crush a Shamrock of Erin?

(vi)

Leopold was comforted that as an apostate Jew/Christian/Jew he would not fear to lose his life as would be the case if he were a Muslim, although he was unquestionably attracted by the materialistic, sensual pleasures of the afterlife promised by Allah to the Faithful in Jannat.

“They shall recline on jeweled couches face to face, and there shall wait on them immortal youths with bowls and ewers and a cup of purest wine that will neither pain their heads nor take away their reason; with fruits of their own choice and flesh of fowls that they relish. And theirs shall be the dark-eyed houris, chaste as hidden pearls.” (8)

“Each time we sleep with a houri we find her virgin. Besides, the penis of the Elected never softens. The erection is eternal ; the sensation that you feel each time you make love is utterly delicious and out of this world and were you to experience it in this world you would faint. Each Muslim will marry seventy houris, besides the women he married on earth, and all will have appetising vaginas.”  (9)

“There is in Paradise a market wherein there will be no buying or selling, but will consist of men and women. When a man desires a beauty, he will have intercourse with them.”  (10)

“The Prophet Muhammad was heard saying: “The smallest reward for the people of paradise is an abode where there are 80,000 servants and 72 wives.”  (11)

Six hundred years after The Christ, a lithic Arabic al-ilah, (12) a moon deity, was converted into a Singular Divinity, and given a murderous voice; the crescent symbol undeniably chronicling his previous pagan lineage.  The offending granite idols of his colleagues were ignominiously removed from the Ka´aba and destroyed.  A middle aged, illiterate merchant proclaimed himself the Last Prophet; a tardy Exalted Final Messenger of God urging the faithful in the name of an impatient Allah to violence in this world, unwilling to wait for justice in the hereafter.

If a Muslim discards his religion, kill him.” (13)                                                                                                                                                                       

The Prophet said: “Wherever you find them (Apostates) kill them, for there will be a reward for their killers on the Day of Resurrection.”  (14)

(vii)

An innocent children’s game designed to encourage obsequiousness to the arbitrary disposition of The Law:

CHILD ONE

May I take a baby step?

CHILD TWO

                                    No you may not!

CHILD THREE

      May I take six giant steps?

CHILD TWO

Yes you may!

(viii)

“He was executed at six in the morning.  By six in the afternoon, when Congress recessed, capital punishment had been voted unconstitutional.”

“Unlucky bastard.”

(ix)

In time lamenting his recklessness, Leopold fashioned the wings of Daedalus and attempted to return to his beloved Emerald Isle and his estranged Molly, but to no avail.  In his soaring presumptuousness, the fragile wings melted by a scorching sun, he plunged into an unforgiving, turbulent sea, as Icarus centuries before him.  He was devoured not by the waves of Poseidon’s Aegean, but rather by the heteromorphic disciples of Nationalist Socialism.

He was detained by French gendarmes in the great raid of “La Rafle du Vel d´Hiv,” (15) a yellow star conspicuously stitched to the breast of his garments. (16) 

Juif.  Written in delicate script.

Juif.  Resembling deceptively fragile Arabic calligraphy.

Juif.  Compulsory for all Jews over six years old.

Only “foreign nationals of the Jewish Race,” non-French Jews, were rounded up and deported towards l¨Est, to their death in that boiling crucible, the scorching crimson crater of an irate Germanic volcano.

The operations were to be carried out “with the maximum of speed, without useless words and any comment,” ordered Emile Hennequin, director of the Paris police.

The French destroyed the handsome structure of the Palais du Velodrome d´Hiver after the war, anxious to eliminate a possible future monument to their Nazi collaboration.  Francois Mitterand, French president who had worked for the Vichy Regime, declared: “I do not believe France is responsible.”  Obviously, it was not their fault.  Fifty three years later, Jacques Chirac, appearing to be a more enlightened French president, reluctantly admitted the inadmissible: the French cooperated in implementing the Final Solution against the Jewish race; the delay a testament to Gallic insolent obstinacy.

The French delivered the frightened Jew, and he found himself crucified on a black Iron Cross hanging from a crisply starched cloth ribbon around the neck of his Inquisitor.  The rekindled flames from the Embers of History, flames that had never been thoroughly extinguished, flared up once again to consume his presence.

A zoomorphic Koranic taxonomy insists that Jews are apes and pigs; (17)   

A scholarly Muslim nomenclator metamorphosed Jews into mice and lizards. (18)

Ungeziefer were not considered people.

Zyklon-B.  An insecticide.

Nothing personal.  Strictly racism.

Arbeit Macht Frei!

Six Million Jews

Ten Million Christians.

How many “Others?”

EXTERIOR.  NIGHT.  LONG SHOT.  GATES OF AUSCHWITZ. 

WE SEE RAILROAD TRACKS IN FOREGROUND.  SEARCHLIGHTS PIERCE

THROUGH THE FOG.  DOGS BARK IN BACKGROUND.

                                    LEOPOLD (VOICE OVER)

                                    Less, were murdered, you say?  

CAMERA DOLLIES BACK TO REVEAL LEOPOLD IN A MEDIUM SHOT.

                                    LEOPOLD

                                     Humiliated.  Raped.  

JUMP CUT TO A MEDIUM CLOSE UP.

                                    LEOPOLD

                                     Starved.  Burned.

JUMP CUT TO A CLOSE UP.

                                    LEOPOLD

                                     Massacred.

DISSOLVE TO DOLLY SHOT.  LEOPOLD WALKING THROUGH THE DEBRIS OF

CREMATORIUMS.

                                    LEOPOLD

                                     O.K.  Pick a number.  Any number.

                                     What number would be acceptable?

CUT TO EXTREME CLOSE UP LEOPOLDS LIPS.

                                    LEOPOLD

                                     Putz!

SOUND FX:  BOOTS OF MARCHING SOLDIERS.

MUSIC UP FULL.

Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles!

Uberalles!

Uberalles!Uberalles!

Uberalles!Uberalles!Uberalles!

Uberalles!Uberalles!Uberalles!Uberalles!

Uberalles!Uberalles!Uberalles!Uberalles!Uberalles!

Uberalles!Uberalles!Uberalles!Uberalles!Uberalles!Uberalles!

Uberalles!Uberalles!Uberalles!Uberalles!Uberalles!Uberalles!Uberalles!

Uberalles!Uberalles!Uberalles!Uberalles!Uberalles!Uberalles!Uberalles!Uberalles!

Nothing personal.  Strictly nationalism.

Why was he permitted to survive?  Why had he been spared?  The accident called Life?

(x)

The Holocaust was preceded by an unrecognized full dress rehearsal; a continuation into the Twentieth Century of the abundant, historically documented Moslem extermination of all that do not submit to Allah.  The arrogant, bellicose Jihadic míse en scene was produced by the Turks in exaggerated, profligate splendor, surpassing even the most outrageous ostentation of Hollywood. 

Hitler to his generals: “Kill without Mercy .  After all, who now remembers the annihilation of the Armenians by the Turks.”  The Genocide of The Assyrians.  The Ethnic Cleansing of the Greeks.  All by the Homicidal Hand of Islam.

Dr. James Levi Barton, American: “The Armenians are a peculiar people. They have a great faculty of making themselves disliked wherever they go, and by most people who move among them.”

Sultan Abdul Ilamid:  “The way to get rid of the Armenian question is to get rid of the Armenians:”

Turkish Minister of the Interior Mehmet Talaat Pasha:  “Destroy completely all the Armenians living in Turkey.  An end must be put to their existence.”

Abouharar.  Akhterim.  Araz.  Bab.  Deir-al-Zor.  Dipsi.  Goeljuk,

Gok Madrasah.  Hama.  Hamam.  Homs.  Intili.  Islahiye.  Kahdem.

Karlik.  Katma.  Lale.  Marat.  Meskene.  Mosul.  Mounboudji.

Payas Kale.  Radjjo.  Rakka.  Ras-al-Ain.  Sebil.  Sebka.  Souvar.

Tefridje,

The National Socialist translation:

Auschwitz.  Birkenau.  Belzec.  Chelmno.  Jasenovac.  Lwow.

Majdanek.   Maly.  Trostenets.  Sobibor.  Treblinka.

Lord Bryce, British:  “A nation blotted out!  It is easy to say it with the lips, more difficult to realize what it means, for it is something totally beyond our experience.”

Grand Vizir, Mehmet Talaat Pasha, Mass Murderer, architect of Twentieth Century Ethnic Cleansing and of Genocide, perpetuator of Koranic Jihad, is honored as a National Turkish Hero in a sumptuous mausoleum on Liberty Hill in Istanbul.

On March 15, 1921, the Muslim Talaat Pasha was killed with a single bullet to the head as he sauntered through the Berlin Zoo observing the ignorant beasts surrounding him.  Given the setting, it was an unexpected performance of sublime irony; an act of justice by the infidel Armenian Soghomon Tehlirian. 

“He was a Turk.  I am an Armenian.”

Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word Genocide, found Tehlirian´s subsequent legal proceedings disgraceful; it was considered a crime to kill one man, but not an entire people.

Admiral Mark L. Bristol, American Ambassador: “The Greeks are the worst race in this part of the world.”

Muslim Turks ethnically exterminated millions of civilian Christian Greeks to create a “Turkey for the Turks.”  In 1922, the Turkish military massacred the helpless civilian residents of Smyrna, “the jewel of the Mediterranean,” and Homer’s wine dark sea was stained a brilliant crimson.  A twenty seven ship armada from Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, watched and did nothing.  Those who reached their ships, swimming through the corpses of their compatriots, were clubbed back into the water.  The sailors of the Free World looked to the east and watched millenarian Smyrna burn to the ground, the consuming flames turning all into ash, into tall columns of billowing black smoke; reminiscent of Sadiman’s agonizing volcanic obliteration.

George Horton, Consul General of the United States in Smyrna at the time of the genocide: “No act ever perpetrated by the Turkish race in all its bloodstained history has been characterized by more brutal and lustful features.”

Smyrna was renamed Izmir by the Turks to expunge the memory. 

Smyrna?  What is Smyrna?  This is Izmir.  Nothing occurred here.  Atrocities?  A figment of anti-Turk, anti-Moslem imagination!  A Historical Myth!

History can temporarily be conveniently rewritten.  Can a collective memory be erased?

“Eonoia oi Mnhmh!” (19)

(xi)

Today, frenzied, triumphant howls spew forth in crimson bursts from mephitic cavities in the capital cities around the globe.  Wrapped in the vibrant, multihued fabric of their colors, nations celebrate vanquishment with ecstatic huzzahs, proclaiming and glorifying conquest; the submission and humiliation of a defeated adversary.

We Are The Champions!

We Are The Champions!

Abidjan, Accra, Addis Ababa, Abuja, Algiers, Amman, Amsterdam, Andorra la Vella, Ankara, Antananarivo, Ashgabat, Apia, Asmara, Astana, Athens, Asuncion, Baghdad, Baku, Bamako, Bandar Seri Begawan, Bangui, Banjul, Bangkok, Basseterre, Bator, Beijing, Beirut, Belfast, Belgrade, Belmopan,  Berlin, Bern, Bishkek, Bissau, Bogotá, Brasilia, Bratislava, Brazzaville, Bridgetown, Brussels, Bucharest, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Bujumbura,  Cairo, Canberra, Caracas, Cardiff, Castries, Chisinau, Codington, Colombo, Conakry, Contonou,  Copenhagen Dakar, Damascus, Dhaka, Djibouti,  Doha, Dublin, Luanda,  Dushanbe, Edinburgh, Funafuti, Gaborone, Georgetown, Guatemala City, The Hague, Havana, Helsinki, Honiara, Islamabad, Jakarta, Kabul, Kigali, Kingston, Kinshasa, Koror, Kuala Lumpur, Jerusalem, Katmandu, Kiev, Kotte, Kuwait City,  La Paz. Libreville, Lilongwe, Lima, Lisbon, London, Ljubljana, Luxembourg, Madrid, Majuro, Malabo, Male, Managua, Manama, Manila, Maputo, Maseru, Mexico City, Minsk, Monaco, Monrovia, Montevideo, Moroni, Moscow, Muskat, Nairobi, Nuku’alofa, Namay, Nassau, New Delhi,  Nicosia, Nouakchott, N’Djamena, Oslo, Ottawa, Ouagadougou, Palikir, Panama City, Paramaribo, Paris, Phnom Penh, Port Louis, Port Moresby, Port Vila, Porto Novo, Port-Au-Prince, Port of Spain, Prague, Praia, Pyongyang, Quito, Rabat, Rangoon, Reykjavik, Riga, Riyadh, Rome, Roseau, St. George’s,  St. John’s, San Marino, San Salvador, Santiago, San Jose, Santo Domingo, Sao Tome, Sarajevo, Seoul, Singapore, Sofia, Sri Jayewardenepura, Stockholm, Skopje, Sucre, Suva, Taipei, Tallinn, Tarawa, Tbilisi, Tegucigalpa, Teheran, Thimphu, Tirana, Tokyo, Tripoli, Ulan, Vaduz, Valletta, Vienna, Vientiane, Vilnius, Warsaw, Washington, D.C., Wellington, Windhoek, Yamoussoukro, Yaren, Yerevan, Zagreb, Zurich.

FortysixGoldmedalsSixteenSilvermedalsSevenBronzemedals.

Count ´Em.

We Are The Champions!

We Are The Champions!

(xii)

From the unremembered primordial ejaculation into the fetorous, setaceous genitals of Lucy’s shaggy mitochondrial ancestor, our genetic Eve, we were created as One.  Nevertheless, since time immemorial, the egocentric violence of a covetous homo sapien provoked the murder of his brothers.

“Adam lay with his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain.  She said, “With the help of the Lord I have brought forth a man.”  Later she gave birth to his brother Abel.  Now Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.”  And while they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.

Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?”
”I don’t know,” he replied. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (20)

(xiii)

It was a leisurely stroll for Leopold from the dissonance of the village market to the subdued tranquility surrounding the modest house to which he had been directed. 

Narrow dirt path.  Rank, profuse vegetation.  Ugly, worthless plants.  Rocks.  Not like Europe  Small house, doesn’t look like he has money, being cautious, perhaps.  Must remember to rub saliva on the mosquito bites.  You covered your tracks well, Ubermensch.  Far cry from Alexanderplatz.  Number 13 Fuhrerstrasse, wasn’t it?  Yes.  Heart racing.  Whistle a tune.  I´moff tosee the wizard, thewonderfulwizard of Oz.  Thirteen.  On the door.  Unlucky number; the Kraut should have known it would end badly.  He knocked.  Don’t forget to remove the safety.  Yes.  Shriveled, brown skinned old woman.  The maid.  No one else around.  Steel so cold.  Hand sweating in pocket. 

“¿Se encuentra el Señor?”  Poor Spanish, she looks amused.  Of course, addressed her in the respectful, “usted.”  Should have used the familiar, “tu.”  Maids don’t get respect.  Smile in return, she knows I’m a foreigner.  No need for the customary stern demeanor.  Feefawfofum. I zmellz de bloodz odz a Krautimam.  A bloated carcass he will be.

Not here.  Ask where you can find him.  Put your hat back on your head.  Church bells, no Synagogues here.  Eight eighteen.  By the time they find him, I’ll be long gone.  No shadows of Mosques either.  That’s a relief.  They have no Muslim problem because they have no Muslims.  Eight eighteen.  Hungry.  Grilled pork kidneys would hit the spot.  Settle for a torta at the terminal; ham and cheese.  No hot sauce.    

Leopold stepped carelessly on the weeds to reach the marker.  He wiped away the crust of parched earth obscuring a name. Standing abruptly, he reluctantly left the cemetery, resigning himself to this unfortunate climax.  He was, nonetheless, disappointed; the successful conclusion of his mission having been thwarted by the passage of time.  He sensed a foreboding at the evident impermanence of existence, the implacable elimination of creation, fundamental to creation itself. 

He found himself at the open air bus terminal, crowded with a boisterous, aggressive mob.  Thrust yourself into the bodies.  That’s right.  Jab him in the chops.  Elbow her tits.  Just doing what they do.  When in Rome, you endure by behaving worse than the Italians.  Someone’s pushing from behind.  Pushing from behind.  Watch your wallet.  Ow!  Young bitch poked my nuts.  Damn!  He bribed the indifferent employee sitting behind a scarred and broken wooden desk in order to purchase a ticket; he was determined to once again board the bus on which he had arrived for the return portion of his journey. 

A tattered and soiled calendar nailed to the wall, incongruously featuring a flaxen haired, blue eyed woman flaunting firm breasts with pink nipples, gave the date as June 16.

(xiv)

Those who perpetrated the Holocaust were frequently described to the Old Jew as inhuman; however he considered those who are indulgent, considerate creatures to be the ones demonstrating qualities deserving to be described as inhuman.  Being human, Leopold insisted, demands insatiable violence; a brutality indispensable for conquest, the ferocity essential for defending continued existence.

He read silently from The Book open on his knees, oblivious to the animal and human cacophony surrounding him; the letters jumping capriciously in front of his eyes as the bus bounced over the irregular pavement of the highway.

Leopold sensed once again that uneasiness which had recently become an unwelcome companion on his peregrinations.  For some time now he suspected that his lethal campaign was more than simple retaliation, more than a revealing demonstration of his human instinct; his proscribed inhumanity.   He was loath to admit that it contained elements of atonement for a much regretted apostasy; an apology to the Highest for his deplored heretical dissent.  A spiritual quest for forgiveness.

“You are not a Muslim,” the soft, profound voice whispered again in his ear.  “The fatwa is not of your Merciful God.”

He searched The Book for an appropriate verse, but regrettably found only: 

“To Me belongs vengeance and recompense.” (21)

Leopold was disillusioned; construing the unsolicited verse as a personal reproach.  Vulnerability was an obligation, a requirement of the Contract; a moral virtue.  On one of those abrupt, perfidious mountain curves, the bald tires of the speeding vehicle on the edge of the pavement provoking extinction, he submissively allowed the nine millimeter Pistolen-08 Luger, that weapon he had triumphantly appropriated from his first prey, to slip from his fingers out of the window.

With deep regret he resigned himself to forfeiting his self-assigned mission, yielding the instinctive compulsion for vengeance.  He now doubted the correctness, the morality of his earlier homicidal deeds, and observed with a surprising disinterest as the weapon of extinction/survival slipped over the precipice, to be swallowed into the profound and sinister depths of the abyss.

Remarkably, he proceeded with a casual, scholarly indifference to calculate the duration of its descent into oblivion; the formula he remembered from his schooldays for the speed of a falling object:

Thirty two feet per second per second.  Force of gravity.  Law of falling bodies.  Per second, per second.

At the precise instant Leopold estimated his weapon to have hit bottom, he closed his eyes.  Abruptly, and without warning, the bus he was riding took flight, as though it had somehow evolved into an ethereal pterosaur; a suspended, fragile chariot sprouting blanched wings, unfortunately hovering only momentarily over the unfathomable emptiness before plummeting vertiginously.  Leopold felt his body lunch over the sheer rock face; mutating into a suicidal lemming, he collapsed into a profound, mysterious void.  A bright white light, similar to that of a nuclear detonation, blinded him.  He groaned a final lament, doubting once again the promise of eternity, and experiencing the sudden, unassailable realization that he had surrendered to deception; survival undeniably demands implacable punishment.  Demands Fear.  Fear of reprisal.  Fear, that singularly effective restraint interrupting the perpetual annihilation of homo sapien by homo sapien; of oneself by the Other.

Leopold belatedly remembered a long forgotten couplet:

Pale Ebeneezer,

Thought it wrong to fight/

But roaring Bill (who killed him) 

Thought it right. (22)

/Strutting Fritz who killed him.

/Bearded Muhammad who killed him.

/They all thought it right.

Searching frantically through his memory for his only hope, 

the only card left in his hand to play, to at least break even 

with the House at this conclusion of The Game, he hastily 

remembered the long forgotten Pagan yearning of a Classical 

Civilization that had itself also involuntarily violently perished; 

their demise plummeting mankind into a half century of obscurity, 

of Medieval dreamless slumber.

HEWANTEDANOTHERCHANCETODOITAGAIN

HEWOULDDOBETTERNEXTTIME

HEWOULDDOBETTERNEXTTIME

Leopold mumbled almost inaudibly.  “Metempsychosis” he said, frowning.  “It’s Greek:

from the Greek.  That means the transmigration of souls.” (23)

The last image to be erased from his mind for all eternity by the 

abrupt cessation of his brain’s functions was of Dlugacz´s butcher shop.  

In Dublin.  Where he always purchased his favorite dish.  Pork kidneys.  

Grilled.  Fragrant with the scent of urine. 

Footnotes:

  (1) Deuteronomy 32:5

 (2) Monumento a la Raza, Avenida Insurgentes, Mexico City.

 (3) Mexican writer, philosopher, and politician.  Minister of Education orienting the nation’s 

education along pan-American (Americanista) lines.  Twice sought political refuge in the 

United States.

Quote: "Hitler, although he disposes of absolute power, finds himself a thousand leagues 

from Caesarism. Power does not come to Hitler from the military base, but from the book that 

inspires the troops from the top. Hitler's power is not owed to the troops, nor the battalions, 

but to his own discussions... Hitler represents, ultimately, an idea, the German idea, so often 

humiliated previously by French militarism and English perfidy. Truthfully, against Hitler we 

find civilian governed 'democracies' fighting.  But they are democracies in name only". 

("La Inteligencia Se Impone." June 8, 1940).

 (4) Haggada.

 (5) The Spanish Armada was destroyed in the Straits of Gibraltar by the British.  Those 

Spanish sailors who survived drifted on the wreckage of their ships, ultimately reaching Ireland.  

They married Irish girls and their families assumed the Catholic faith. 

         (6) Deuteronomy 8:19.

         (7) Song of Solomon.

        (14) Qur´an. Sahih Bukari.  Volume 61.  Number 577.

        (16) Both Christians and Muslim insisted Jews wear distinctive articles of clothing.

                In 807 CE Caliph Haroun al-Raschid ordered all Jews to wear a yellow belt.  

                In 1215, Pope Innocent III, ordered all Jews to be distinguished by their dress.