Fragment of the Novel:
In Arms We Trust
by Vasilis Afxentiou
Athens, Greece
Email: [email protected]
Copyright 1999
All Rights Reserved
Part 1
The Marathon Gene:
The Undying Flame in The Quality of Grace
It is not because other people are dead
that our affection for them grows faint,
it is because we ourself are dying.
--Marcel Proust
Chapter 1
[The information was acquired by me from the the people themselves
and the archives of the hedron, the damaged facet of what remains
of the second Hexahedron, of Starseed, as it calls itself. The
montage that follows is mine. P.P.]
A cozy new world.
Unite to obliterate identity.
The irony made Chickbrow quiver in his e-car seat.
The mockery charred and chipped away at his innermost tenets.
But the promoters of all that went wrong with the world had not
the vision. They had not the heart and virtue freedom needs to
breathe and be. So, they choked freedom. Smothered it under the
guise of 'planetary civism'. Their brave new children attempted
what wise men dread:
Utopia through unilateral information dominance promoted by dogma
and arms, drugs and computer bondage.
The new order of things to come was to be a supranational, an
incorporate Earth, run not by communism or capitalism, but by
the I-Soldier.
The by-product? A form of totalitarianism that would have stunned
Orwell. Chickbrow had mastered well the crumbling volume on his
shelves. Given to him by his grandfather Cleon.
Chickbrow had not neglected any of the other's words.
"There must be an antipode ... " the old man had told
him, back then in the thirties.
Chickbrow was still in his teens then.
"It's the pivotal point of any kind of Democracy. There
have to be either bona fide opposing political parties, or nations
-- at least a bilateral model. Communism may have posed a threat
to us after the second great war, but as well had been a check
and balance on our Democratic system: what Democracy needs in
order to be healthy and workable.
"When the Soviet Union collapsed, and China adopted the
Chart of Provisional Free Enterprise, the West fell in the very
selfsame rut a score of others had fallen throughout history.
"No threat.
"No contention.
"No controversy or opposition.
"Presumption.
"Smugness, conceit, coquetry and self adoration.
"I just call it being spoiled stupid. Democracy, David Chickbrow,
has to have tough and durable debate to survive. None of that
patronizing and humoring, superciliously cute and 'darling' stuff
between Republicans and Democrats -- two sides of the same dollar.
"No variance.
"No ability, or margin, breathing space, to adapt to.
"Zero evolution.
"Extinction.
"A lot of agreeing and splendoring in profusions of endearments
may be fine for erotic escapades, sweethearts, heartthrobs and
sweet old ladies -- but for Democracy ... they decay it. Spoil
it.
"It happens to countries just as easily as it does to people.
To young or old nations. Particularly to ones that have never
felt the stomp of a conqueror's boot on their native soil. Have
not endured defeat. Not suffered humility in a long, long time.
So, forgot what it's like. Vanity, like that in a Congress of
aristocracy and a Senate of gentry, or an Executive branch of
an unchecked and self-appointed oligarchy, is a flaw easy to detect,
but ornery as hell to rectify. Because it suits the handful who
governs. Sweetens their palate. And they’ll fight with rabid fury
any and all change threatening their post.
"Power is never easy to step down from, David. But in the
history of mankind there has never, never, been enlightenment
in power. Never has -- a smidgen even of -- good come out of it.
Except a dominion's own degeneration. Its fall from within itself
-- like the dominion of dinosaurs."
The Sachem, what they used to call grandpa -- a Ph.D. in Social
Science and an Assistant Professorship at Harvard Government School
seemed as good testimonial as any -- taught one thing and lived
another. He had done this to survive the anachronistic despotism
that somehow crept in and managed to rule unchallenged over half
of the world for nearly half a century.
The wealthy half.
"Before it had become through-and-through ripe," the
old man had told him, "and impose itself by force in 2020,
tyranny had been noiselessly but resolutely slithering like a
pit viper closing in. Oppression had been smoldering like smokeless
coal before the flash of kindling for more than a full twenty
years.
"And when the tinder burst to flame, the utopia of a 'new
world order of things' turned into a world incubus. Abreast of
the rise of the three camps: internationalism, nationalism and
fundamentalism came the threat of international gray zones where
law had no effect, nationally or otherwise. Here, David, globallized
organized crime burgeoned in the form of economical, defense-hysteria,
mass-media, Mafia, drug-digital, nuclear, biochemical terrorism."
Chickbrow's grandfather in all modesty was set on besetting his
damage over the greatest number of top honchos over the longest
period. He was part Hammurabi, part Confucius and Alexander, a
Che and a Nathan Hale. But most of all he was true American. To
the marrow, a Brave.
"Babylon, Persia, Rome were not brought to their knees by
conquerors from outside. They were vanquished, devastated, from
within their own stockades. First by narcissism and self-induced
conspiracy, then by biting off more than they could chew. By sheer
snow-balling. Through an avalanche of their own over-confidence.
Soviet communism lasted a little over seventy years, Yankee capitalism
almost two-hundred-and-fifty... "
The third millennium, Chickbrow reflected, was going to be full
of surprises. His own removal from the space team had been one.
And racism had everything to do with it. Contempt for minorities
had been another. It seemed there are cycles in history in which
some form of intolerance prevails speechlessly under a benign
guise. The circumstances, in this century as well as the previous
one, were favoring the stooped-head, the post-Hi-Tech informer,
the corporate yes-man, the company infiltrator.
Definitely not the redman. The few of his kind that were left.
***
"Where am I?" she asked. She could not suppress a shiver.
Her heart fluttered wildly.
She was not present, yet she was not elsewhere or totally unaware.
Reaching out with a tendril of thought she merely perceived eruptions
and flashes of what seemed to be a tunnel of beaten gold. It shone
intermittently in alternation with deep expulsions. Prismatic
needles of tincture emanated from the labyrinthine cavern and
from a carved, melanite-embroidered, crystalline fissure up ahead.
An enormity of space was ahead and beyond. It swirled in buffed-sable
and russet-scarlet. A vortex generated of dancing lusters ...
of wizardry, was swallowing her. Her stomach lurched.
She took a quick glimpse behind her, down the tunnel. She felt
her chest constrict. I must survive, she thought. She had to learn
a great deal about light, strength and wisdom. About Godly things,
too.
She purled along.
She surveyed for the mode of her displacement. The principle
behind it. No bearing. No point of reference. No air stirred by.
No resistance or drift, only a silent disengagement, then a discharge,
a release through a milieu she could not relate to or identify.
The tunnel was uninterrupted and invariant, slanting every-which-way
... and there was this smell. She sniffed, acrid and sweet, stale
too ... the smell of old suns and mutated nebulas, all in vast,
spanning reaches.
Her nostrils felt dry, her muscles taut; she thought her forehead
burned with hot sweat; and her brain cringed in strokes of insane
conjectures.
Although her senses worked, her being did not possess form, but
was part of one -- no, two, and more -- of many, many tinklings
drifting towards and encircling her, hues wandering and opening
like blooming buds, scintillating softly-singing glimmers right
at the edge of this fracturing night. They were as one and difficult
to separate. One of her eyebrows she imagined rose as if in response,
a queer gesture in a study of rapture and despair.
Among the bursts of movement, of star-glow, she glimpsed something
enormous and motionless. A deep stupendousness of no edges. A
volume. Glowing patterns circuited to and from it.
She drew herself together obediently and became still as a helplessly
poised animal. She then shrunk into a distilled point.
"Who am I?" she asked. And knew that instant.
***
He raised the Vessel over his head whispering prayers. When he
opened his eyes he saw the ball of brightness. A fist of radiance
that seeped through the domed ceiling of his church as though
it were absent and streamed down to the gold Hallow Chalice he
held. His hands trembled as the Vessel commenced to glow from
within. It flooded his church with thick silver light.
"My Lord -- "
He shuddered, let go, and recoiled. The Chalice remained. The
light changed to molten gold, welled over the Vessel's lip, and
trickled onto the Altar below, to the floor. And the light rose
from its knees.
"A message," it said. "Come. The Bond of the Covenant
is Opened!"
Then in a more distant but clear voice, "'For sin shall
not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but
under Grace.'"
The Vessel hovered in clear, empty air.
"Miracle! A Miracle!" the congregation echoed and ...
... awoke Lukas with a start.
The sheets were wet and salty from his sweat.
***
[From the archives of Starseed supported by the decoding of Linear
A, Disk of Phaestos and Great Pyramid of Gizeh. P.P.]
... On a bizarre vast edge between two voids, one of the Universe
the other of the indefinable Erebus beyond, Residua of Essence
spin in felicity, counter-spin in enchantment and unfold progressively
more pronounced. They intently and enthusiastically shift back
and forth -- among their supplementary domiciles and rivulets
of edifice-plasma -- uniquanta of knowledge, insight and lore.
It took them only a small fraction of a hyposec to assimilate
the new and utterly unexpected bit of data of information inflowing
through the elliptical space-time curvatures that furrow the vacuum
of the eleven dimensions available to them.
But they greet and accept with loving eagerness the embrace of
the extraordinary and magnificent experience of the joining of
life -- a new and most integral 'being' -- to them once more.
They and the flowing edge complete the vortex, the revolving sphere-shell,
Front of Creation which, along with its angular motion, has been
traveling radially outward at the speed of light since its inception.
It would have taken the Front of Creation, at its current curvature
of largeness and speed of rotation, thirty-seven billion years
to achieve a single circuit about the blue glowing hub, the core
that is the sweeping blister of the Universe.
The multitudes Residua of Essence would have in effect been termed
souls, till of this late happening, this instillment of joyous
hearkening, when a passage of a ripple of force imbued itself
within them bridging the domain of spirit- and faith-essence to
that of energy, form and matter of the Universe Proper, entelecheia
your Aristotle calls it. And that which had once been invisible
and immaterial, but aware, aethereal ambiance began slowly to
acquire the prominence and salience of its kind and shape, that
is, its former nature ...
... In the very start, the first color shifts had been detected
by our equatorial astronomers at a distance a hundred-fold beyond
that of your Virgo constellation and that of Vereniki. They had
been in the form of a traveling peripheral ripple heading toward
neighboring galaxies omni-directionally -- a vast sphere shrinking
back onto its source. Back to the very asymptotic, geometricalless
and temporal source of Creation. The color of the stars this ruffling
undulation had been leaving in its wake was an almost stand-still
pinkish-white brilliance in the spectrum shift. It not only showed
that the Universe had completely and unexpectedly begun to slow
its expanding, but, by further observation and straight forward
calculation, it was discovered that it had begun doing so for
an extensive time. The steady rate of expansion, which for thousands
of millennia had served as a heat sink, had ceased long-long ago
...
[What analysis did not show, however, until later, was that the
edge of the Universe, the Front of Creation, had initiated the
awesome operation of braking four billion years back. P.P.]
... Unthinkable quantities of trapped force [Starseed goes on]
were been introverted; reconciled and re-conducted in a spontaneous
manner counter to the original path of their impetus. Against
the grain of their nascent momentum. Instead of turning order
into less order, the internal pressures had reversed, compoundingly,
releasing free magnetic monopoles.
The preserving mechanisms innate to the Front of Creation had
at this point collapsed; already several rents were being torn
in the fabric of the void and were now made accessible to Residua
of Essence.
Elsewhere, within this fringe, the Vanguard of Creation, point-pockets
of internal pressures were mounting to those experienced in the
Boundary, turning upon their fountainhead to cause a rip in the
Plank wall. They induced a laceration into chaos ... and spawned
small split cells, bifurcations, of fractalian repercussions in
place of anomalies, but with asymmetries: ports of forthwith temporal
bonds for the reconstituting Residua of Essence. Beyond this point
our space, time and matter fundamentally broke down. What the
Residua of Essence peeked into, over this limit, on the outlying
extreme side of Creation, was the birthing of a new Universe of
the furthest completeness ...
... Meanwhile, the wealth of might, at once loosened in the braking
Universe Proper, sought instantaneous and new direction. And not
only by revivifying the Residua or violating accessibility across
Plank time.
Sentient life scattered all over the Cosmos, along with being
sapient entities of identity, of thinking, feeling and ken, were,
as well, entities of direction. Entities that could use up further
this excess energy. Coolly fuse it into action, assimilate it
into motion and mold it into fractals of organized and functioning
matter. These organic assemblages, sapient transducers, manipulated
raw force -- even of unrestrained pressures -- to give it vector
of focus, adjustment and design.
Once, the Residua of Essence too had been such.
Corporeal beings that could forge from concepts by their acumen,
spirit and will-strength alone: could steer their realizations
and translate them into palpable action through their physical
bodies and could aim their course tangibly as well as immaterially.
This initiating of the direction-giving process was referred to
by them as reflection and insight, expectation and sagacity, prudence
and wisdom, verity and belief.
And now, they jubilated in its reacquirement, rejoiced in the
regeneration of their corporeality in the tenfold.
But often, as well, the outcome, or, the prime consummate and
culminator of a portion of this pent-up and undirected loose energy,
had invariably been the fury of malcontent, the insobriety and
overindulgence the sweet brew of power excites and then goads
within us, the surge and rage of raw violence, the vehemence of
dissension, and the hand-released arrow that swiftly and pointedly
darts for the unsuspecting heart of peace ....
***
[The teacher’s obituary for his killed in action, older son,
Kyrillos, during the last invasion attempt against his homeland
in 2002 by descending, starving and banded Caucasus tribes, Turanian
hordes and Tartar-Mongol legions armed by Glixxon’s rising World
Confederation. Arms in exchange for Black and Caspian Sea oil.
From my journal, 15 August 2052. P.P.]
"‘These were our children who died for our/lands./health/
But who shall return us the children? -- Rudyard Kipling, THE
CHILDREN .... ’
" ... this is my promise and pledge," the teacher writes,
"my covenant of testimony and grief for my own lost and unreturned
child, Mr. Kipling. To the bringer of holocausts, to the shamer
and exterminator of dignity and kindness in man and upon planet
Earth, to the trespasser of the limits, to the non-citizen of
humanity I vow my non-alliance and my non-affiliation. I commit
my disunion with and divorce from him. More. I firmly establish
my dissension with and division from him. This, I promise to the
breaker of the covenant between man and peace. Further ...
" ... Past oppression and ignorance, indigence and beggary
sired violence, passed it down to the present and strive to keep
it bustling into the far-deep future ...
" ... Violence wroughts up anarchy. Or welts dictators,"
the text I have unearthed goes on to say. "The stipend of
either is misery, the rack of the mind and soul, isolation, exile
and death to those who side with enlightenment and freedom, roots
and balance ... "
I read these pages the teacher had written one half century before,
again and again, and in my search I see yesterday's questions
become today's, today's questions the future's, and the future's
become a distressing way of life.
More questions come:
" ... On one hand there is this suffusion of talk on amity
and labels about peace, accord upon all Earth. On the other all
this High Definition and Dolby Surround Sound of blood-surfing.
"Why this worshipping of weaponry?
"Why this eliciting of respect by instilling fear, by ingraining
death-and-rage? Why this flair for mass-expiration in 'best sellers',
this propaganda in praise of a state of perpetual war and siege
-- in the warring hero -- capitalized in animations on the monitor,
motion pictures on the big screen?
"Why this thrust of thirst for Inquisition- and Nazi-like
tortures that daunt, instruct and institute terror and minister
mistrust, paranoia and neurosis, epilepsy and murder into the
innocent, sensitive and impressionable souls of our children today
with each such book read and each such film seen around the world,
children that are brainwashed and are destined to grow up to become
the hard-hearted, senseless barbarians of a boot-camp world tomorrow?
"Why this paean to hate?
"Why this trundling paradox?
"Is it only the paradox of naiveté?
"Where is the source of this child molester?
"Who and what generates the oxymoron?
"How is this condition licensed to propagate and reach our
children -- throughout the globe?
"When did it begin to perforate as part of their reality?
"Why children?
"In place of marbles and dolls, rector sets and chemistry
sets, microscopes and telescopes -- an endless variety of new
and civil toys -- we give them Winchesters and Star Wars, Colt
45s, Desert Storms and Desert Foxes to play with. In place of
books and tutoring, art and music -- boundless new horizons of
worthy literature, creative and humanizing recreation, means of
civic scholarship, harmony and philanthropy -- we give our children
Magnums, tanks, Stealth fighters, Harriers, Eurofighters, a licensed
NATO on the stand-by to indiscriminately incinerate, butcher and
mangle infants, the old, the helpless (not to mention innocent
animals and plants. Don’t these as well have the birth given right
to life? Don’t these give sustenance to all of the biosphere,
Homo Sapiens included?).
"Why do we hustle into our children’s hands raw fury and
spite to build upon; rush into our flesh and blood’s lives animosity
and malice -- these cruel tools of war and slaughter -- to settle
differences with? ... "
The text I have unburied proceeds to ask more:
" ... What manner -- brand -- of peoples have the propensity
to lavish in, to glory in, crime of wrath, molestation, mistreatment,
to splendor in intimidation and harassment, bigotry, in the harnessing
of revenge and rancor having as prime premise difference? Difference,
as that of the privilege and right to come from another source
of parameters, to come from, believe in, stand by, a different
process and system of values, concepts and interpretations of
Life, Love and Liberty? ... "
Next to this outraged man and educator, I too dare pluck up my
courage. I stand by this begrieved father’s loss of his boy to
those reverent and worshipful in the implements of war and wars
themselves and I boldly ask:
Who are, on our globe today, the modern Hannibals, the new Genghis
Khans and Tamerlanes that triumph and tradition in arms and armament?
Who today thrive on a way of life based on that of the invading
Goths and the raiding Vikings, the plundering Visigoths and the
butchering Huns, on retribution and raw conflict, on the proliferation
of accouterments of bloodbaths, hatred and wholesale killing?
Who prey on the incitement of doubt and insecurity?
Who mock precepts that have passed unscathed the test of time
as human reason and moderation, the wisdom found in tolerance
and restraint -- simple and plain horse sense in a nut shell?
Who privilege only those who unquestioningly put in with them,
but spur their SIA, intelli-bombs, seek-and-sack missiles, spy
and laser-bearing satellites and Citizen Protectors in cold candor
to devastate and pilferage, pillage and terminate all who do not?
From the text I have undug:
" ... What nations live by the fire arm? The sword? Bolster
and brace soldiering from cradle to coffin? Have to dodge bullets
in their own city streets, hospitals and schools? What peoples
subsist by -- get their kicks from -- the drawing of blood, and
silence eternally the irreconcilable?
"What peoples browbeat and mute those opposed to their 'custodian-like'
arrangement of things? Hush those who are of a different history
or stock of roots, of a contrary trust of values, and those who
believe in an alternate form of Democracy?
"What manner peoples thrive on war and sub-war, insurgence,
coercion and scuffle -- on the code of the Universal Barbarian?
And ... let the rest cry their beloved country? ...
" ... What manner peoples foment internally and internationally
the strife of greed as a National Product -- as a way of life
-- and with a straight face proclaim this attitude to be 'a marshaling
of the competitive spirit'? ... "
I gnaw and pick at parched lips at this man’s dare, his pain
of loss ... as these numbing questions of his -- this bizarre
manifesto-of-a-manuscript I stoop over -- reel into and through
my amazed mind to ask in writing that which most of our world
citizens cannot utter in resounding protest or even whisper, in
principle or document, or indeed in loud thought in 2052, at fear
of their lives and the lives of the ones they love.
" ... Who are those that gain profit by candying the act
of rapacity? Honey a coexistence that is based on mutual suspicion,
so as to bolster their arms sales and fatten themselves from it
-- arms sales to my divided island's oppressor, to the fresh primate
hordes of a modern roused Attila -- and do so with velvet language
and a silver tongue? Who wear the mask of the 'verist', a domino
of ‘dismay’, 'mince' words and didactically ‘admonish’ -- or use
some such philippic poise and prose -- that which they covertly
and by example provoke, grossly, in bulk and en mass? War games
no less.
" ... Who do away with esteem and self-respect and instead
bring discredit to non-war, and cynicism to peace-first, and proscription
to entente for peace, at the peace table, prosecuting and abolishing
by this attitude and these actions world-wide fidelity, world-wide
union?
"Who persist in their own opinion of deontology? Are almost
convincingly engrossed in their own efforts at rediscovering,
revivifying and resurrecting ‘what a comprehensive yet practical
interpretation of ethics is’, that is, at rediscovering the wheel
of virtue; while these same peoples are shystering and pettifogging,
trickstering and hoodwinking world economies?
"Who are immuned to pangs of conscience? Self-righteously
consider themselves the new Rome Imperium?
"Who reckon themselves absolved from the transparency of
pretentiousness and presumptuousness in their usage of words like
globalization, democracy and communism, coherence, Universal Declaration
of Human Rights, Amnesty International and egalitarianism, partnership
for peace, socialism and suchlike fiats and caveats as if the
globe were a joint-game-board of Scrabble and Chess to have fun
with and get rich from; to ridicule and sport from the torture
and anguish of wearied refugees, the 35,000 children who die daily
from poor peoples’ disease; sport with toppled economies and indebtedness,
famine, with ruthless and unchecked bombings so their brood of
Generals can try out their new arms on living flesh, the afflictions
and fears of the powerless, the helpless? ... "
The manuscript then alludes to the 1946 writings of George Orwell.
Apparently 106 years later nothing improves ... nothing emends
... nothing encourages:
"In our time, political speech and writings are largely
the defense of the indefensible. Political language has to consist
largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.
Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants
driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the
huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.
Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging
along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called
transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are
imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the
neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is
called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is
needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures
of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor
defending totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, 'I believe
in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by
doing so.' Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
'While freely conceding that such regimes exhibit certain features
which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I
think agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political
opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods,
and that the rigors which certain people have been called upon
to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete
achievement ... '"
The text of the manuscript goes on:
" ... I now think of the tragedy of my beloved son and land,
my beautiful brilliant isle torn in two, and of that other fair
and green island, Ireland, and its many sons, the same of fate;
and of the sons of the Scots and Welsh, the same of fate; the
fate all weakened minorities evidently must face and endure; of
the sons of the trampled and smothered Balkans, of the sons of
a starved Sudan, an emaciated Africa, the un-unified Koreas, the
sons of the calamities of a Vietnam, a Laos, a Thailand and a
Cambodia, the toll of sons of an Afghanistan and a Chechenia,
the genocide of a Curdistan and the million-and-a-half dead sons
of an Armenia, the twenty million Russian sons and daughters a
political experiment murdered, of an Iran, of a Lebanon and a
smashed and famished Iraq, the sons lost in the fifty-year strife
of an Israel and a Palestine, the sons of the world’s downtrodden
... and I wonder when this sacrifice of our children will suffice?
When will it all end ... as Popes and Presidents, Muftis and neoteric
Sultans, Patriarchs and Planetarchs, Rabbis and Prime Ministers
promise us it will before, or in, their term of office? As universal
treaties and alliances, as Human Rights and International Criminal
Courts are there -- are paid billions by us, the World Citizens,
each year -- to arrest, deactivate and abrogate ... since 1946?
"When is that 'Universal Soldier of Mercy' sung so much
by us -- that long-awaited neutral but civilized NATO and that
long-anticipated impartial but humane UN, that modern but just
'Nuremberg Trial' -- spoken of so often by so many coming to judge
the handful of overly zealous, dallying, arrogant politicians
and gung ho soldiers, the war-gaming power-anxious oligarchy,
responsible for the consequence of a Pearl Harbor, a Hiroshima
and a Nagasaki and their 210,000 innocent sons and daughters dead,
the ten million killed in a First World War that man should have
had the manly decency and sense to avoid, a Second World War that
extracted fifty million more mostly young innocent lives, the
slaying of two million innocent Vietnamese and fifty-three thousand
innocent Americans, the carnage of a Mai Lai and a Kent State
and a Tiananmen Square, a Baghdad, and a Kosovo, and the bestiality
upon innocence as that scaring the naked napalm-burned tiny torso
of a Kim Fok; and wipe out soldiering and bullying once and for
all!
"Then this is the violator.
" ... I bring visions of Rwandan, Somali, Sudanese, Bosnian,
Serbian, Albanian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Armenian, Vietnamese,
Chinese and Iraqi, Central and South American, Cuban war- famine-
and drought- and disease-vanquished victims to my mind,"
the teacher says, "and ask how many children's and infants’
swelled, empty bellies, napalm-scarred bodies, sexually-exploited
lives, AIDS-ridden days have these Christian, Moslem, Hebrew,
Hindu, Buddhist ... promises filled or comforted!
"Then this is the coveror of Truth.
" ... Whose history and philosophy of living is based on
the business of death-dealing? On the industriousness of warring
and fortification? Proliferation of a way of life founded and
based on armament and expansion? On a leveling machine of intervention
upon, and occupation of, sovereign Lands? The hammers and the
sickles? The Apocalypse of the thunderbolts, the pretext of the
NATOs, the pretense of the UNs, on a defunct Security Council
and the Armageddon of the blazing mushrooms? Whose ambition and
'Manifest Destiny' is rooted in the use of the scimitar and embedded
in the horror of the swastikas -- in genocide? The unjustness
of, and wastes in, terrorism and murder? In the symbol of the
phoenix bird afire? In the Cross aflame? On the word not kept!
"Then this is the breaker of the covenant between Peace
and Man, Harmony and Grace, the usurper of our kin and children,
Mr. Kipling, the children that will be returned to us when hell
freezes over," the teacher writes.
by Vasilis Afxentiou
Athens, Greece
Email: [email protected]
Copyright 1999
All Rights Reserved
Biographical Note: Vasilis Afxentiou
I am an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher. I have
been teaching English full-time for the last fourteen years. Prior
to that I worked as a Technical Specifications Writer for seven
years and as an Engineer for five years.
I was born in Thessaloniki, Greece. I went to university in the
United States where I received my degrees.
My writing credits include published fiction and non-fiction appearing
both in Greece and in the USA. Stateside publications I have written
for are Greek Accent, National Herald (Proini), and Crosscurrents.
In Greece I've been published in 30-Days, Key Travel News, Greece's
Weekly, Athena Magazine and had a weekend travel column in The
Athens Star newspaper.
Some e-zines that have puplished my stories are The Domain, Ibn
Quirtaiba, Cosmic Visions, ThinkB, Aphelion, Dark Planet, Basket
Case, BORNmagazine, Aspiring Writer, ThinkB, Appalachians, Newwords,
and Zine in Time.
