A Paler Shade of Red
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Cover
Other books by W. E. Gutman
Foreword by Alan Riding
Prologue
This I Believe
Part One – The Source: The seminal years
Part Two – Midstream: Against the current
Part Three – The Estuary: Muddy waters
Part Four – The Open Sea: In hindsight
Part Five – Treading Water: Onward to the past
Postscript – The Name of the Game: Learn your lines
Acknowledgements
Back cover
A Paler
Shade of
Red
Memoirs of a Radical
W. E. GUTMAN
CCB Publishing
British Columbia, Canada
A Paler Shade of Red: Memoirs of a Radical
Copyright ©2012 by W. E. Gutman
ISBN-13 978-1-927360-97-2
First Edition
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Gutman, W. E., 1937-
A paler shade of red [electronic resource] : memoirs of a radical / written by W. E. Gutman.
Electronic monograph issued in PDF format.
ISBN 978-1-927360-97-2
Also available in print format.
Additional cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada
Cover design by the author.
Photograph on the front cover is in the public domain.
Extreme care has been taken to ensure that all information presented in this book is accurate and up to date at the time of publishing. The publisher cannot be held responsible for any errors or omissions. Additionally, neither is any liability assumed by the publisher for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the express written permission of the author.
Publisher:
CCB Publishing
British Columbia, Canada
www.ccbpublishing.com
IN MEMORY OF IONEL
Also by W. E. Gutman
JOURNEY TO XIBALBA:
The Subversion of Human Rights in Central America
Reporter’s Notebook, ã 2000 (Out of print)
NOCTURNES -- Tales from the Dreamtime
Fiction, ã 2006
FLIGHT FROM EIN SOF
Fiction, ã 2009
THE INVENTOR
Historical fiction, ã 2009
ONE NIGHT IN COPÁN -- Chronicles of Madness Foretold
Short stories, ã 2012
ONE LAST DREAM
Screenplay (Registered with the American Writers’ Guild), ã 2012
UN DERNIER RÊVE
Screenplay (French-language version), ã 2012.
WHEN THERE’S DOUBT THERE’S HOPE
DON’T BELIEVE ANYTHING UNTIL ITS’ BEEN OFFICIALLY DENIED
John Pilger
FOREWORD
By Alan Riding, author of
And The Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris
W. E. Gutman’s life has been so crammed with twists-and-turns -- some unwelcome, many unexpected, a few stubbornly pursued -- that his moving and lyrical memoir has the punch of an epic novel, both fast-paced and reflective. Driven successively by a need to survive occupied France, by an intense curiosity, by an instinct for rebellion and a taste for adventure, Gutman has collided all too often with the shortcomings of humanity. But in A Paler Shade of Red, he finds solace in the power of words, free at last to display the idealism that explains his simmering fury with the world.
PROLOGUE
Say what you will but not all rivers run to the sea. Only those whose beds are deep and wide, whose waters swell with winter snows and summer rains will ever stream unhindered into Mother Sea’s embrace. Nor do the fountainheads from which they spring share common beginnings. Some come to life in silent majesty where ice-encrusted granite reaches for the sky. Others dribble out of a mossy cleft or scatter from a rocky crevice like strands of quicksilver. Brook, rivulet and creek merge at random. Tributaries join the headlong race and carve mighty waterways. They will all return to the source one day, transmuted by nature’s alchemy, ready for yet another cycle of endless self-renewal.
Some would-be rivers are stunted at birth. Their channels lack depth or vigor. Others bubble and billow for a while then vanish, never to be seen again. Exhausted, disheartened, others yet die of thirst along the way on some arid plain. A few meander without cause. They don’t seem to know where they’re headed, or why. They just obey their own life force, rushing heedlessly toward an estuary and surrendering at last to the rapture of the deep.
*
You are about to embark on a journey brimming with reminiscences. Reflected in its paces is the deepest dimension of self. Revelation is the fruit of foreknowledge. It entails a sense of déjà vu. It also evokes an anticipatory awareness of life’s looming exactions. Yet, all is serendipity, the result of some casual chain reaction, an intertwining of haphazard events. The trick is to seize the moment. Time recedes, never to be replenished. Life is an adventure. To revel in its actuality, to love it as we wince from the low blows it delivers along the way, is to exalt it.
For all its expectations, this narrative is little more than a sketch. Spanning seven decades, many of its basic pen strokes rely on memory -- dimmer as I rummage through the distant past, clearer as powers of recall increase with the vividness of more recent events. Likewise, long periods of self-inquiry have yielded a few mismatched but pertinent fragments. Some events, too faint to recollect with any certainty, may be inadvertently out of sequence; I strove toward spontaneity, not the rigors of linear history. Others, as relates to some aspects of my work, especially in Central America, were deliberately reversed or transposed to cover compromising tracks or protect valued sources. Lastly, too painful to relive, even vicariously, too personal for public consumption or too fragmentary, some details were synopsized or ultimately excised from an over-exuberant first draft. Whenever possible, I’ve endeavored to reconstruct events, recapture feelings and echo dialogues long since blunted by time. Legitimized by indelible recollections, notes, faded photographs, family anecdotes, yellowed documents and recorded history, this narrative also relies on insights and perspectives apprehended long after the fact. They are laid bare without pedantry or false modesty. I vouch for their candor. I offer no apology should they lack wisdom, civility or virtue.
THIS I BELIEVE
“Solitude knocks at the door only when invited,” my grandmother used to say. She suffered neither fool nor whiner gladly. My uncle, a hopeless romantic, asserted that “flirting is a science; loving is an art.” An aunt, a notorious adulteress, justified her innumerable trysts by pleading that “never to lie, never to deceive is a feat only an imbecile can perform.” My father, a country doctor who lacked a scintilla of entrepreneurial spirit, warned that “the transaction that brings the highest dividends is the one not yet concluded.” My maternal grandfather, an electrical engineer and amateur humorist, liked to say that “intelligence is a battery that can be recharged only when plugged into someone else’s intelligence.” And, shortly before she died, in a moment of agonizing self-awareness, his daughter -- my mother -- whispered, “To live with death in one’s soul is to die alive.”
For all their pithiness, poignancy or devilish wit, aphorisms evoke what is already there in the glaring light of day. It’s the hyperbolic nature of subjective truth that transforms perceived reality into a grotesque parody of itself. But the e
ssential lessons they convey, even metaphorically, speak volumes about those who coined them, about their lives and times, about the hopes, joys and sorrows that inspired them. More profoundly, what emerges from their confluent parts is the culture of cynicism, circumspection and stoicism that favored their survival.
Crafted over the generations by members of my clan, countless aphorisms were already common currency when I was a boy. They may have influenced the man I would become:
Avoid the arbitration of those who call themselves “neutral.”
Man discards the debris of his subconscious by dreaming.
Society jettisons the detritus of its conscience by eliminating dreamers.
Only fools think they’re always right.
One tolerates more readily the meanness of an idiot
than the stupidity of a cruel man.
Society censures abortion not because it robs it of a genius or a virtuoso, but because it deprives the state of a taxpayer and the church of a hostage.
Money is like fire. It can warm your feet or burn your socks.
A political slogan is tripe in pill form that only imbeciles swallow whole.
Never honest with itself, history unfolds while historians deform it.
One starts out being a portrait; one ends up being a caricature.
Men are by nature ungovernable, which is why they clamor for laws they’re unfit to obey.
When politicians keep pointing fingers at each other, it’s the voters who eventually give them the finger.
The pernicious spirit of religion is that it considers temptation as much of a sin as the misdeed it invites.
To appreciate exile one must have endured the indignities of the regime that inflicted it.
Eat today if you hope to be hungry tomorrow.
Beware of those who haven’t yet betrayed you.
Always get even in advance.
If you can’t afford a hired killer, try blasphemy.
Words have the right to be, even if they sting.
To be credible, journalism can’t afford to be harmless.
PART ONE
THE SOURCE
The seminal years
FUTURE PERFECT
Proverbs and aphorisms and in-your-face wisecracks are the legacy of the Jewish people. We wouldn’t know how to ride the stormy swells of life or countenance calamity without invoking some quaint saying that warms the soul, or chases away the blues or restores faith in divine providence:
Life is the greatest of all bargains; we get it for nothing.
The clever repartee that lifts the spirit --
Live; you can always hang yourself later.
The age-old counsel that warns against rumor-mongering --
What your eyes don’t see, don’t invent with your mouth.
The sarcasm that demolishes absurd assumptions --
If my grandmother had testicles, she'd be my grandfather.
The sardonic rejoinder to airs of mawkish nostalgia --
If you want to talk about the good old days, wait a while.
The subversive one-liner that encapsulates and concretizes the Jewish ethos --
To be Jewish is not a circumstance; it’s a state of mind.
Jews are by nature restive, skeptical. Encrypted in the Jewish psyche, the greater truths and lesser lights our Biblical heroes bequeathed are course-plotting aids, not endpoints. We recognize their fallibility. Adrift on a sea of perplexity, we don’t follow them without engaging in endless soul-searching or endless debate. It’s our nature to spin then reject hermetic concepts. We are, therefore we doubt. Everything is relative, unfinished, highly debatable, often contentious. We owe this paradox both our longevity and our vulnerability. Reality is a many-sided gem. It’s impossible to glimpse all the facets without being blinded in the process. To see everything is to see nothing. So we improvise.
There’s a question to every answer.
The closer you get to the altar, the farther God retreats.
Sometimes, we switch from the declarative to the interrogative. When we respond to a question by asking another -- an acquired reflex -- what emerges is neither witticism nor affront, but the synthesis of a cardinal reality in which the sublime and the ridiculous come together and mate. It takes very little to create an alternate reality -- or to endow it with a seductive oddness.
One day, in Tel Aviv -- I was about twelve -- I asked a passerby for the time.
“Why do you care,” he retorted and walked away. A few days later, as I rummaged in search of shoelaces at a Jerusalem bazaar, the merchant informed me with studied indifference that he’d run out but would be happy to sell me toothpaste. I could have demurred but I didn’t. This sort of pluck, this archetypal chutzpah, would teach me, as my ancestors called their “pedagogics” -- two basic lessons:
Time swallows everything; then it swallows itself. To know the time is a nuisance. It does nothing to alter its course.
Without a trace of irreverence, malice or lunacy, wit is humorless.
I would seize the moment one day and get even. Call it atavism or chromosomes on speed. In 1956, shortly after I immigrated to America, I enlisted in the U.S. Navy. The recruiter asked if I could swim.
“Why,” I asked without a trace of irony, “don’t you have ships?” I no longer wonder whether the recruiter had ever, even for a moment, envisaged the rib-splitting perspective of a fleet bereft of vessels.
“Why are you enlisting in the Navy?”
“So I don’t have to swim across the Atlantic.”
I know the martial soul of the military. It’s a soul that asks itself few questions. Its optic reveals a grimness and narrowness of mind that forbids it to ponder abstractions or hypotheticals. My deadpan baiting would qualify me as an “agitator” in U.S. Navy files. I would later be branded a gadfly, a muckraker, a heretic, and worse.
RULES OF THE GAME
By the age of thirteen I could recite tens of dictums, epigrams and barbs. Their origin is lost in time. I imagine each had sprouted spontaneously in response to some stimulus or vexation, all the echo of the sardonic genius, the iconoclasm of my dynasty. Surely some go back centuries. Recast, amended and fine-tuned over the years, others exude a scent of faded modernity. I’ve since retouched and rejuvenated those that needed to harmonize with the vagaries of my era. I’ve added many more of my own:
ACQUAINTANCE (1): Someone we know sufficiently well to borrow from but not well enough to lend to.
ACQUAINTANCE (2): Degree of friendship dismissed as insignificant if the subject is poor but described as intimate if he is rich or famous.
ADMIRE: To recognize oneself in the object of our infatuation.
ALLIANCE: In politics, the union of two crooks whose hands are so deeply buried in each-other’s pockets that they’re incapable of robbing a third.
AMBITION: The uncontrollable urge to be scorned by those who have none.
BACK: That part of a friend’s anatomy we can admire when we’re down and out.
BEGGAR: Someone who once relied on his friends.
BIRTH: The beginning of the end.
BORDER: In geopolitics, an artificial line between two regions that separates the imaginary rights of one from the fictitious claims of the other.
BRAIN: Organ that allows humans to pretend that they’re capable of thought.
BREASTS: Milky ways.
CLEAN CONSCIENCE: Faulty memory.
CANNON: Instrument used to redraw borders.
CONGRATULATE: To cloak jealousy in garments of gallantry.
CONVICTION: Inflexible belief, generally absurd.
COWARD: Someone who thinks with his legs.
CYNICISM: To see things as they really are.
DEMOCRACY: Self-destructive political system that tolerates the existence of undemocratic institutions.
DIGESTION: The process that reminds us what we’re really made of.
DICTATOR: Statesman who turns to despotism when anarchy threatens him.
DIPLOMA
CY: The art of lying on behalf of one’s country.
EGOTIST: Someone who cares more about himself than about me.
EXCUSE: Ruse that paves the way for a future affront.
FAILURE: Virtual success.
FAITH: The illogical belief in the occurrence of the impossible.
FELLOW MAN: Mythical being we are ordered to love as ourselves and who does everything to make us disobey.
FRIENDSHIP: Invitation to ingratitude.
FUTURE: The refuge of optimists.
GIFT: Investment without guarantee of dividends.
HOPE: Antidote against reality.
KILL: To create an opening without naming a successor.