One Night in Copan Read online

  As the U.S. spreads itself thin in a number of military operations, Russia (which itched to bomb the U.S. in the early stages of the Cold War, and never gave up its desire to do so) seizes the moment and reasserts itself. Russia has nothing to lose should the U.S. eventually “decline and fall” -- on the contrary. Stirred by an ancient longing and mortified that it never recovered from the breakup of its vast empire, Russia now weighs its options and eyes a disintegrating world. The boys in the Kremlin know that Western Europe will blink and do nothing to help the U.S.

  Russia also understands that America has lost much of its prestige, preeminence and economic clout; that it is being increasingly isolated as the number and fanaticism of its foes grows with every saber-rattling pronouncement from the White House. In response to America’s anti-ballistic program, Russia rebuilds the most formidable arsenal of nuclear warheads the world has ever seen. North Korea, a sworn enemy of the U.S., produces nuclear weapons and state-of-the-art delivery systems. Much of Western Europe, now weaned from NATO and pursuing its own objectives, turns against the disastrous and unwinnable war in Afghanistan. Islamic nations -- fundamentalist and secular -- turn on the volume in their hatred of the U.S. New terrorist cells are springing around the world as antipathy mounts against globalization and in response to a perception by Muslims (accurate in the narrowest sense) that the U.S. is waging war against Islam.

  Africa, still smarting from 500 years of colonization and resentful of America’s long-standing indifference toward its unending woes, turns bitterly anti-U.S., anti-western, anti-white. The South African blood bath, long prophesied but never forestalled, even after the abolition of apartheid, erupts like a pustule, inflaming contiguous states and storming through the continent from the Cape of Good Hope to the Mediterranean, from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic.

  Episodic at first, famine spreads like wildfire. Infant mortality skyrockets. There are other casualties. What little food can be scraped to keep the heart pumping proves less than adequate to nourish the brain. Over three billion people suffer irreversible brain damage. Asylums are full. More are desperately needed to contain a swelling tide of insanity but none is being built and the overflow spills into streets, along with the homeless, the sick, the dead and the dying.

  After years of uninterrupted fighting, no one knows for sure why wars are being waged. Nor can anyone quite remember why the all-consuming conflicts had erupted in the first place. The belligerence of the warring factions has not abated but the cost of maintaining troops and materiel skyrockets, prompting each side to further slash domestic programs while raising taxes and artificially deepening inflation.

  Things aren’t much better at home. Men seventeen to fifty-nine are in uniform, training for the front or patrolling the streets. Everyone is armed. In the cities, the haves wrangle with the have not. Looting, assaults and other forms of violence soar during the long hot summer and thousands die at the hands of vigilantes, mercenaries and gangs, all more eager to settle scores than preserve law and order. Justice is blind to injustice. Anti-war activists are on the attack. All they achieve is to foment greater resentment against their cause by flag-waving diehards too old for conscription, a dispensation that always stirs patriotism and raises the decibels of jingoism and sanctimony to ear-blasting levels.

  Basic staples -- bread, sugar, eggs -- are in short supply. Meat, when available at black market prices, is rarely fresh. But hunger subverts reason and everyone takes chances. And while hunger and exposure kill the poor, it’s often food poisoning that claims those who can still afford to eat.

  Not unlike ants, we spend the fall hoarding and digging in deeper. A calamitous winter, at best, lies ahead.

  Fusing pseudo-capitalism and Marxist-style collectivism, bloated and prosperous, China smiles like a Cheshire cat and waits.

  Find me. I’ll be waiting. We’ll all be waiting, the dissidents and the insurgents, the heretics, the free thinkers and the idol smashers.

  We’re all mad; only the very brave or the despairing let go. But we’ll keep on feigning sanity. It helps dress up our lives. If acting is the art of pretense, living is the science of deceit. We do a bit of both now and then and sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which. As my late friend Max used to say, “We’re not God’s most perfect creation. In fact, we’re quite defective: We keep on multiplying and our offspring come without a warranty.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am indebted to my parents, learned, urbane, fair-minded and liberal, for instilling a love of books and an appreciation for music, art and philosophy, for sparing me the enslavement of religious indoctrination and for enduring, if not always endorsing, my wildest antics. To my mother, a selfless, unassuming woman of great culture and refinement, I owe my fondness for beauty and symmetry. From my father, a loving, iron-willed and incorruptible man who abhorred ostentation and pretense, I learned that self-esteem and a respect for truth offer infinitely greater rewards than a good reputation.

  I salute my teachers, those I pleased when I applied myself and those I exasperated when I didn’t. Their erudition, pedagogical skills and saintly patience for the lazy, unfocused, mercurial and rebellious student I was helped lay the foundations on which I would erect a lifetime career of endless beginnings.

  I can never adequately acknowledge the immense influence a number of prominent writers, poets and philosophers had on the constantly evolving person I would become and, by extension, on the ideas I would champion. Their prose, verses, insights and eye-opening reflections resonate as intensely today as they did in the days of my youth. Most were French: one was denied a Christian funeral for penning vitriolic anti-religious polemics; five were imprisoned, one for denouncing the brutality of colonialism; the other for suggesting that the blind can be taught to read through the sense of touch; the third, the son of a prostitute, for vagabondage, lewd acts and “other offenses against public decency;” the fourth, for stretching the limits of literary freedom in tracts that mixed raw eroticism with civil disobedience. The fifth spoke for the common man and rose with uncommon bravery against government and military corruption.

  My other mentors wrote in Arabic, English, Dutch, German, Russian, Sanskrit and Spanish. Three hailed from England; one of them did not survive the spurious puritanism of his Victorian milieu. One died insane -- as do many who seek shelter from the battering storm of reality in the haven of delirium. All were freethinkers, rebels and iconoclasts, now long dead, but whose works and the reformist ideas they impart still inspire new generations of mavericks-in-training.