He sent several letters throughout March, informing his family of his progress; the first was written 42 years ago today. Below are scans of his typewritten pages (in Spanish), and a translation beneath.

I plan to post the rest in the coming weeks. It would be nice if I could post each on the anniversary of its writing, but with my teaching schedule they probably won’t be on time. At least the first will be:

San Francisco
March 14th, 1968

Dear all:

Here is the news you expected.

The following are to receive copies of this letter:
1) Copy 1 – Tere, Jorgito, Muni, Sandi and Javier [note: this is my grandmother, father, uncle, aunt, and great-uncle]
2) Copy 2 – Peter, Don Pedro, Chocha, Julia Elena, Pedrito and Patricia [note: this is my grandmother's family]

What follows is the narration of the events since I left my house at 7:00 on Monday, March 11th.

Monday the 11th–

I traveled to Santiago on Aerolineas Argentinas. Departure at 8:15, I arrived at Mendoza at 9:00 and found Peter and exchanged packages. I departed at 9:30 and arrived at Santiago at the same time but my watch said 10:30. The crossing of the mountain range is something worth seeing; luckily I filmed it and hope that it has been captured well in the movie. Santiago is an important city and of much movement, but it is not lovely and I did not much like what I was able to see. I walked a lot, changed pesos for escudos (5000 pesos for 94 escudos).  I spent about 50 escudos and kept the rest and I don’t know what to do with them in the U.S.  I had lunch at 11:30 under the strange look of the waitress because it was very early, but I was guided by two clocks that told me it was later: my watch with the Argentine time and my stomach. I walked a bit more along Alameda and Avenida O’Higgins and, tired and hot, I went into a theater with air conditioning and saw the movie “Los Farsantes” [The Fakers], quite good; I left the theater and continued walking until 7:00 in the evening (6:00 in Chilean time), drank mote con huesillos (mote and not mate), a drink made with peach juice and a cereal or something like that, and bought a book: Birth Control, a very instructive subject, and I went to Aeropuerto Pudahuel (a new airport in Santiago for domestic use but being used temporarily for international flights), the same where I had arrived in the morning (this machine doesn’t have ñ) ["mañana" just having been spelled "manana"]. I waited while I read the book. My luggage weighed 30 kilos, so I paid for the excess weight between Córdoba and Santiago (they allow 20 kilos) and none from Santiago to San Francisco. Aerolineas Peruanas allows one or two excess kilos but you have to be careful because from Santiago they charge 5.14 dollars per kilo (or about 1700 pesos). One man had 11 kilos in excess (bottles of wine) and they wanted to charge him 57 dollars (18,000 pesos!).

He sent them as freight, payable at destination, insuring them for 100 dollars, hoping that they would break and thus to collect rather than pay, and he was lucky: three bottles broke! We departed at 9:00 Santiago time (10:00 by the Argentine clock) in a Convair 990 A Fan Jet with beautiful Peruvian stewardesses dressed in the typical uniform and very nice; they served dinner and later we landed in Lima, where they have a stunning airport, modern, gigantic, and automated, with walls of polarized glass, bathrooms with chrome, revolving luggage checker, etc., a real anticipation of what I later saw in the USA. This airport was built, as the one in Chile, with funds from the Alliance for Progress.

Our plane continued on from Lima to Miama via Panama, and we changed planes for another, also a Convair 990 A Fan Jet (they announced it so many times that I already knew it from memory) that went via Guayaquil, then Mexico and to Los Angeles. From Lima to Guayaquil I slept a bit though I felt sick with a bad headache and was very tired; I asked the stewardess for an aspirin and with this it got a little better. We arrived at Guayaquil at 2:30 (4:30 by my watch), I got off the plane and four Argentines reunited in the hall of the airport: myself, newly off to settle; another, who worked for Johnson Waxes and on a business trip; and two others, settled in Los Angeles, one a machinist, the other a jeweler (this was the one with the wine bottles), both very happy with life in the U.S., and telling me a lot of propaganda for Los Angeles and disparaging San Francisco. They said that in L.A. there are many more opportunities and a better climate such that you can go in the water at the beach all year round, and that in S.F. it is cold and it rains a lot (this appears to be true; I will tell you shortly). It was remarked that the Ecuadorian Indians are barely civilized, and, all of sudden, I felt lost in the world, thinking that I was there, in Guayaquil, a short distance from this people in a remote part of the Earth. But later we departed, for Mexico, a long leg of the trip, and I continued sleeping, more comfortable since I alone occupied a place with three seats and I discovered that the arm-rests were removable, and it suited me very well also using the three pillows. We arrived at Mexico at 5:00 in the morning (Mexican time) (8:00 by my watch). The airport is nice and important, but not very modern. We departed from Mexico at 6:00 and the sun was already starting to rise, so I didn’t sleep, and I entertained myself looking at the land from 10,000 meters up. On each leg of the trip the stewardesses gave explanations on the use of the life-jackets and the oxygen masks. Additionally, on each leg the authorities of each country ask for all the documentation so you have to have them handy since all the formalities are done in a hurry, even when you have to wait a while until the plane departs.

All the terrain is mountainous from Mexico to Los Angeles and before arriving you travel over the Gulf of California, or rather over the water with the coast of Mexico to the right and the coast of Baja California to the left, and at a certain point you see the depth of the Gulf and the mouth of the Colorado River (the famous one, that in its course forms the Grand Canyon). Finally at 8:30 in the morning (Pacific Time in the U.S.) (1:30 in the afternoon on the 12th, by my watch) I arrived, at last, on North American soil, and disembarked as an immigrant. Before getting off the plane I filmed the airport and the landing (I forgot to say before that in Guayaquil I paid 7.40 dollars (they accepted U.S. money) for an 8mm, color, daylight movie roll for the camera) In the U.S.A. it’s worth 3 dollars. In Argentina, 6.50. I also changed pesos for dollars in Guayaquil, at a rate of 400 pesos per dollar.

In Los Angeles I presented my visa, an immigration officer attended to me very kindly and gave me advice and instructions on things to do since I am settling here, and even shook my hand and wished me good luck. The customs officer asked me if I was bringing meat, vegetables or fruit or new things as gifts, I told him no, and he barely looked at my bags and let me pass. But the flight should have arrived at 7:00 (local time) and arrived at 8:30, and we missed the planned connection that was for Western Airlines to San Francisco. So they put us on a United Airlines flight that departed at 9:15. To get there, inside the Los Angeles Airport, which is enormously big, from the departure gates of the planes of one company to the other (each company has an entire building, separate, its own, with several departure corridors that lead to the different planes and that adjust like bellows to the plane’s door) you have to take a little bus that covers all the companies and carries the passengers (note! each ticket costs US $0.25 = 90 pesos). A beautiful final trip to San Francisco in a Boeing 707 Jet and we arrived at 10:30 Pacific Time (3:20 Argentine time!) I did not find anybody there (Fred Belcher was waiting for me and didn’t see me, nor I him), so I found out at the counter what was the cheapest hotel in downtown San Francisco, and they told me that it was one that had partially burned a short time ago, and that, if I had no problem I should go there, the cheapest that they have, U.S. $8 per day to sleep (note! approximately 3,000 pesos per person). They told me that a taxi to the city would cost me 8 dollars (3,000 pesos) so I asked if the bus carries luggage and they said yes, and I went by bus.

The ticket cost U.S. $1.10 (about $400), it was 15 miles (24 kilometers) from the airport to downtown and it drops you at the bus terminal, two blocks from the hotel that I had reserved: the Franciscan. One believes that in the U.S. everything is modern, but no. The Franciscan Hotel is some 50 years old, with old doors with thick frames and an air of general antiquity, even when it is well maintained, with wall-to-wall carpets, abundant and very warm water, television in the bedroom, telephone, private bathroom, etc. The bathroom was hilarious: the pipe for the shower was not in the wall but ran from the end of the bath to above, suspended by some iron rails, and with the 50 years you can imagine that it was a little crooked and had lost its elegance; plus it measured 1.64 meters while I measure 1.65 and each time I bathed, I stuck the tip of the shower-head a centimeter inside my head.

But, although ancient, it was clean and pleasant and it was right in downtown San Francisco on Geary Street. When I stepped off the bus it started to rain (although the pilot of the plane had announced beautiful weather for San Francisco and it was true at landing) and, loaded with bags, I had to ask a porter to carry the bags to the hotel (two blocks = US $1 = 400 pesos, at the current rate of peso for dollar in the U.S.). Until then, as you can see, I managed alone, without help. From the hotel I called the Belcher house but the number I had written down was wrong and the place I called told me they didn’t know him. Then I called Rafael, a person to person call, and Dora answered and they asked her for Rafael, who by chance was home, although for a problem of earache, and I spoke with him and he didn’t want to believe that it was me and that I was here. He came for me promptly with the car and took me to his house, but on the road we stopped to eat something (it was 2:00 in the afternoon) and then we went to Burlingame, which, I didn’t know then, is past the airport, so that had I known I would have saved the trip downtown and back, but in any case I was already checked in at the hotel. I saw Dora and the kids, all very well, Rafaelito had gone alone to school and came later, Cecilita very cute and also Maria Dolores and Juan Francisco and I even noticed Alejandro was much improved. Rafael, very well, told me that he had written not so long ago, and Dora the same. All are doing magnificently and they have a beautiful house in a good residential neighborhood on the outskirts of San Francisco, on the Peninsula. While I was there, it was pouring rain all afternoon, without stopping a moment. Dora bought some excellent steaks and made a very good dinner, and Rafael brought me back downtown in the car and it kept raining. Having arrived at the hotel, I went to bed and slept soundly, terribly tired, while it rained all night. All this happened on Tuesday the 12th.

Wednesday the 13th I woke up, and I left by myself to the bus station, found out where to take the bus for Oakland, and there is one that goes directly to Kaiser Center crossing the Bay Bridge (a bridge of 8 kilometers, suspended, that crosses San Francisco Bay, and which has two levels, each level having one way of traffic, back and forth), on one side of which is San Francisco and on the other, Oakland. $0.50 ticket (200 pesos). Once I had arrived at Kaiser Center, a very beautiful building, modern, extraordinary, on the banks of an artificial lake, Lake Merritt, I went to the 25th floor to see Ernie Jones (for those who don’t know who he is, he was my boss in Córdoba and later the big boss from Buenos Aires) but he had gone on a trip. On that floor Irene Belcher saw me, but I didn’t know that she was there and I went down to the 13th floor where I looked for and found Robert Salazar, who was very happy to see me and told me that Irene had called to see if he had news of me since Fred had looked at the airport the previous day without finding me, and he supposed that I hadn’t traveled. So Salazar called Irene right away and we went to the cafeteria of the Kaiser Center building, a marvelous place (out of a movie), with enormous picture windows overlooking the lake, a great modern room, and we sat there and talked a bit and had coffee that Salazar bought. From there I looked for John Burns and he saw me immediately, very happy that I had come and right then he called Ivan Strayer and John Crncich (I met all of them last June in Buenos Aires) and invited us to lunch at a restaurant outside, and of course he paid, to the great happiness of my fearful pocket. I told them that I was looking for work and that I had come to settle in the U.S., and he immediately put me in touch with the head of personnel for Kaiser Industries and I filled out an application (although later the problem arose of a clause in the contract of sale of Ika from Kaiser to Renault, which prohibited Kaiser from hiring people from Ika without previous agreement with Renault). In addition, he called long-distance to Phoenix, Arizona, where Ernie Jones was, and told him of my arrival and that I was looking for work, and I have an interview with Ernie tomorrow, Friday, at 9:00. I also have interviews with two executive hiring agencies. In the meantime I returned to talk with Irene and was in Gutierrez’s office, her boss who was absent since he had gone to Guatemala (how they travel!), and we were chatting and she offered that I go to their house in order not to pay for a hotel, since Patricia’s room was empty because Pat is working in a “lodge” in the mountains. So I accepted and left the hotel and Fred came to get me with the car and it rained quite a bit again. In the afternoon it was very nice and from the window of Gutierrez’s office you could see the park and Lake Merritt and the mountains, all very pretty, but by nightfall the weather had gotten bad again and we arrived with Fred at their house in heavy rain.

Now I have Patricia’s room in the apartment they rent in Mount Diablo–Lafayette. Lafayette is one town of the very many that form the conglomerate of people of San Francisco, Oakland and surroundings. The distances here are very big and there are very few buses as everybody has a car, but the joke is on whoever doesn’t have one; the cost of some things like transportation is prohibitive, and for example, to go over the bridges and cross the bay you have to pay “toll” of US $0.25 each time that a car crosses (100 pesos) and parking costs US $0.50 per hour (200 pesos). Yesterday I ate two hotdogs and a Coca Cola and spent one dollar (400 pesos). A good salary, in dollars, should not be less than US $800, in order to be profitable and to live reasonably well, but it is not easy to get such a salary. Healthcare is very expensive even when you can get insurance with affordable premiums; but what is incredible is the lack of domestic service, which is decidedly impossible to get here for a middle-class family, only millionaires can afford this luxury.

Rafael told me that in the next year he and Dora and the kids are thinking of returning to Argentina since, although they are okay here, Dora is tired of dealing with the five kids and expects the sixth (did I not tell you?) and can’t do it all alone, even though Cecilita already helps her with the littlest kids. The helpful automatic home appliances do exist, but it costs to buy them and not everyone has them, plus you have to make them run, fill them, supply them, maintain them, etc. Tere, if you want to come you should bear in mind that you will have to manage taking care of the kids. Plus I don’t see that it is very easy to get a good job if I don’t get the one at Kaiser, at least in the beginning. This country is wonderful but it also has its problems and you have to think about it well. Okay, no more, hugs and until the next time.

UPDATE: The video footage mentioned in this letter has been posted here.

These photos were taken 40 years ago tonight, probably by my father but conceivably by my uncle, aunt, grandfather, or grandmother, about 14 months after they arrived to the United States from Argentina.

The following article was written by a man I believe to be my second cousin twice removed, Dr. Alberto Benegas Lynch (my father’s mother was a Benegas). It was quoted last year in the Wall Street Journal, but apart from the brief passage quoted there I can’t find it anywhere in English. I believe its original publication is here (in Spanish). I hope its author and publisher don’t mind my supplying a translation for those who cannot read the original. I cannot vouch for any of its content, of course, and it should perhaps be noted that its author is something of a “neoliberal” (what in the States might be called a “conservative”) economist (and adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute – there’s some more about him here).

My Cousin, El Che
by Alberto Benegas Lynch
for LiberPress
October 14, 2007

Now that the waters have calmed some on a new anniversary of Che Guevara’s death, I write about this ghastly character with some element that, in part, introduces another perspective.

In my family, Che has been talked about quite a bit, since my father was a first cousin of his. The grandfather of the man in question was a wonderful person, Roberto Guevara, married to Anita Lynch, sister of my maternal grandmother. [Trans.: By my own genealogical reckoning, Anita Lynch was the sister of his paternal grandmother, Martina Lynch. And this would make sense of his saying his father rather than his mother was Che's cousin. But the Spanish here is 'abuela materna.'] In genealogical line, I note that I am more Lynch than Benegas, since my father and mother both descend from the children of Patricio Lynch, from whom Che also descends.

From the start, this born revolutionary revealed certain inclinations by his failure to keep his word, since he promised his first girlfriend that he would go buy cigarettes and never came back. He also showed certain oddities in striving to take ten steps exiting elevators and landing on the left leg, if not succeeding then returning to the thing and repeating the operation until getting it just right (its being the left leg already seemed to announce something of his dogmatic future).

My father used to repeat the famous aphorism, “you choose your friends, you don’t choose your relatives.” While it is certain that in all families there is good, ordinary and bad in proportion to their size, I always noticed a certain amount of shame for the fact that a character with such sinister features had filtered into ours.

On one occasion, one of my aunts related to me that when very young, Che delighted in inflicting suffering on animals, and, when older, insisted that death (of others) is not so bad after all, and that, in this context, he anticipated Woody Allen’s definition: “Dying is the same as sleeping but without getting up to piss.”

This last, which might seem funny and witty within the scope of film, resulted in an enormous tragedy for the hundreds murdered by Che, who finally transformed that definition into, “the true revolutionary must be a cold killing machine.” And all by the mania of the Stalins, Pol Pots, Hitlers and Castros of this planet, who, in their anxiety to create the proverbial “new man,” have tortured, hurt, maimed and killed millions of human beings.

And to think that Cuba, despite the corruption of Batista, was the nation with the highest per capita income in Latin America, world-class in its sugar industry, petroleum refineries, breweries, mineral plants, alcohol distilleries, liquors of international prestige; it had televisions, radios and refrigerators relative to its population equal to the United States, railways of great comfort and extension, hospitals, universities, theaters, and periodicals of the highest level, scientific and cultural associations of renown, steel mills, factories for foods, engines, porcelains and textiles.

All before Che was Minister of Industry, a period in which the dismantling was scandalous. The Cuban currency quoted on par with the dollar, before Che was President of the Central Bank.

As could not be otherwise, Che began his career as a hardened Peronist. Let’s remember that the Nazi-fascist policy of Perón plunged Argentina into a quagmire from which it still has not recovered and that, among other things, he wrote in 1970 that, “If the Soviet Union had been in a condition to support us in 1955, I could have become the first Fidel Castro of the continent,” and, when he was in power cried in 1947, “Let us raise gallows in all the country to hang the opponents,” and, in 1955, proclaimed, “To the enemy, no justice.”

It is inadmissible that someone with half a mind maintain that education in Cuba is acceptable since, by definition, a tyrannical regime requires domestication and can only offer brain-washing and indoctrination (and with notebooks on which one must write with pencil so that they can serve the next group, due to the scarcity of paper). In the same way it would seem that there remain some distracted minds that have not been informed of the ruins, the misery and the pigsty into which Cuba’s health system has been transformed, which only maintains some clinic in the window to make an impression on cretins.

Let’s hope that those who continue using the symbols of Che as a grace perceive that it is the darkest, most morbid and pathetic joke that can happen to a human being. It is the same as flaunting the image of the gloomy swastika cross as a sign of peace.

 

Alberto Benegas Lynch is President of the Economic Sciences Faculty of the National Academy of Sciences, in Argentina.

In 2005 — and several times again over the next years — I wrote Barack Obama’s name on the board in my classroom, first in Sardis, Mississippi, and later in Jackson, when one or another of my students declared that there would never be a black president. In the three years I lived in Mississippi I had something like 500 students (just one of them was not black) and many expressed something like this sentiment at some time or other — at least one in almost every class, probably.

The first time I saw Barack Obama — the first time I heard his name, I think — was when he addressed the Democratic National Convention in 2004. And I liked Kerry more than a lot of Democrats did, but I wished then that Obama was running in his place, and I believed then that he would one day be the President of the United States.

I have followed his career these last four years. I was excited for my students when, in June of last year, we got word that he was quietly coming to Jackson for a fundraising event, and several of them got to shake his hand. I spent hours in line last March waiting for his appearance at Jackson State University. I have have been excited about his candidacy since it was first announced, and since it was called unlikely.

During the 2004 election I lived in Buenos Aires, and everywhere I went, whenever anyone heard I was an American, I was attentively cast as a representative of my country; and after that election, everyone, it seemed, was upset at the result, and everyone was asking me to explain it. As I struggled in awkward Spanish to explain American politics to late-night taxi drivers, and as I read the baffled and the angry editorials, I felt alienated from my country and I wished I knew it better. (And I decided, then, to go teach in Mississippi rather than following other opportunities.)

In 2005 I thought he probably wouldn’t run in 2008, that he would defer to our collective expectations of a Hillary Clinton candidacy, that he would finish a term in the Senate. I put his name on the board and I told my students not to forget it; I told them that, if Clinton wins in 2008, she will be up for re-election in 2012 and Obama will run in 2016; that if she loses in 2008, he will run in 2012; and that in either case, there will be a black president, and soon.

Tonight I am happy to have been partially wrong, and I am proud, and I am excited for my country, and I wish our new President-elect good luck in the very difficult tasks he has before him.

The same Alberto, his brother (my great great grandfather) Pedro, their father Tiburcio, and their contribution to the Argentine wine industry, are discussed over here.

—
Excerpt:

Toward the end of the year 1811, an intensified arming and concentration of the forces of western Europe began, and in 1812 these forces — millions of men, reckoning those that transported and victualed the army — moved from the west eastward to the Russian frontier, where in exactly the same way the Russian forces had been massing during that year. On the twelfth of June the forces of western Europe crossed the Russian border and war began, that is, an event took place counter to human reason and human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such an infinite number of crimes, frauds, treacheries, robberies, forgeries, issues of counterfeit money, depredations, incendiarisms, and murders, as are not recorded in the annals of all the courts of justice in the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as crimes.

What brought about this extraordinary event? What were its causes? The historians, with naive certainty, tell us that its causes were the wrongs inflicted on the Duke of Oldenburg, the nonobservance of the Continental system, the ambition of Napoleon, the firmness of Aleksandr, the mistakes of diplomats, and so on.

Consequently it would only have been necessary for Napoleon, Rumyantsev, or Talleyrand, between a levee and a reception, to have taken the pains to write a more adroit note, or for Napoleon to have written to Aleksandr: “Monsieur, mon frère, I consent to restore the Duchy to the Duke of Oldenburg,” and there would have been no war.

We can understand these views being held at the time. We can understand how to Napoleon it seemed that the war was caused by England’s intrigues (as in fact he said on the island of St. Helena). We can understand that to the members of the English Parliament the cause of the war seemed to be Napoleon’s love of power; that to the Duke of Oldenburg its cause seemed to be the violence done to him; that to the merchants the cause seemed to be the Continental system, which was ruining Europe; that to the generals and old soldiers it seemed that the chief cause was the necessity of giving them employment; that to the legitimists of the day it was the need for reestablishing les bons principes; and to the diplomats of that time it all seemed to result from the fact that the alliance between Russia and Austria in 1809 had not been sufficiently well concealed from Napoleon, and from the awkward wording of Memorandum No. 178. It is natural that these and a countless, an infinite number of other reasons — the number depending on the multiplicity of points of view — presented themselves to the men of that day, but to us, to posterity contemplating the accomplished fact in all its magnitude, and seeking to penetrate its plain and terrible meaning, these causes seem insufficient. To us it is inconceivable that millions of Christian men killed and tortured one another either because Napoleon was ambitious, or Aleksandr firm, or because England’s policy was astute, or the Duke of Oldenburg wronged. We cannot grasp the connection between these circumstances and the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why, because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe pillaged and slaughtered the inhabitants of Smolensk and Moscow and were slaughtered by them.

To us, their descendants, who are not historians and are not carried away by the process of research and can therefore regard the event with unclouded common sense, the causes that suggest themselves are legion. The deeper we delve in search of these causes the more of them we discover, and each single cause or series of causes appears to us equally valid in itself, and equally false by its insignificance compared to the magnitude of the event and by its impotence (unless in conjunction with all the other concurring causes) to occasion the event. To us the willingness or unwillingness of this or that French corporal to serve a second term appears as much a cause as Napoleon’s refusal to withdraw his troops beyond the Vistula and to restore the Duchy of Oldenburg, for had the corporal refused to serve, and had a second, a third, a thousand corporals and privates, also refused, Napoleon’s army would have been so greatly reduced that the war could not have taken place.

If Napoleon had not taken offense at the demand that he withdraw beyond the Vistula, and had he not ordered his troops to advance, there would have been no war. But if all his sergeants had refused to serve a second term there also could have been no war. Nor could there have been a war had there been no English intrigues and no Duke of Oldenburg, and had Aleksandr not felt insulted, and had there not been an autocratic government in Russia, or a French Revolution and the ensuing dictatorship and Empire, or all the other things that produced the French Revolution, and so on. Without any one of these causes nothing could have happened. Accordingly all of them — myriads of causes — coincided to bring about what occurred. And so there was no single cause for the war, but it happened simply because it had to happen. Millions of men, renouncing human feelings and reason, had to move from west to east to slay their fellows, just as some centuries earlier hordes of men had moved from east to west slaying their fellows.

The actions of Napoleon and Aleksandr, on whose words the event seemed to hang, were as little voluntary as the actions of any soldier who was drawn into the campaign by lot or conscription. This could not be otherwise, for in order that the will of Napoleon and Aleksandr (on whom the event seemed to depend) should be carried out, the concurrence of innumerable circumstances was required, without any one of which the event could not have taken place. It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands the real power lay — the soldiers who fired the guns, transported provisions and cannons — should consent to carry out the will of those weak individuals, and should have been induced to do so by an infinite number of diverse and complex causes.

We inevitably resort to fatalism to explain the irrational phenomena of history (that is to say, phenomena the reasonableness of which we do not understand). The more we try to account for such phenomena rationally, the more irrational and incomprehensible do they become to us.

Every man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his own ends, and feels in his whole being that he can at any moment perform or abstain from performing this or that action, but as soon as he has performed it, that action executed at a given moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in which it has not a free but a predetermined significance.

There are two sides to the life of every man: the personal life, which is free to the degree that its interests are abstract, and the elemental life of the swarm, in which he ineluctably follows the laws decreed for him.

Consciously man lives for himself, but unconsciously he serves as an instrument for the accomplishment of the historical, social ends of mankind. An act committed is irrevocable, and that action coinciding in time with the actions of millions of other men acquires historical significance. The higher a man stands in the social scale, the more connections he has with people and the more power he has over them, the more manifest is the predetermination and inevitability of his every act.

“The hearts of kings are in the hand of God.”

A king is the slave of history.

History, that is, the unconscious, common, swarm life of mankind uses every moment of the life of kings as an instrument for its own ends.

Though Napoleon at that time, in 1812, was more convinced than ever that it depended on him to shed or not to shed the blood of his people — as Aleksandr expressed it in the last letter he wrote him — he had never been so subject to inevitable laws, which compelled him (while thinking that he was acting of his own volition) to do for the world in general, for history, what had to be done.

The people of the west moved east to slay their fellow man. And by the law of coincidence, thousands of minute causes fitted together and combined to produce the movement and the war: reproaches for the nonobservance of the Continental system, the Duke of Oldenburg’s wrongs, the movement of troops into Prussia — undertaken (as it seemed to Napoleon) for the sole purpose of obtaining an armed peace — the French Emperor’s love of war and habit of waging it coinciding with the inclinations of his people, the passion for grandiose preparations, the expenditures on those preparations and the necessity of obtaining advantages to compensate for them, the intoxicating effect of the honors he received in Dresden, the diplomatic negotiations which in the opinion of contemporaries were carried on with a sincere desire to attain peace but which only wounded the self-esteem of both sides, and millions upon millions of other causes that adapted themselves to the fated event and coincided with it.

When an apple has ripened and falls — why does it fall? Is it because of the force of gravity, because its stem withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing under the tree wants to eat it?

None of these is the cause. All this is only the conjunction of conditions in which every vital, organic, elemental event occurs. And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decomposes, and so forth, is just as right and as wrong as the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it to fall. In the same way the historian who says that Napoleon went to Moscow and was destroyed because Aleksandr desired his destruction is just as right and as wrong as the man who says that an undermined hill weighing thousands of tons fell because of the last blow of a workman’s mattock. In historic events the so-called great men are but labels giving names to events, and like labels they have only the slightest connection with the event itself.

Every act of theirs that seems to them an act of their own free will is, in the historical sense, not free at all, but is connected with the whole course of history and determined from eternity.

-War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Ann Dunnigan, Book III, Part One, Chapter One

I visited the area in the early 70s with Bobbie Lee herself. At that time I worked with her in Las Vegas. We have remained friends ever since. Much of the area in and around the famed Tallahatche Bridge is not what it was 30 years ago, actually poorer. It is in Chickasaw County, not far from Greenwood Mississippi. The bridge was, back then, almost unuseable. The so-called Choctaw Ridge is just one of many areas identified by the locals as “up on the ridge”, all with various little names. It is unlikely any map would identify the exact location of a Choctaw Ridge, people of the area called the same place different things. I can only say it is a real place, and probably long forgotten by most in the area now.

This is interesting, though “Chickasaw County” is not especially near to Greenwood, and the Tallahatchie River does not enter it. History is strange.

I’ve not posted anything in quite a while. Stress and procrastination are partners. I’ll add a few posts soon.

I was perhaps unreasonably pleased to find this map of Panola County printed in the Wirt books mentioned in my last post, and though I will not deny a map fetish, neither am I wholly without reason. First, a map of a place like Panola County is a rare bird. Sure enough the county appears on maps of the state of Mississippi (more or less as an intersection of I-55 and Highway 6, with a dot for Batesville), but the towns of Sardis, Como, Crenshaw, Courtland, and Pope, though they may perhaps appear as dots, surely are not indicated by perimeters comprising finite areas. Additionally, I am pleased by any map that clearly demarcates the Delta, whose boundaries are so unambiguous when they are crossed but which are nevertheless so ambiguous on maps. I have seen only one other map that so clearly indicates the region (stolen from npr.org).

And of course the quaint hand-drawn character of the map is reminescent of the maps of Middle Earth included in all of Tolkien’s books, which maps were endlessly imitated by me and all other bookish but warm-blooded nine-year-old boys with good hardy souls in them; and the likeness surely activates some psychological trigger.

What’s more, the map heightened my appreciation of a song. I did not know, before seeing this map, that Choctaw Ridge names the boundary separating the Delta from the Hills. The coldness of the (mother’s?) lyric Nothin’ ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge, in Bobbie Gentry’s lovely song, “Ode to Billie Joe,” now benefits from a suggestion of the historical antagonism between the Delta whites and the “Rednecks” of the Hills. Since it is in Panola County that the Tallahatchie River crosses Choctaw Ridge, I suppose the Tallahatchie Bridge central to the song is Panolian, and that the song’s speaker and her family are having breakfast at home somewhere in the western third of the county.

On an entirely different note, a few pages before the map Wirt’s Politics of Southern Equality begins with an inscription allegedly left by a Union soldier on the wall of a Mississippi home, where we are told it remains legible:

To the owner of this house — Your case is a hard one and I pity you.

A Google search does not return any instances of the phrase. I wonder if the inscription is real, and if so where in Mississippi it is.

In August I will begin teaching at North Panola High School, where about 100% of the students are black and many are poor. Perhaps ten miles south of North Panola High is South Panola High, which is racially integrated (and a few times larger). The two buildings give rather different impressions, as you can see in the photographs. More are available here.

When I scanned the map of Mississippi counties with critical teacher shortages I noticed no county but Panola that was shaded on only one half. Though I could guess, I do not know why Panola County is divided into two school districts. I hope the two books Frederick Wirt wrote on the subject of race in Panola County (Politics of Southern Equality and We Ain’t What We Was) will be informative.